Published: Wednesday 27 November 2024
In April 2024, a new set of regulations for social housing were introduced as part of the Government’s response to the fire at Grenfell Tower. Visit the Regulator for Social Housing’s website to read more about the standards which are designed to improve the homes and services that tenants receive.
It is not expected that every housing provider will be meeting the standards already. But the regulator expects landlords to be transparent with the regulator and with tenants when it identifies standards it hasn’t met.
This year we’ve contacted the regulator to let them know that we’ve identified two areas where we haven’t yet met the new standards.
Decent Homes – our investment approach
The Decent Homes standard is a set of expectations around the quality of the homes provided. While the majority of the homes we manage meet this standard, not all of them do and we have a plan to bring this level up.
Our Asset Management Strategy was published in 2021, it governs how we invest in the homes we manage. It was driven by consultation with residents and was the focus of a task and finish group of residents from the Tenants’ Consultative Committee.
The priorities that residents identified during the consultation were (in order):
- Health and safety work
- Electrical and mechanical improvements such as lifts and lighting
- Work to improve the external areas of buildings including roofs, windows and brickwork
- Sustainability measures
- Decent homes work including new kitchens and bathrooms
We developed a seven-year major works programme investing more than £350 million with these priorities in mind; with the decent homes work to come towards the end of the period. We’ve just started our £23m kitchen and bathroom replacement programme which will be a key part of bringing many of our homes with outdated facilities into the Decent Homes standard.
In 2018 we carried out a full survey of the properties we manage; to make sure our data is up to date we’re beginning a new two-year cycle of stock condition surveys. During this period, we’ll be writing to residents to arrange to go into every home to take a detailed note of the condition of the property so we’re sure of what work needs to be done and can prioritise areas depending on local need. Please keep an eye out for letters from our team to arrange an appointment.
Fire risk assessments
We have to complete a fire risk assessment (FRA) for each building we manage with more than two residential properties. The FRA is a checklist of safety measures that need to be in place in a building. In October we had completed FRAs for 576 buildings, leaving eight that still needed to be completed.
We have now completed six of the eight and have scheduled the remaining two to be completed within the next four weeks. We now report on our FRA status to the regulator every month.
The completed FRAs have brought to light a number of measures we need to put in place to bring our buildings into full compliance and we’ve also notified the regulator about that. We are working through these actions and have brought in extra staff to make sure they are tackled as soon as possible.