How to bring your social housing portfolio into compliance with regulations
9 May 2024
As of April this year, new consumer standards are being enforced under the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023, including:
- Safety and quality standards: requires landlords to maintain safe and high-quality housing conditions.
- Transparency, influence, and accountability standards: ensures that landlords are transparent and treat tenants with fairness, allowing them to access services and raise concerns.
- Neighbourhood and community standards: focuses on ensuring that tenants live in safe and well-maintained neighbourhoods.
- Tenancy standards: covers the fair allocation and management of tenancies.
Whilst these are welcome steps in developing and improving the legislation around social housing, they put more emphasis and pressure on compliance efforts.
Now that they are in place, you should be looking at your housing portfolio in more depth than in previous years, scrutinising the way in which you are operating and closing any compliance risks before they become problems.
Our practical advice to ensure compliance
Large landlords with over a thousand homes will be inspected at least once every four years so it’s important that you make sure that your properties meet the standards outlined in the regulations.
It’s important that you manage your compliance requirements, such as:
- Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM): from June 2024, large landlords must submit data on tenant satisfaction to the RSH, helping the regulator assess the quality of homes and services provided.
- Performance improvement plans: if you fail to meet regulatory standards, the RSH may require you to implement a performance improvement plan. This plan should outline how you will address deficiencies and improve standards.
- Emergency remedial actions: ensure that you do not obstruct the RSH from carrying out emergency remedial actions. Non-compliance can result in significant penalties.
- Health and safety: appoint a dedicated health and safety lead to manage compliance with health and safety laws and address any hazards like damp and mould proactively.
- Training and qualifications for staff: ensure that your staff, especially those in housing management, are well-trained and meet the qualification requirements set by the regulator.
- Transparency and information provision: be transparent with your tenants and the RSH about your operations. This includes publishing information about executive pay and providing tenants with detailed information about accommodation and services.
We highly recommend that you use the services of a qualified and experienced social housing solicitor to help you maintain compliance with these regulations.
Not only will the additional inspections cause some disruption to your operations, but investigations, penalties and legal proceedings threaten to cause even more damage to your bottom line.
We can give you the guidance and advice necessary to protect your portfolio from these risks and give you the tools needed to maintain compliance with the legislation in the weeks, months, and years to come.
For more information, please contact the Birketts team.
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Andrew Harmer
Sectors
The content of this article is for general information only. It is not, and should not be taken as, legal advice. If you require any further information in relation to this article please contact the author in the first instance. Law covered as at May 2024.