Social Housing
Regulation Bill
“My Government will introduce legislation to improve the
regulation of social housing to strengthen the rights of tenants
and ensure better quality, safer homes.”
The purpose of the Bill is to:
● Increase social housing tenants’ rights to better homes and
enhance their ability to hold their landlords to account,
addressing concerns that the Grenfell Tower tragedy raised.
The main benefits of the Bill would be:
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● Ensuring the Regulator of Social Housing can better
stand up for social housing tenants, inspect properties and
act as the ultimate watchdog on standards.
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● Strengthening the Regulator of Social Housing to
ensure issues are resolved faster for tenants with stronger
powers to issue fines, intervene in mismanagement, and powers
to complete emergency repairs.
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● Providing greater transparency for tenants on how
their landlord is performing, how their homes are managed and
who is responsible for compliance with health and safety
requirements.
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● Strengthening the economic regulation of the social
housing sector, increasing protections for tenants’ homes and
supporting continued investment in the new supply of social
housing.
The main elements of the Bill are:
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● Enabling the Regulator to intervene with landlords
who are performing poorly on consumer issues, such as
complaints handling and decency of homes, and to act in the
interest of tenants to make sure issues are rectified.
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● Enabling the Regulator to inspect landlords to make
sure they are providing tenants with the quality of
accommodation and services that they deserve.
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● Creating new Tenant Satisfaction Measures which will
allow tenants to see how their landlord is performing
compared to other landlords and help the Regulator decide
where to focus its attention.
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● Ensuring tenants of housing associations will be able
to request information from their landlord in a similar way
to how the Freedom of Information Act works for tenants of
Local Authority landlords.
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● Guaranteeing that the Regulator will be able to act
more quickly where it has concerns about the decency of a
home. They will only be required to give 48 hours notice to a
landlord before a survey is carried out.
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● Providing powers for the Regulator to arrange
emergency repairs of tenants’ homes following a survey and
where there is evidence of systemic failure by the landlord.
This will ensure that serious issues are resolved rapidly
where a landlord is unable or unwilling to act.
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● Ensuring there will be no cap on the fines that the
Regulator can issue to a landlord who fails to meet required
standards.
Territorial extent and application
● The Bill will extend primarily to England and Wales, and apply
to England only, with some provisions extending and applying
across the UK.
Key facts
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● The social housing sector provides homes to over four
million households across England.
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● The sector is made up of private registered providers
of social housing, who own nearly 60 per cent of the housing
stock, and local authority landlords, who own nearly 40 per
cent.
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● Over 8,000 residents contributed to discussions and
responded to our consultation on the Social Housing Green
Paper and Call for Evidence on regulation, which led to the
Social Housing White Paper, including the bereaved, survivors
and residents of the Grenfell community.
