The Charter for Social Housing Residents – Social Housing White Paper

By Kieran Colgan · 17 November 2020

We welcome the long-awaited social housing white paper published by the Government today.

Entitled “The Charter for Social Housing Residents” it sets out a commitment to raise standards, increase transparency, give social housing tenants a voice and ensure that it is listened to.

It sets out what every social housing resident should expect:

1. To be safe in your home
2. To know how your landlord is performing
3. To have your complaints deal with promptly and fairly
4. To be treated with respect
5. To have your voice heard by your landlord
6. To have a good quality home and neighbourhood to live in
7. To be supported to take your first step to home ownership

And what the Government will do to ensure landlords live up to the Charter, working with the RSH to create a strong, proactive consumer regulatory regime, strengthening the formal standards against which landlords are regulated.

We work with a number of organisations to provide assurance that their response to regulation is both honest and robust and welcome measures that support transparency in relation to performance and decision making and welcome the measures contained in the Charter, these include:

• Legislation to strengthen the RSH’s consumer regulation objectives to explicitly include safety
• Social landlords to identify a nominated person responsible for complying with health and safety requirements
• The RSH to prepare a Memorandum of Understanding with the Health and Safety Executive to ensure sharing of information with the Building Safety Regulator
• Creation of a set of tenant satisfaction measures for landlords on things that matter to residents
• Introduce a new access to information scheme for social housing tenants of Housing Associations and other private registered providers of social housing so that information relating to landlords is easily available
• Ensure landlords provide a clear breakdown of income spend
• Require landlords to identify a senior person who is responsible for ensuring they comply with consumer standards set by RSH
• Landlords will be required to comply with the Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code ensuring they have good processes in place to respond swiftly and effectively to complaints.

Our team of experienced governance, compliance and safety team look forward to working providers to support the delivery of these important reforms.

If you would like to discuss how we can support your organisation, please contact us – ark@arkconsultancy.co.uk.

A full copy of the Charter can be downloaded by clicking here.