Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee
Oral evidence: The regulation of social housing: follow-up, HC 1127
Monday 6 February 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 6 February 2023.
Members present: Mr Clive Betts (Chair); Bob Blackman; Ian Byrne; Mrs Natalie Elphicke; Ben Everitt; Kate Hollern; Andrew Lewer; Mary Robinson; Nadia Whittome.
Questions 1 - 153
Witnesses
I: Kwajo Tweneboa, Housing Campaigner.
II: Jonathan Walters, Deputy Chief Executive, Regulator of Social Housing.
III: Baroness Scott of Bybrook OBE, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Faith and Communities); Josh Goodman, Director of Social Housing, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
Witness: Kwajo Tweneboa.
Chair: Welcome, everyone, to this afternoon’s session of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee. This afternoon we have a one-off session looking at the regulation of social housing. We have witnesses in three different panels.
Before we come to our first witness, I am going to ask members of the Committee to put on record any particular interests they may have that may be relevant to the inquiry. I am a vice‑president of the Local Government Association. We will go around the table.
Ian Byrne: I employ a local councillor in my office.
Kate Hollern: I also employ a local councillor.
Nadia Whittome: I am a board member at One Nottingham, which is the strategic partnership for the city of Nottingham.
Bob Blackman: I am a vice‑president of the Local Government Association and I employ three councillors in my office.
Mary Robinson: I employ a councillor in my office team.
Mrs Elphicke: I am a vice‑president of the Local Government Association.
Ben Everitt: I am too. I also employ a councillor.
Andrew Lewer: I am a vice‑president of the LGA.
Q1 Chair: Coming to the first witness today, it is a great pleasure to welcome Kwajo Tweneboa, who has been a vociferous and very high-profile campaigner on behalf of tenants. He has been highlighting the conditions in which many tenants find themselves living, particularly around mould and dampness. A really very good welcome to you today. Thank you very much for coming. We want to hear what you have been finding and the problems you have seen tenants experiencing.
I want to begin with the high-profile and tragic death of Awaab Ishak and the subsequent coroner’s report, which highlighted how damp and mould contributed significantly towards the death of that young child. Why did it take the death of a young child to get national action on this very crucial issue?
Kwajo Tweneboa: The case of Awaab Ishak is a completely tragic case. Everyone would agree with that. He ultimately paid the highest price possible for the conditions he was having to live in. The difference with Awaab was the fact that he was a child and the fact he could not stand up for himself. He was very young. His parents had been complaining before he passed away about the conditions and the damp and mould in the property but were simply ignored. That is what we learned. The coroner’s report that followed proved he died as a result of the conditions he was having to live in.
It is almost like Grenfell, in the sense that it was the worst possible outcome that could have happened, which was innocent people dying. That is why it got the attention. Campaigners and journalists have been complaining for longer than a year. In my case, I have been highlighting damp and mould for two years. It has been going on for decades. They have been complaining. They have been complaining to local MPs. They have been complaining to their housing provider, but it has specifically not been taken seriously.
Then we have Awaab Ishak, who died as a result of that. All of a sudden it is being spoken about. These things are often talked about when it is too late. In this case, this is something that has happened. This is something that is needed because, like I said, it has been spoken about for so long but simply has not been prioritised or taken seriously. Like I have said time and time again, people are dying in their homes as a result of this.
Q2 Chair: In the campaign you are doing and your highlighting of complaints, have you noticed that there is now a different attitude when you take complaints to housing associations and councils? Are they now more receptive to hearing about them and doing something about them?
Kwajo Tweneboa: I am very concerned at the moment in regard to damp and mould, and I am glad I am able to share it. In terms of the tenants who come to me to complain about disrepair, damp and mould is at the top of the list. I have received hundreds, if not thousands, of complaints about damp and mould.
Since the coroner’s report on Awaab Ishak came out, housing providers left, right and centre have been sticking things on their websites talking about the need to tackle damp and mould. They have created hotlines for tenants to complain. They are doing all sorts of things online and on their websites PR-wise, but tenants are still reaching out to me to complain that they have raised the issue of damp and mould. It can be expected that I am getting more and more damp and mould complaints, but tenants have said they have reached out to their landlords and they are still getting the same answers.
If it is not the same answer, it is the standard fix that landlords believe tackles damp and mould, which is to come into your home, wash it off with a bit of bleach and then paint over it like it is not there. It comes back in a matter of weeks. There has been no scientific research into tackling the issue of damp and mould. I do not know why housing providers are not getting that you simply cannot wash it and paint over it. That is not a solution.
Q3 Chair: You are saying that they are all giving the reaction that they are claiming to improve their service. They are putting things on their websites accepting there are problems. They are saying to tenants, “This is how you report them. We are going to deal with them better”, but in the end, in practical terms, things are not really changing in terms of the issues being dealt with on the ground in the houses and these problems really being sorted out.
Kwajo Tweneboa: That is exactly what I am saying, yes.
Q4 Chair: That is a challenge we are going to have to take up, after you have spoken to us today, with the regulator, the Minister and probably again with housing associations and councils. We can have all the best words in the world and the best statements, but in the end it is what happens in people’s homes that really matters.
Kwajo Tweneboa: Yes, exactly.
Q5 Chair: Let us come on to another tragic case, that of Laura Winham, who was found dead in her home. She had probably been there for years. That is a different sort of case. It is a case where, in the end, the housing provider, the housing association here, had not checked on her even though they were aware that this tenant had particular problems.
We cannot go into the reasons for her death here today, but we know pretty well, from what we have heard, that checks were not done and nobody went in to see if she was okay. Is that another issue that really needs to be pushed and taken up?
Kwajo Tweneboa: Absolutely, yes. In the space of a year now, we have had three similar cases. We had one in Peckham, a few weeks ago we had one in Southwark and now we have had Laura. These individuals, who are social housing tenants, have been dead in their properties and gone undiscovered for many years. That should not be the case. I ask myself, “What failures are happening in that process?” Surely there should be some sort of welfare checks on individuals. You would think the housing provider would need to get in contact at some point. It is not happening until the neighbours are complaining.
For example, there should have been gas safety checks and all of these other checks that need to be carried out. How is it that they can possibly be done and someone is still left dead, undiscovered, in their home for years? It cannot be the case. There are failures on multiple levels there. It is something that needs to be looked at and addressed. There are not enough welfare checks happening. There is not enough care for tenants. If there were enough care for tenants, I would not have to be here talking about the slum conditions people are having to live in up and down the country.
Q6 Chair: We have to be careful on the gas safety checks. There is certainly going to have to be an investigation into a check that was supposed to have been done that was not done when the tenant was probably dead at the time. You are right: that is a very key issue. Someone going into the house to do a safety check can do other things as well, if it is part of a more holistic service.
Kwajo Tweneboa: Yes.
Chair: Let us move on. Your campaign has certainly been a major credit to you. It is something we have had drawn to our attention, and many thousands of other people have as well.
Q7 Nadia Whittome: Thank you so much, Kwajo, for joining the Committee today. I have a few questions about your campaigning. First of all, can you explain to us what led you to campaign for improvements in social housing?
Kwajo Tweneboa: I have lived in social housing for the majority of my life. I am currently still a social housing tenant. I lived on the Eastfields estate, which some of you may be aware of. Again, I have lived in disrepair for the majority of that time. I lived in temporary accommodation, for example, with my sister and my dad. We were living in a converted car garage as our temporary accommodation. That was until we got our home on the Eastfields estate, which also happened to be falling apart.
In both properties there was severe damp and mould. At one point it grew on to the bed that me and my sister shared, and it got into the wardrobes. In the most recent property, we had a kitchen that was nearly 100 years old. It was completely rotten. The cupboards were soaked and damp. There was poor security to the house, damp, mould, cockroach and mouse infestations and a bathroom that could not be used. Our bathroom light was filled with water. We had no windows in there. We had to shower at the gym.
Then my dad was diagnosed with stage one oesophageal cancer. It is a very aggressive form of cancer. In the beginning we were very naive in believing that it would be completely fine, but we did. It progressed over the space of a year. He went from walking around and being independent to being half his size and being fed through his stomach by district nurses three times a day. He was unable to swallow water or his saliva, never mind eat food. He was having to live and die in those conditions. The nurses were disgusted at the fact that this was happening. So were we as a family, but we were also concerned with his health.
He died in January 2020, and things went from bad to worse. On the day of his funeral we had a leak. That was February 2020. That was not dealt with until October that same year. It was months later before someone came out. It was ripped down. It contained asbestos, which we were not told about until I started digging. I was at work. I worked in a school. I was spending more time on the phone in my office trying to contact my housing provider than actually working.
It got to a point where enough was enough. It must have been the tenth time I had phoned them up and asked them to come out to fix a problem, and they were rude to me on the phone. They said they were really busy and hung the phone up on me mid-conversation. I said to myself, “They are not going to listen to me and my sisters, even after my dad passed away. I am going to leave it to the journalists. The next person to contact them will be a journalist”, and that was the case.
They put out a statement. Even after hearing about my dad, they said something along the lines of, “We are sorry that Kwajo feels as though he and his family have not received the service he deserved”. That is when I really lost it. I said, “No, this is where things change”. I decided to go round every single house in my estate and knock on every single door. By the time I had done a full circle around the Eastfields estate, my phone was flooded with pictures and videos of the conditions other tenants were living in. They were much worse than mine.
That is when I posted the threads on social media. They went viral, and then ITV did an investigation into the Eastfields estate. Here we are, a year and a half later.
Nadia Whittome: Thank you so much for sharing all of that with the Committee. I would like to thank you for the incredible work you have been doing as well.
Kwajo Tweneboa: I appreciate it.
Q8 Nadia Whittome: I am sure that everyone on the Committee is appalled to hear about the conditions you and your family were subjected to. I know it is also one example of a much wider problem. That is what you have been highlighting in your work. Can you describe to us some of the situations you have come across in your campaigning? How are tenants living in these properties being treated by their landlords?
Kwajo Tweneboa: This issue of disrepair is both in the private sector and social housing. If I think about some of the conditions in social housing, I have taken people to hospital. I have had to take people to A&E because ceilings have collapsed on them.
There has been damp, mould and infestations of cockroaches. I have opened people's ovens and cockroaches have come crawling out. I have seen dead mice, ceilings collapsed, homes flooded and ceilings missing. I have seen vulnerable children and vulnerable adults living in these conditions. In one home, I have been stood about an inch and a half deep in the raw sewage of this particular tenant’s neighbours. It had erupted through their shower and toilet and flooded their home; it had gone into their bedroom. They were struggling. All of these people reached out to me because they were ignored at multiple levels.
Honestly, the list could go on. Some of the things I have seen have been described as not even fit for animals to live in, never mind human beings, let alone human beings who are sick. Living in those conditions is absolutely immoral and outrageous, but I have seen it time and time again. People dying from cancers have reached out to me for help because they are not getting help, or enough help, anywhere else.
I remember one lady who had stage four bone cancer and breast cancer. She wrote to me to try to help her and her son because she knew she was going to pass away and it would just be her son. She was really concerned for him because the provider was not dealing with the damp and mould and was not trying to re-house or put in writing that they were going to pass the property to her son. She was not sure what was going to happen so she reached out for my help to get them moved. It is situations like that. There are countless situations.
Q9 Nadia Whittome: Thank you. Those are shocking examples, but all of us as MPs have heard similar examples in our own constituencies. How common are those conditions? Why are we in this situation?
Kwajo Tweneboa: Every day and every night I am getting messages from tenants complaining about the conditions they are having to live in. It is very common. It just seems to be getting worse and worse. Last year it was quite bad. It was really bad in terms of tenants reaching out to me trying to get some help, but this year there has been a complete influx. I do not know whether it is because of the addition of the cost of living crisis.
I did not mention it earlier, but there have been tenants who have been burnt in their homes, with boiling hot water pouring from their ceilings. They have received life-changing burns. I have seen it all. It is so common. I cannot put a number on it, but I have spoken to thousands of tenants in the space of a year and a half.
Q10 Nadia Whittome: Just lastly from me, do you have any examples of any positive action that is being taken by either housing associations or local authorities? If so, can you expand a bit on that?
Kwajo Tweneboa: I cannot be naive to the fact that there probably are housing providers out there doing a good job. Is any housing association or housing provider perfect? No, absolutely not. Every provider is going to have a case where tenants are living in poor conditions.
In regard to my work, the sole reason people reach out to me is because they are not getting help elsewhere. It is always negative. I have had complaints from tenants whose landlords are part of the G15. I have had complaints about all of them. Local authorities are just as bad. It is happening up and down the country.
I have not had any amazingly good cases, but I am not naive to the fact that I am sure there are providers out there doing a decent job. Unfortunately, though, not enough of them are.
Q11 Nadia Whittome: You do not have any examples of positive action that is being taken.
Kwajo Tweneboa: No.
Q12 Ian Byrne: Just to echo Nadia’s comments, you are giving a voice to people who feel as though they have not been given a voice for a long time. You are doing a fantastic job. Well done. More power to you.
My question is about residents’ involvement or the lack of it, which you have just touched on. Since October, reforms have been made to how residents can complain. The Government have been running communications campaigns to raise awareness of social housing residents’ rights. You have had extensive consultations with thousands of people, as you mentioned. Has there been any positive impact from these reforms since October?
Kwajo Tweneboa: Yes. Tenants have become more aware, specifically the tenants who are maybe not as tech-savvy or some of our elderly tenants, for example.
Even before the consultation, tenants knew how to complain. I knew how to complain; people on my estate had been complaining. The problem was the failure at multiple levels to acknowledge tenants’ complaints and deal with them in a satisfactory way. Having said that, there would have been tenants out there who may not necessarily have known the right routes to go down or in what order to do this.
I definitely think it has helped. It has also helped the conversation about poor housing and people living in poor conditions. Many tenants have been complaining for months, if not years. They know how to complain.
Q13 Ian Byrne: Just on that, at one of our sessions we did raise the ability of people to understand their rights within the consultation and the need to ensure that communication was happening in other languages so we were not excluding people. Have you seen any evidence of that?
Kwajo Tweneboa: Yes. The biggest change—I did have this conversation the last time I met the Department for Levelling Up—was making sure we are able to communicate with people whose first language may not be English, for example, and using multiple languages when communicating with tenants about how to deal with issues of disrepair. That is going to help massively. That will probably be the biggest change I can see from it all. That is something that will definitely help.
Q14 Ian Byrne: That is positive. The Government’s Social Housing Quality Resident Panel was launched in November 2022. It had its first meeting last month. Are you confident that this panel could lead to meaningful improvement in the quality of social housing or is it a tick-box exercise?
Kwajo Tweneboa: That is a good question. I hope it is not a tick-box exercise. Having said that, we have seen similar things before, especially after Grenfell. Grenfell should have been a “lessons learned” situation. It should not have taken anything else to reinforce the issue of poor housing and tenants being ignored but, five and a half or nearly six years on, we are out here uncovering this. We are going through the same sort of questionnaires and panels.
That should not be the case. The saddest part about it is that we should have learned the lessons five and a half or six years ago when Grenfell happened. This should not be happening. Having said that, it is needed. It can only help the situation and people’s understanding of the problem. It is needed. These sorts of things need to continue to happen. We need to find solutions and tackle the problems.
I hope it is not a tick-box exercise, but, again, seeing is believing. We have to see the results of that, how it works and what changes happen as a result of it.
Q15 Ian Byrne: Yes, that is a good answer. We will have our fingers crossed. The Government have named and shamed 18 social landlords who have breached consumer standards or been found guilty of severe maladministration. What has this achieved?
Kwajo Tweneboa: The naming and shaming is something I have been doing as part of my campaign work. It is the only thing that has worked when it comes to fighting for tenants’ rights and solutions for tenants living in disrepair, whether that is moving them or fixing the issue.
I have learned that shame works. The most expensive thing for these housing associations is shaming them and bad PR. That is what they have got. It is a good approach by the Government because it is showing a willingness to hold these providers to account. That is something we have lacked for decades, especially when it comes to social housing.
There has been a massive power imbalance between the social housing providers and the tenants who they are supposed to serve. The naming and shaming approach is great, but we need to go further than that. The regulator needs to have teeth. There need to be penalties and a willingness to hold these landlords to account seriously. It cannot just be a slap on the wrist and then they are allowed to go about their business.
If this was, for example, the NHS—I have said this time and time again—and doctors and nurses were neglecting their patients in the same way as the case of Awaab Ishak, with him passing away as a result of the conditions he was living in, there would have been investigations. In the worst cases, there would have been criminal investigations. We do not see the same happening in housing, and it should. Ultimately, it is people’s health and safety that is being put at risk. It is not only that: in these cases that have been highlighted in the news recently, it is their lives.
Q16 Ian Byrne: Eighteen providers have been named and shamed. Have you done this yourself and then seen the positive consequences of your actions? Has there been work done? Have you seen that yourself? Have there been any tangible outcomes?
Kwajo Tweneboa: Yes, it would have been the majority. There have been incidents where tenants have complained for 10 years, but when I come along and shame them on social media, they move the tenants out in 24 hours. It goes to show that it can happen. For some reason, it takes shaming for that to happen. It is not only shaming; it is shaming by people with big social media platforms and big followers. If it was a social housing tenant who did not have a big following, they would simply be ignored. Honestly, it should not take that. Housing providers and social housing providers need to remember why it is they are here: to provide decent and safe homes to some of the country’s most vulnerable individuals. They have become very lost in doing that.
Q17 Ian Byrne: That is a really good answer once again. This is the million‑dollar question. We will now hear evidence from the Regulator of Social Housing and then the Minister. What would you like us to ask them?
Kwajo Tweneboa: That is a good question. What has been good so far is the talk about regulation coming in. We need that sooner rather than later. My question would be, “When are we going to get that regulation?”
In regard to the regulator, I am going to be meeting the regulator soon. I have had questions for a very long time. We have seen some positive changes from the ombudsman. We have seen the naming and shaming approach. They are more transparent in doing things publicly, but the lack of response from the regulator is worrying me. The Eastfields estate was something that was highlighted to the regulator. It frustrated me a lot because it was me who reported them to the regulator. In that report, I provided loads of evidence. We heard nothing back from the regulator when it came to Eastfields. I never received a call. They rang the landlord and asked the landlord questions. They found no systemic failure.
Since then, I and other tenants have submitted loads more complaints, but we have not really seen a reaction from them. Even people within housing are asking questions as to why the regulator is not willing to hold the bigger landlords and some of these bigger housing associations to account. We are seeing the same names coming up time and time again. They are monster organisations. Tenants are being neglected as a result. That would be the one question I have for the regulator. It is a bit frustrating. We are seeing changes from the ombudsman.
It is not just me saying it. People working in housing and tenants are complaining about why the regulator is not willing to hold these bigger organisations to account. The regulator should be leading the charge; it should be leading the fight against tenants living in poor conditions. If it is not willing to do so and does not have enough teeth, this issue of poor housing will not get fixed. It will go on for many, many years. I do not want to be sat here in five or 10 years’ time saying the same thing.
Q18 Bob Blackman: Congratulations on your campaigning thus far. There is often a time when tenants need to take legal representation as well. However, I have heard on good authority that certain unscrupulous legal firms are literally leafleting estates and inviting tenants to sign up with them, but one of the conditions they impose is that tenants do not allow the housing association or local authority to have access to their property while they are pursuing legal action against them. Have you heard about this particular issue? There is nothing wrong with someone getting legal representation and assistance, but at the end of the day we want the problem fixed. If the legal people are preventing the fix taking place, that is really serious for the family concerned.
Kwajo Tweneboa: In regard to taking legal action, that is something I did, because I just felt I was ignored at every single level. I did that, and it was successful in my case.
However, like you mentioned—I can only be honest; I have seen it—there are some firms that, like you said, leaflet estates. Eastfields was like that after the ITV piece came out. Firms were leafleting, pushing leaflets through our doors, ringing us up out of the blue and asking whether we wanted advice or for them to take on our case. I always say to tenants, “You have to be very careful with which one you go to”. Like anything, you have to be very careful about who you choose. You have to do your research and ask for advice.
In regard to the second point you made about some of them saying, “Do not allow entry”, I have seen cases where solicitors have got involved and the legal firm has written to the housing provider. Before the housing provider has responded to the tenant, they have found out that legal action has been taken and now they want to get into the property, even if the tenant has been complaining for 10 years, for example. They want to get into the property and fix it before it can go any further. I have seen cases of that. Again, it could be an issue with the provider not following procedure when legal action is taken by responding straightaway. It could be a mix-up in that sense.
I agree with the first thing you mentioned. You have to be careful with the legal representation you choose because not all of them have tenants’ best interests at heart. There are some firms that do, which genuinely care about the issue of poor housing, dealing with disrepair and holding providers to account. There are some out there that you need to be careful of.
Q19 Bob Blackman: Do you have any documentary evidence of this taking place? It would be very helpful for this Committee to have that. If you do not have any, I would ask, as a general appeal, that people who have been in this position write into this Committee so we have the evidence to present both to Ministers and other regulatory authorities.
Kwajo Tweneboa: Yes, it definitely would be helpful. Personally, I do not have any evidence of that. Even in my case, my legal representation was always telling me, “No, let the provider in. Let them come in and do the work. Let them get on with it”. That is like many of the cases I have heard.
There probably will be people out there who will be able to submit evidence. Like you said, I would welcome them to do so. Ultimately, tenants need to be protected, especially if they are being exploited.
Q20 Chair: Kwajo, is there anything else you would like to say to us while you are online with the Committee? Are there any other points you would like to get across to us?
Kwajo Tweneboa: Yes. In regard to social housing, we also need to look at the contractors being used. This is something that is not being talked about enough. I have spoken to thousands of tenants, and I see where these providers are failing. In many cases, contractors are not showing up on time. Contractors are saying that jobs have been done when in fact they have not in order to meet satisfaction targets. Contractors are showing up late and then blaming tenants for not allowing them entry or even sitting in their vans outside people’s properties.
I have told housing providers that their contractors are letting them down, but ultimately we need to hold the housing providers to account. They choose to continue to employ the same contractors that tenants complain about. Light really needs to be shone on these contractors. They are getting away with exploiting not only providers but, in some cases, tenants as well. It cannot continue. They really need to be held to account. The same names are cropping up again and again.
Chair: That is a really important point. We heard that in some evidence when we did our previous report on this. The whole Committee would like to say to you very clearly that you are an incredibly powerful and eloquent champion for those in real need with real problems, people who cannot necessarily speak up for themselves. You have done an absolutely incredible job. It is great having you here today. It is not great hearing some of the stories you have to tell us, but it is certainly great that you are highlighting these issues. We have heard the challenges you want us to put to the regulator and the Minister a little later. We also know, as you have said to us, that very often you get promises and the action does not follow.
Kwajo Tweneboa: That is it.
Chair: If at any point in the next few months you feel that action is not following and things are not changing, please come back to the Committee. We would love to hear from you again. Think of us as an ally to try to get these problems sorted out. You are at the front, and we will be behind you, supporting you all the way.
Kwajo Tweneboa: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Witness: Jonathan Walters.
Q21 Chair: We come now to the Regulator of Social Housing. Welcome. You have probably heard some challenges there, which we will be putting to you, but could you begin by introducing yourself? That would be helpful.
Jonathan Walters: I am Jonathan Walters. I am the deputy chief executive at the Regulator of Social Housing.
Q22 Chair: It is a pretty obvious first question. As Kwajo just set out to us, you are not doing very much, are you?
Jonathan Walters: I would refute that. We are doing a lot within our remit. We are really looking forward to the proactive consumer regulation regime. Once the Bill has passed through Parliament, we will be able to get on with proactive inspections of all social housing providers, whether they are local authorities or housing associations.
There is a lot going on. I completely accept that some of what is happening and some of the things we are seeing in individual providers with particular tenants are unacceptable. I completely endorse what he is saying about some of the things he is seeing. They are unacceptable. They should not be happening. As a regulator, we are working hard to put those right within our current remit. We are really looking forward to getting a stronger remit in the future.
Q23 Chair: That is almost like you do not have any powers now. You do have some, do you not? There is not much evidence you have used them.
Jonathan Walters: There is. We have downgraded and taken action against a wide range of organisations, both local authorities and housing associations, where we have had issues brought to us. One of the issues for us at the moment is that we cannot go out proactively looking for failures. Where they are referred to us—we get hundreds of referrals every year—we take action where we can.
Q24 Chair: We will come back to that issue a little later. In the tragic death of Awaab Ishak, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing clearly had major problems. Six months after his death, you gave RBH’s governance the highest grade possible. That does not look like a regulator on top of the job and really going for an organisation with a very poor record, an appalling record in this case.
Jonathan Walters: At that point, we were still waiting for the coroner’s report. We knew the death had happened, but sometimes there are agencies that are better placed to work out what is going on. We wanted to understand what had happened in that really tragic case, but it was important that we had the evidence from the coroner before we came to that conclusion. When we had that conclusion, we downgraded the organisation.
Q25 Chair: You have to wait for a coroner’s report before you get to grips with a housing provider failing so badly in what they are supposed to be doing.
Jonathan Walters: This is a really tragic case. Unfortunately, the reasons for the tragic case were not definitive until the coroner reported. When we went in and engaged with them, they were co-operating with the coroner’s report. They were working proactively to try to put that right. What transpired subsequently is that what we were told and what the board of the organisation was told was not representative of what was actually happening on the ground.
Q26 Chair: You are saying to us that in happier circumstances, if that young boy had not died, you would not have done anything at all because you would not have had a coroner’s report to act on.
Jonathan Walters: The coroner’s report really highlighted the issues that were going on there. We were waiting to see what the coroner’s report said. Even if the case had been different, it is possible that the report would have highlighted other issues we could have gone in and investigated. We were waiting for that agency to report back to us.
Q27 Chair: Did you have any other complaints about this organisation before the coroner’s report?
Jonathan Walters: The organisation self‑referred itself to us upon the death. We looked at the evidence at that point. At that point it was not clear what had led to the death of the child who had died in the property. We were waiting for the coroner’s report.
Where there is an agency that is better placed to get at the facts and that has better power than we do to understand what is going on, which in this case the coroner clearly did—
Chair: You had no concerns at all.
Jonathan Walters: It is not that we did not have concerns. We were waiting for the further evidence that came from the coroner.
Q28 Chair: Before the coroner started doing their report, you had no concerns about this organisation whatsoever.
Jonathan Walters: I would not say we had no concerns whatsoever. We had no evidence that there had been a failure at the organisation until we knew from the coroner’s report—
Q29 Chair: Leaving the coroner’s report to one side, before that process you had no concerns about this organisation whatsoever.
Jonathan Walters: As far as we were aware at the time, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing was a well-governed organisation. That transpired not to be the case.
Q30 Kate Hollern: Can I just understand that? This tragedy happened. This poor child died. Six months later you give them the highest grade possible. How can that be?
Jonathan Walters: At the time, we were looking at how well governed the organisation was. We were looking at the organisation in the round. We were not looking at this individual case because we were still waiting for the evidence to come back from the coroner.
Q31 Kate Hollern: At the point you graded them, you were aware of this tragedy.
Jonathan Walters: We were, but we did not have any evidence at the time. Once we had the evidence, we took action and we acted.
Q32 Kate Hollern: You were aware of this tragedy, and you still awarded the highest possible grade. That does not make sense to me. That would have raised flags. I would have expected you to have looked a bit further and a bit deeper.
Jonathan Walters: Indeed, and we did look. We asked them about what they had done on the estate at the time. We received assurances at the time that things were in a reasonable place. It only became clear once we had the coroner’s report. The key point here is about the evidence we have. At the time of that IDA, the in-depth assessment, we did not have the evidence of what had happened in that case, which came with the coroner’s report.
Q33 Kate Hollern: If a provider tells you they are doing everything right, you give them the grade despite the red flags already being there. However, we will move on from that a bit. What processes have you put in place to identify whether other providers have been incorrectly assessed? How do you ensure providers are open and frank about the current situation?
Jonathan Walters: We expect and we require all providers to be open, transparent and honest with us. Where we have evidence that providers have not been, as we did in Rochdale, we take that very seriously. After the coroner’s report, it became apparent that Rochdale had not been open and transparent with us and there had not necessarily been the openness and transparency within the organisation you would have expected. We take that very seriously and that was heavily weighed into our judgment, and we found RBH to be non-compliant with both governance and the home standard. As you will know, the chief exec has resigned and the chair is now going. There is a process of change going on in that organisation.
We place a great premium on people being open and transparent with us. Where they are not and we have evidence they are not, we take that very serious. If someone has lied to us or misrepresented a situation to us, that normally reflects in a much worse judgment than would otherwise be the case. We are always looking for landlords that take what their tenants tell them and what the regulator says to them seriously and respond appropriately. If they do not, we take action and make sure they change as a result.
Q34 Kate Hollern: What is the process to satisfy yourselves and this Committee that other providers have been assessed correctly?
Jonathan Walters: We have a robust internal process. The team that has been working on a case will go in. They will take evidence from the provider. They will take external evidence. They will look at referrals from the ombudsman. They will take everything in the round.
At the moment, because of where we are with the legislation, we are looking at governance and financial viability. Those are our primary loci within organisations. When we get to the future, we are going to have a much wider remit around many of the issues this Committee has been hearing about. We are looking forward to being able to deal with those.
At the moment we are looking mainly at governance and viability. That comes with quite a lot of internal checks, quite a lot of internal challenges and quite a lot of internal processes that look at the evidence we have and calibrate it against other providers. Nothing is just signed off in one place. It is always subject to an internal process of challenge and robustness.
We then have that process checked externally by our internal auditors as well. We have a range of challenge processes that we use to make sure we are coming to the right judgments.
Q35 Kate Hollern: Did these processes happen after the coroner’s report?
Jonathan Walters: No, we always have these processes in place. It is a question of the evidence we have available to us at the time. In Rochdale, we did not have the evidence until after the coroner reported.
Q36 Kate Hollern: We have known for a very long time that damp and mould is a very big problem that does seriously affect people’s health and mental wellbeing. Prior to the coroner’s report, what had you been doing about it?
Jonathan Walters: We have been raising issues around the quality of accommodation and the quality of social housing for some time. Our economic focus is really about whether associations are spending enough money on their properties and whether they are investing enough to maintain them to the right standard.
We have been saying for quite some time that we do not think housing associations—we do not have a remit for local authorities in this space—understand their stock well enough. They do not understand the tenants who are in there. They do not have that granular detail. A number of our downgrades of associations have featured this, where we have felt they were not on top of those issues.
The quality of stock, including damp and mould and compliance with the whole of the decent homes standards, is a key focus of our work. We have been flagging for a while that we have concerns. We have reflected that in some of our judgments.
Q37 Kate Hollern: How many times in the last five years have you found a housing provider in breach of the home standard for failing to deal with damp and mould?
Jonathan Walters: That has happened three times.
Q38 Kate Hollern: It has happened three times in five years. You are confident that all breaches have been identified and, where you have found a problem, it has been resolved.
Jonathan Walters: Where we have had issues reported to us—that is where we have been up until now—I am sure the situations have been dealt with. As the Committee will know, we wrote to all local authority and housing associations just before Christmas and they reported back to us. We are now in the process of following up with a number of organisations on the basis of the evidence they gave us. I suspect there will be further regulatory action as a result of that.
Q39 Bob Blackman: Yes, can I just follow up on one thing in your answers to the Chair? You were saying that, in terms of the situation in Rochdale, you had no evidence contrary to it being a first-rate supplier. What evidence do you require to give people such a high rating?
Jonathan Walters: This is about housing associations rather than local authorities. At the moment, we are looking at what evidence a board has about what is going on in their organisation and what assurances a board receives about the quality of accommodation, financial viability, how it manages risk and the services it is delivering to tenants. We are looking at the evidence the board has.
We take that in the round. That includes meetings. We observe board meetings. We go out and hold meetings with senior staff in the organisation. We talk to the board members separately from their executives. As my colleague says, we try to pull the lamp down and shine it in board members’ and executives’ eyes. We grill them.
Anyone who has been at a housing association that has been through an IDA will tell you it is not a pleasant process. It is not designed to be. It is designed to be challenging and difficult. We are really looking forward to becoming proactive across all the regulatory standards. Then we will be able to do the same and build out from that on the consumer side as well.
Q40 Bob Blackman: I was just going to say that the one gap in all of this is the people who are provided with housing.
Jonathan Walters: Yes.
Q41 Bob Blackman: Do you take any cognisance of what they have to say?
Jonathan Walters: We will be in the future.
Q42 Bob Blackman: You do not at the moment.
Jonathan Walters: We do not at the moment.
Q43 Ian Byrne: You give them a clean bill of health or whatever six months after this happened. We know that 80% of that estate had mould. It was a catastrophic failure by you as a regulatory body to award this housing association what you have awarded them. There is absolutely no way that 80% of the residents have not put complaints in. They must have flagged it up. They must have done.
We are talking about something very tragic. We know this anyway from the research, but, from speaking to eminent people in my own constituency who work in Alder Hey Hospital, the conditions people are being brought up in are life or death. That is the first part. How do we address that?
Secondly, what can you do, as a regulatory body, to the actual board? These people who are overseeing this housing are causing young people, children and families to die. What teeth do you have? They should not just be told to resign, take a slap on the wrist and then move on to another post. What can we do to ensure they face the full weight of justice for their inaction?
Jonathan Walters: To address the first part of your question, at the time we asked Rochdale Boroughwide Housing for evidence on the estate, and they supplied us with evidence about what was happening in the estate and the levels of non-decency. At that point the picture that painted was a good picture. What has subsequently transpired is that the information was wrong. As we highlighted in our report, there were a number of reasons why that might have been. It was clear that the information they gave us at the time was wrong.
On the second part of your question, as a regulator, we are regulating the organisation rather than the individuals on it. We can and do periodically appoint people to the board of an organisation. Clearly, we also downgraded the organisation. Rochdale is currently graded as G3 and V3.[1] We have said it is not meeting its economic standards. That is a very powerful message for people. It has a big impact on the board and on its reputation.
We do not legally have powers at the moment to block people from standing on a board. We cannot start criminal prosecutions. Those are not within our remit. Those would be things that would fall with other regulatory agencies.
Q44 Ian Byrne: Is that something you would want? If you were given more teeth, would it stop this from happening?
Jonathan Walters: The powers that we are going to get in the Bill that is going through Parliament will give us the teeth we need. That does not include being able to block board members. Where we see board members being appointed to organisations where we would have concerns, we would raise that with the organisation. Ultimately, that might result in a downgrade in the organisation. We do not have the legal power to block them. There are all sorts of issues that flow from that. Where we are gives the right balance in terms of the teeth the regulator needs.
Q45 Ian Byrne: Should you be able to levy criminal charges against individuals who have been responsible for overseeing housing that causes loss of life?
Jonathan Walters: There are agencies that are better placed to do that. The Health and Safety Executive and other agencies are in a better place to make those decisions than we are.
Q46 Ian Byrne: Do you liaise with them?
Jonathan Walters: We do. Yes, we talk to a range of other regulatory agencies.
Q47 Mrs Elphicke: I just wanted to look at this in the context of some of the comments you made in relation to governance. You do regulate governance.
Jonathan Walters: We do, yes.
Q48 Mrs Elphicke: Part of governance is the codes and policies that apply within an organisation. I know it was a policy not just of Rochdale Boroughwide Housing but a number of RSLs that they will not repair if legal claims are ongoing. What action have you taken in relation to that?
Jonathan Walters: Rochdale now admit that was the wrong decision. I believe they have changed their policy. That has become widely accepted across the sector. Not all organisations operated that policy. Those that did are now revisiting it.
Q49 Mrs Elphicke: You are the regulator. I have looked and I cannot see, but please update me if I have missed it. I cannot see that you have said that this is an unacceptable policy for RSLs to have.
Jonathan Walters: Clearly, it is up to organisations to make their own independent decisions. We have clearly highlighted in a number of places that the most important thing is to put the issue right for tenants. The thing we all want to see is the issue being resolved on the ground.
We have not written it down. I am pretty confident we have said on public platforms that you should not be putting artificial constraints in your way to sort out problems. If there is a policy like that, we have encouraged landlords to review that. I would do that again today. Landlords should be looking at the best ways to get in as quickly as possible and sort policies out.
Q50 Mrs Elphicke: You are the regulator and you are awarding governance standards. Should you not be saying, “This is not acceptable”? You should not be in a situation where, as happened in the case of Awaab Ishak, a legal claim is ongoing and no action is taken. It is not just this case; it is systemic.
Jonathan Walters: Our job is absolutely to make sure the right outcomes are being achieved for tenants. One of our jobs is not to tell landlords individually what their particular policy should be. Those are decisions for independent organisations.
Where we see something that we think is getting in the way of delivering good outcomes, we will raise it; we will flag it. We do not have the power to tell them, “You must do it in this way or that way”. We will clearly flag that we think it is an issue.
Q51 Mrs Elphicke: You do have the powers in terms of what level of governance award you give them. You can take these matters into account when you are looking at the governance process.
Jonathan Walters: If we felt that were a severe enough issue, yes, we could downgrade on that basis.
Q52 Mrs Elphicke: You could if you felt it were a severe enough issue. There was another policy they had, which they have now taken down from their website. They had an unreasonable behaviour policy, which said, for example, that they considered it unreasonable if a tenant were to make excessive demands on the time and resources of staff, to make lengthy phone calls, to send emails to numerous staff, to send detailed letters every few days, to expect immediate responses or to contact them repeatedly about a matter that needed to be addressed and so on.
Does this foster an environment and culture, from a governance perspective, whereby tenants can make complaints about life-threatening matters?
Jonathan Walters: It has become clear that the culture that existed in RBH previously was the wrong one. The new members of the board and the new executive team are turning that organisation around.
Q53 Mrs Elphicke: That policy was in place when you gave them the top governance rating.
Jonathan Walters: Yes, I accept that.
Q54 Mrs Elphicke: That might perhaps be an area to reflect on going forward. Just moving on, if I may, to the section on the audit, what did the audit returns you have undertaken tell you about the scale of investment that is required to sort out the housing stock in relation to damp and mould?
Jonathan Walters: At the moment, we have figures around the number of homes that we think have serious damp and mould issues. The cost of remediating those things will vary from property to property and organisation to organisation. We do not as yet have a detailed figure.
In some properties it will be structural; there will be a structural problem with the construction of the building. A freehold estate may well be a good example of that. It is very hard to get rid of damp and mould without very invasive work on the buildings. In some cases, it may even need the building to be taken down and reconstructed. At the other end of the spectrum, there may be issues around ventilation and other things that can be done to address the issue quite quickly and solve the problem.
From the figures we have at the moment around the prevalence of the damp and mould issue, we are not yet in the position to extrapolate how much it will cost. That is further work that we need to undertake.
Q55 Mrs Elphicke: You have downgraded the financial viability of Rochdale Boroughwide Housing. From the work you have done already on that second and more serious category where the building might have to be taken down, how many housing associations are you expecting to have to change the financial viability criteria on?
Jonathan Walters: We have recently regraded quite a lot of organisations from our top grading of V1 to V2. Over half the sector is now at our V2 judgment, which reflects a wide range of cost pressures, including quite a lot of expenditure on existing stock.
The sector is expecting to spend about £40 billion in the next five years on its existing stock. It spent £6.5 billion last year. That is just the housing association sector; the local authorities are on top of that. There is quite a sizable amount of investment going into the stock. A lot of that is about addressing issues like this, but some of the damp and mould costs will be on top of that as well.
Q56 Mrs Elphicke: In relation to the smaller housing associations, those of under 1,000 homes, how are you satisfying yourselves that damp and mould issues are being addressed? Those smaller providers do not have to take part in the audit.
Jonathan Walters: We are still thinking about the best way of getting that. We have 1,000 organisations with less than 1,000 homes. Most of them are staffed by volunteers. It is about how we get that information in a way that does not put an unreasonable burden on people who are doing this for their local communities.
Q57 Mrs Elphicke: Finally, in terms of the information you have received, it has been said that a minority of responses provided poor-quality information. In what way was the quality of the information poor? What are you doing to improve the quality of information in relation to this issue?
Jonathan Walters: There was a real mix. The majority of people gave us good returns. There was a proportion where it was poor or very poor. We are following up with that proportion of organisations. On the back of the information we have received, we are doing two things. First, we are engaging with providers that had good information, but their good information told us there was a problem. Secondly, we are engaging with those providers that gave us poor information. It is quite hard to tell the extent to which they have a problem because their information was poor. Both of those are quite deep concerns as a regulator. There is definitely more work to be done.
Q58 Mrs Elphicke: Finally, to round off on the beginning of my segment of questions, have you downgraded the governance level of any of those organisations that provided poor-quality data of the type you have described?
Jonathan Walters: Not yet, no. I would not be surprised if that were to come in the coming months.
Q59 Chair: Will you eventually collate all of those reports together to give an overview of the problems, together with the likely costs of putting them right?
Jonathan Walters: We want to try to understand the financial impact of this. We are thinking about the best way to do that. We published our initial findings last week. We are thinking about how to put more information out to the public.
Q60 Chair: Will that be for councils as well as housing associations?
Jonathan Walters: We got information from both so it will be both, yes.
Q61 Andrew Lewer: In some of the work that we have done previously as a Select Committee and particularly in the recent report we did on the regulation of social housing, we made particularly strong recommendations about the systemic failure test being too high a bar and too limiting in your ability to hold providers to account. We suggested strongly that it should be scrapped.
I have seen your information about how that was your organisation’s interpretation of your responsibilities rather than something mandated. When we made that report to you, you did respond to the report but you did not engage with that recommendation. Why was that?
Jonathan Walters: We are very keen to look at the systemic failure test. We accept that the recommendations the Committee made were very helpful. We have heard that from other places as well.
As you know, we are getting ready to change our remit and become a different type of regulator from 1 April 2024. As you know, over the summer we are going to consult on our new standards framework and the way we operate as a regulator. As part of that, we want to review the systemic failure test. We will be looking to change it as a result.
Q62 Andrew Lewer: Previously, as an organisation, you provided a fairly robust comeback about the systemic test and why it was right, despite the fact that we and others did not think it was. You have changed your mind as an organisation on that.
Jonathan Walters: It has been really helpful to get the Committee’s feedback on that. We want to go out and talk to stakeholders: local authorities, housing associations, tenants and funders. We want to talk to a wide range of people, including this Committee. On the back of that, we will look to change that test.
Q63 Andrew Lewer: You would anticipate that in April 2024, with the new start and new abilities to operate that you will have, there will not be a systemic test anymore.
Jonathan Walters: Clearly, we are always regulating organisations, not individual cases. It always has to be about the organisation as a whole. I completely accept that the way we have talked about systemic failure has not always worked in the way it should have done. We are going to look at what the right test is. We want to talk to other people; it is not something we want to do in isolation. We want to engage with tenants and landlords about that.
Andrew Lewer: That is good. That is a valuable admission. I know it is not easy to do sometimes, but it makes more sense than us continuing to hammer away at it. Thank you for that.
Q64 Ben Everitt: We covered tenant voice quite a lot in the answers to some of the questions that came up. Indeed, that was the key theme coming from our first witness, which I know you were here to listen to. You have recently published an implementation plan on reshaping consumer standards. That plan will come into effect once the Bill is passed. Would you walk us through it?
Jonathan Walters: Yes, absolutely. Parliament is going to give us two fundamental jobs when it comes to inspection. One is to make sure we have inspected all large housing associations. That is 200-odd housing associations, which own about 2.7 million homes, and just under 200 local authorities, which between them own about 1.9 million homes. That is the vast majority of the social housing sector. You are going to ask us to have inspected each one of those within a four-year timeframe, so the first thing to do is to get an inspection regime that will go around and inspect all of those organisations.
The second job you will give us to do is to have an ability to go in and inspect, where necessary, when there are other problems that are identified. Clearly, we will want to do our inspection process on a risk basis, going to the people we are worried about most first, but it might be that, in the case of someone we are planning on doing in a couple of years’ time, we need to go and do something quicker on them because of evidence that has come to light, and we want that power. We are designing an inspection regime that will deal with both of those.
As I said, we do a good job on the economic side. On the consumer side, we will continue to want to talk to officers, directors and the board to make sure that they are running those organisations and homes properly and that they are delivering good-quality services to tenants. Ultimately, they are the landlords, not us. We want them to be doing a good job, so that is what we will be doing. We will be challenging them in a similar way to the way we do currently, but crucially, the big difference that will come with the new regime is that we will be talking to tenants as well.
We are going through a series of pilots, so we are onsite with half a dozen to a dozen organisations at the moment, where we are piloting an inspection regime. We are going to do at least one more round of pilots—possibly two more rounds—before we go live, so we can build up some good evidence about what works and what does not work. We have been talking to people like Ofsted. We have been talking to the Scottish Housing Regulator about how they get views from users and customers of the services they are inspecting.
We are going to trial a whole range of different methods of hearing that voice from tenants. That could be about holding individual meetings with tenants; it could be about providing an open forum. Anyone who has a child will probably have filled out an Ofsted inspection questionnaire when your school was going through that process. It is about looking at all of those different methods for hearing what tenants are saying.
Crucially though, one of the things we want to make sure is that landlords are hearing what tenants are saying. We will also want to check that landlords, the board and councillors are hearing directly from tenants themselves. Is the organisation hearing it as well as making sure that we are hearing it? Then we will want to bring that into our judgments on the consumer and the governance of the organisation.
Q65 Ben Everitt: Thank you. That is quite comprehensive. You consulted on this approach with the tenancy satisfaction measures. I appreciate that you are saying that you are looking to have as broad a set of feedback from tenants as possible. Is there a risk, though, that in the process you have just described there you are not going to get codified feedback back, so it is not going to be comparable? You will get lots of data and opinions, but it will all be in different formats. Is there not a risk that you might just end up with this sea of data but no real insight?
Jonathan Walters: That absolutely is a risk, which is one of the reasons we want to try a range of different methods as we go through the trial inspections that we do this year. The pilots will hopefully give us some valuable insight. You are also quite right to highlight that the TSMs will be a useful way of being able to compare landlord to landlord but also, crucially, landlords through time. Are the scores of that landlord improving or declining? How do they sit in relation to their peers? How do they sit in relation to similar organisations? All of that will be useful intelligence alongside, perhaps, what will be more anecdotal information that you might get from tenants and speaking to them.
Q66 Ben Everitt: Are you looking for feedback from tenants on every single inspection, or is it just where there are issues that have been flagged as a concern?
Jonathan Walters: It will be every inspection. On every inspection it will be important to hear the voice of the tenants about their landlord.
Q67 Ben Everitt: Over time, that is 2.5 million.
Jonathan Walters: If you do local authorities as well, it will be 4 million.
Q68 Ben Everitt: Do you think that is achievable?
Jonathan Walters: There will be plenty of tenants who will not want to talk to us. There will be plenty of parents who fill out Ofsted inspection questionnaires; there will be plenty of parents who do not. One of the key things is making sure people have that opportunity to come and talk to us, but frankly, if they are happy enough with their landlord and they just want to get on with their lives, nobody should be forcing them to fill out questionnaires when they do not want to.
Q69 Ben Everitt: What is the timescale for when you are going to pivot from a broad data collection and feedback approach to something that is a bit more codified? What are you looking for in the learning process that you have described to be able to then make the feedback system efficient and make it give you good insight that you can act on?
Jonathan Walters: As I say, we are onsite now at between six and 12, certainly, and we will do a series more during the course of the year. We are going to try different techniques on different pilots and see which ones give us better information. As I say, we have been talking to other regulators about how they gather that information. If someone has a great idea, I am quite happy to steal it. We will look at what works and then we will have to make a decision later on this year about how we are going to start but, of course, it is a four-year process. We might start in one way and find, having done a few, that there is a better way of doing it. We will not be afraid to change our minds and learn if we need to.
Q70 Ben Everitt: You are designing a dynamic system that you do not know what it will look like in the end, and you are going to start it next May.
Jonathan Walters: We have a range of techniques that we want to trial, so we have a list of techniques that we want to use. We will want to narrow those down, so I think we will have a good sense once we get to April 2024.
Ben Everitt: Good luck.
Jonathan Walters: Thank you.
Q71 Bob Blackman: In your implementation plan, you say you have to take account of both the stock and compliance with the decent home standard where you have particular concerns, but you do not say anything about physical inspections of properties. In your earlier answer, you were saying you may carry out physical inspections of properties. Can we just be clear on that?
Jonathan Walters: Yes. What we want most and what we have been saying to the sector for a while is that landlords themselves have to get a better understanding of what is happening in their properties. This was an issue that was highlighted recently by the commission that the National Housing Federation and CIH convened. The sector is beginning to realise that it needs to improve its understanding of stock quality. It is far better if the landlord has information that we can rely on and use.
It would not necessarily be a good use of our money or feepayers’ money to start doing a significant number of inspections of properties, because that is what the landlords should be doing and what they should be paying for. We are being given the power in the new legislation to go and physically inspect properties where we need to, but that is very much seen as an in extremis measure where there is an issue the landlord cannot deal with and we need to get in there and sort that problem out.
Q72 Bob Blackman: You have already said that it is going to be a challenge to complete the level of inspections that you have. Do you have in your mind now what the criteria or balance would be before you would do a physical inspection of not just one property, but a series of properties to do with a particular supplier?
Jonathan Walters: This is where we think there is a particular issue that a supplier, housing association or local authority is unable to deal with. It might be around damp and mould. It might be about a particular block, but we are talking here of in extremis, where the organisation itself has failed or is unable, for whatever reason, to do that inspection itself, because it is better that it does it and understands its stock, rather than us doing it for them.
Q73 Bob Blackman: In your response to our report, you said that some providers do not have accurate data about their stock, which is obviously a concern. What proportion of providers do you judge to have accurate data on their stock?
Jonathan Walters: Everybody will have some quality data. There will be a range, and I would not want to sit here and speculate to the Committee that it is X% or Y%. I would say that, on the damp and mould information, about 10% of the returns we got were not of sufficient quality. That is probably not a bad ballpark figure.
Q74 Bob Blackman: What steps are you going to take in order to improve the accuracy of the data you are presented with?
Jonathan Walters: When we are going out and doing our in-depth assessment on the economic side, we are already challenging organisations. When we go out and do an IDA, where we find that data is not of good quality, that absolutely comes into our judgment around governance, because that is a responsibility of the landlord to have that. We have downgraded organisations where they do not have that data in place.
Q75 Bob Blackman: When the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill was considered in the Lords, amendments were made to ensure that you had the power to intervene in relation to requiring housing associations to safeguard and promote the interests of homeless and potentially homeless people. We will hear from the Minister shortly. The Minister said that the existing tenancy standard already sets this expectation that providers should take into account homelessness duties. Do you require any further powers to take up action to ensure we deal with homelessness prevention?
Jonathan Walters: We have and will continue to have an expectation that housing associations work with local authorities and other statutory agencies to fulfil their responsibilities, which would include this. We would expect agencies to be working proactively with their councils.
Q76 Bob Blackman: Are you content that you have all the powers you need to require housing associations to carry out their legal duties?
Jonathan Walters: Yes, we do.
Q77 Bob Blackman: In a while, when you come back to see us, we will be asking you questions about it.
Jonathan Walters: I can feel it right now.
Q78 Mrs Elphicke: Before we finish this session, I just want to touch on private finance. Private finance puts considerable weight on you as a regulator and lends very much on the basis of you doing your job. If you are downgrading people, as happened in the Rochdale Boroughwide Housing case, by two grades to move them from financially viable to, essentially, a body of concern—and you have indicated there may be a number of other associations who you are similarly going to change in terms of financial viability—do you feel that you have failed in providing that level of financial oversight? Are you concerned that it might impact on the availability of private finance for housing associations in the next period?
Jonathan Walters: Again, we have been signalling for some time about the financial pressures the sector is under, and we have very clearly signposted that we were going to downgrade or regrade a whole range of organisations from V1 to V2, which we have done.
In the Rochdale case, they went from V2 to V3. We have a very small number of housing associations at V3. We regard V2 as a perfectly acceptable grade because it shows that you are working your balance sheet hard. It shows that you are taking risks, investing in your stock and building new homes most of the time. V3 shows that you are having liquidity problems or you are potentially unable to continue to be an independent organisation.
We have a very small number of organisations at V3, and where those organisations do not have an independent future, as in the case of Swan Housing Association, we continue to work closely with others to broker rescues in the sector. The Committee will be aware that Sanctuary are in very advanced discussions with Swan to take them over. We remain confident that we are able to regulate financial viability effectively.
Q79 Mrs Elphicke: Do you think that any organisations are expecting to go from V1 to V2 on the basis of the damp and mould disrepair and associated building safety issues?
Jonathan Walters: I could not rule it out. We have recently regraded a whole range of organisations down to V2. There will not be many large organisations in this country that are at V1 now. Most of them will be at V2. The sector is under significant financial pressure. There may be one or two that move from V1 to V2 in the future as well.
Q80 Chair: On the homelessness point, if a council came along to you and said, “We have our responsibilities to house homeless people, but this housing association has a large amount of stock in our area and they are not taking their responsibilities seriously and not providing any properties for us to allocate to homeless people”, you would have the powers to investigate and take action.
Jonathan Walters: We would have powers to investigate, yes.
Q81 Chair: What about to take action?
Jonathan Walters: As independent organisations, we can downgrade them. We can signal to the world, and ultimately we can take action against them if they are not doing what they should be doing.
Q82 Chair: What action can you take?
Jonathan Walters: We could appoint people to the board of the organisation. We could downgrade them. We could accept a voluntary undertaking. In the new regime, we can expect a performance improvement plan, where we require them to take certain actions in the future.
Q83 Chair: Everyone can welcome the audit as a first step, but we heard from Kwajo before that promises often do not turn into action. Are you going to repeat the audit in future years so that we can get an up-to-date analysis about what is changing, what is being done and whether things are improving?
Jonathan Walters: There is a wider piece that is not just the damp and mould piece, but is actually about the quality of the stock. We are already adding additional questions to our annual survey of providers about the quality of their stock, and we will look at that again, whether we go through the same process of writing to everybody in the same way or whether we collect more granular statistical information on a routine basis so that we can track it. This time, we wrote to everybody and they wrote back to us. I am not sure that will be the most efficient way in the future, but we will want to look at the data we collect and whether we can collect more data on issues like damp and mould and decent homes compliance.
Q84 Chair: It is also about collecting it in a way that is compatible and comparable between organisations and over time.
Jonathan Walters: Yes, over time and in public.
Chair: Thank you very much for coming in. We will probably see you again at some point in the future to see where progress has been made.
Witnesses: Baroness Scott of Bybrook OBE and Josh Goodman.
Q85 Chair: We now move to our final witness for today, Baroness Scott. This is your second visit to the Committee in fairly short order, so thank you very much for coming back as the Minister responsible for this area. It is a pleasure to have you here today. Just to follow up again on the challenge that Kwajo put out at the end, in the past there have been lots of promises and well-meaning commitments, but not much action. What is going to change?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: The Social Housing (Regulation) Bill will change a huge amount, as you have heard from both previous speakers. They are both looking forward to it. It is going to give the regulator a lot more powers. To answer the question, we intend to have the Bill through Royal Assent this summer, and it will then go into action from April next year.
Q86 Chair: Bills do not themselves change things, do they?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: No, but they can give powers, they can change the way particular people behave and they can put pressure on. The changes to the regulator’s powers will make a great deal of difference, together with everything that has been going on. We have not just stopped as a Department. The Secretary of State, as you know, has done a huge amount, working with the providers, challenging them and making sure that they do what they say they are going to do. We have looked at the Bill continually through its passage to see what more we can do.
Q87 Chair: It is not just dampness and mould we have heard about today. There are wider issues of housing disrepair and properties which, at the worst end, are not fit for human habitation, with a general problem of fitness in many of them. What is the Government’s approach to this? Can you convince us that you have a clear plan for the next few years that will sort out the totality of these different problems?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Yes, from the two sides. First of all, the Secretary of State and myself are absolutely sure that what has been happening cannot go on, and therefore we will continue to challenge the sector to ensure that every person in this country can have a safe, secure home to live in.
The regulator is going to be a key part of this. The regulator already collects data from all larger housing providers, which is about 90% of them, as to their compliance with the decent homes standard. In future, they are going to have the power to go much deeper into the granular detail of how these housing providers are delivering to that standard.
That is important, but more important also is that they have the power to issue unlimited fines. As you have heard, they can inspect and intervene in those cases where tenants’ lives are being put at risk because landlords, quite honestly, are dragging their feet in actioning repairs. In the very worst cases, we will make sure that they have the powers to take the properties away and put them under new management, so they will have teeth to do things and make things happen.
Q88 Chair: It is not just about powers; it is about money as well. What feedback are you getting from the Secretary of State writing to housing associations asking them to do returns about the problems they are facing, the problems with their housing stock and what is needed to put that right? Have you done any assessment yet of the likely costs of doing that?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We have done some rough assessments. We are working out it is just over £5,000 a property, but that is overall. Some will cost a lot less and some will cost a lot more, depending on what you are going to do. Yes, there is money required within the system. As you have probably heard, we have already started to look at giving some authorities, particularly the West Midlands and Manchester, £15 million each to start on those repairs. We and the Secretary of State will be looking at this further, and there will be more announcements in the future.
Q89 Chair: That is a certain amount of money, but it is not going to go very far at £5,000 a house. Talking to many councils and housing associations, they are saying that these are systemic problems in some estates. They are not odd repairs where you patch a leaky roof or whatever. They are probably going to need massive regeneration and possibly, as we heard from the regulator, demolition and rebuild.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Yes. Some will and some will not. While they are looking at all their stock, that is the information that we require, as Government, to look at what the issues are going to be for the sector, but some will not be expensive. Some will be much cheaper and we will look at that.
Q90 Chair: Are you going to produce a figure at the end of the day as to how much putting right these problems that have come out of the returns to the Department will cost?
Josh Goodman: As Jonathan from the regulator said earlier, the immediate exercise from the regulator in asking the landlords for their returns on damp and mould has looked at the prevalence and the speed of action from the landlords, rather than asking each landlord for an estimate of the cost. Where the cost comes in is that it is the responsibility of each landlord to be planning for that.
When the regulator currently asks large housing associations to make their estimates and financial forecasts, it insists that includes the landlord’s estimate of bringing all their homes up to the decent homes standard. We know that, from the latest set of returns, they were planning over £40 billion of investment over the next five years, which, by the way, was 16% more than the previous year. We are seeing a pattern of landlords planning to spend more on housing stock than they were before.
To your question of exactly how much of that is going to need to be spent on damp and mould, that will be for each landlord to assess and then for the regulator, when it inspects each landlord, to check that it is making appropriate provision.
Q91 Chair: It all seems a bit like passing it over to somebody else, whether to the housing providers or to the regulator. In the end, surely Government have a responsibility to make sure there is sufficient money to put houses into a decent homes standard and a proper state of repair. You cannot just pass it off, can you?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: No, it is the housing provider’s responsibility for their stock. It is their stock.
Q92 Chair: What happens if they do not have the money?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: The Government need to know and need to assess what they can do, if anything, to help them so that we can together get the stock across this country into a decent state.
Q93 Chair: If providers think that they cannot manage this in their existing business plans as a housing association or within their HRA limit as a council, they should come and knock on your door and say, “What are you going to do, Minister?”
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: No. We, as a Government, need to assess with them what is required. We need to challenge them to do as much as they can and we need to look at what is the shortfall, if there is a shortfall. That is the work that is being done at the moment.
Josh Goodman: I will just add two things. One is that we were clear, when we published the rent settlement for the coming financial year, that if landlords felt they could not afford that, they could come and apply to us for an exemption from the 7% rent cap. We have had no such applications so far.
Secondly, ultimately, if a landlord cannot afford to do up its stock, one option is mergers. The regulator has heard from the sector that it expects that there may be more mergers in the coming years, given the financial pressures that Jonathan has talked about. I am not saying that is necessarily the full answer. As the Minister says, we are looking to assess the scale of the problem.
Q94 Chair: Councils cannot merge, of course.
Josh Goodman: That is true.
Q95 Chair: If they do not have the resources in the HRA, they cannot merge.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: No, they cannot. They can if they want to through devolution, but that is a different subject.
Q96 Andrew Lewer: It has been a prevailing trend across the sector for a long time now that bigger is always better, and that mergers and ever more gargantuan organisations deliver a better service to local tenants. Certainly my experience over many years, having been a director for a housing association and council leader, is that it is often not the case that big housing associations that merge everything together provide a better service. Quite often, they end up with housing stock scattered all over the place and no point of reference for the tenants to get their problems sorted out. Is that always going to be the solution, or is there an opportunity for places to disaggregate their housing stock and have it in a more locally based platform as well?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: It is up to the local providers to do a business case as to what the best thing is for them. In some cases it will be to merge and in some cases it will not. I have not heard of them disaggregating, but I am sure that, if the business case is there, the regulator and ourselves would look at that.
Q97 Chair: Just going back to a problem, if you are going to get the case for regeneration and redevelopment of an estate at a significant scale, Homes England has some money to spend on housing projects, but it cannot spend if there are not any additional properties provided. If you take down 400 old concrete flats that are not great to live in and replace them with 360 modern properties, Homes England cannot help. Is it not time we got rid of that rule?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We are looking more and more in terms of what we can do to help fund and support housing providers to do exactly that. That is something the Government are looking at at the moment. I do not know whether Josh wants to say anything further on that, but we are looking at it because you are quite right that it is an issue.
Q98 Chair: Do we know how long the look-at will take?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: How long are you going to look at it?
Josh Goodman: How long are you going to look at it? We are looking at it.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We are looking at it.
Q99 Chair: Will you write to the Committee and let us know?
Josh Goodman: The Secretary of State said recently that he hoped to be able to say more in the coming weeks.
Q100 Chair: Right, so it is soon or shortly.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: In due course.
Q101 Chair: When will the new decent homes standard be published? Is that “in due course”?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We have already conducted the first phase, which involved talking to all sorts of tenants groups, landlords and other people like that. In August last year we launched another consultation, but that was particularly on decent homes standards in the private rented sector, so we stopped it in order to look at it not only in the social rented sector but also in the private rented sector.
At the moment, we are considering the second phase of responses. Further information will come forward about the timetable for updating that standard, but we want a coherent response to decent homes in this country, both from the private and socially rented sector.
It would be wrong to be looking just at the decent homes standard for the social rented sector. It is important that we just wait a little bit, look at this further consultation and look at the rented sector as a whole.
Q102 Chair: Will it be before the summer recess?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I cannot say. It depends on, I would assume, the timings of what is available in both Houses.
Q103 Nadia Whittome: Minister, we heard just now from housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa about some of the appalling conditions that tenants are living in. Where homes are found to be unfit, alternative accommodation obviously needs to be provided while that housing is remediated. How much alternative accommodation do you need to find?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Tenants who are living in unfit accommodation can already apply for rehousing, particularly if there is a welfare or disability need. There is not enough housing of any type in this country. We need to deal with that in so many ways.
Q104 Nadia Whittome: It sounds like you do not know the answer to that question. If you do not know how much alternative accommodation you need to find, is there any point in me asking what your plan is for finding it?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We know how much housing has particularly serious effects, particularly from damp and mould problems, but I do not have a figure as to exactly how many houses are required in order to move people out of those houses, because it will depend on whether those houses need to be empty in order to do the remediation work.
Josh Goodman: Just to add to that in terms of what we do know, the commission from the regulator to providers in November, which Jonathan from the regulator was talking about earlier, did not ask landlords to come back with a quantification of how much alternative accommodation they would need to provide.
We know that, as Jonathan said before, there will be a wide variety of types of fix. Lots of it will not require tenants to move out; some of it might, but we have not aggregated that up at a national level. It is, however, totally clear in the regulator’s current standards that it is the job of landlords to rehouse tenants, if needed, while works are being done.
Q105 Nadia Whittome: According to the most recent statistics from your Department, at the end of June 2022, 10,000 households were in B&B-style accommodation. How will you prevent people being put into unsuitable accommodation when so many are already in unsuitable accommodation?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We have to build more houses. There is no further answer to that other than we need more housing stock, particularly social housing now, as much as affordable housing. Obviously, as you move more people up through the system from social housing into affordable housing and their own housing, you release social housing. The biggest issue is that we do not have enough housing. That is why the Government at the moment are working on doing everything they can to encourage more building of social housing.
Q106 Andrew Lewer: Why have the Government dropped their housing target?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I honestly do not believe that the housing target is what is important. What is important through the levelling-up Bill is that we get a simpler system of local development plans where local people understand the necessity for housing in their communities and therefore put into their local plan the housing that is required across this country. That is what the levelling-up Bill will do. It will make it simpler for them to do it and it will encourage them to do it, because it is required.
Q107 Nadia Whittome: Minister, in June last year, the Government announced that it is their policy to extend right to buy to all tenants of private providers of social housing. Is that still the plan?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Yes, we would encourage anybody who can afford to own their own home to own their own home, whichever way they can.
Q108 Nadia Whittome: How are you going to ensure that those properties are replaced when the Government have no direct power over how housing associations build or replace properties?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: From the local authorities, we have given them the freedom to borrow.
Q109 Nadia Whittome: These are for housing association properties.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: You want housing association properties. Are you talking about the whole sector or just housing associations?
Q110 Nadia Whittome: I am talking about your Government’s policy to extend right to buy to all tenants of private providers of social housing.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: That is not what the first question was.
Nadia Whittome: No, that was definitely the question.
Josh Goodman: If I understood the question correctly, it is about the policy announced by the Prime Minister as of June last year about extending the right to buy to all housing association tenants, building on the pilots that have been done before.
The current Secretary of State for Levelling Up was extremely clear at the time and remains extremely clear that it is crucial that, if we do proceed with that, there must be not just one-for-one replacement of properties, but also like-for-like replacement, given that some of the findings we have started to see from the pilots that have happened to date show that it is a struggle even to get one-for-one replacement, let alone to get like-for-like. Like-for-like is stronger than one-for-one because it means not just a property for a property but a property of the same size and type.
Q111 Nadia Whittome: On that, how are you going to fully fund the one-for-one and like-for-like replacement?
Josh Goodman: That is something we are working towards.
Q112 Nadia Whittome: You do not know how you are going to fund it.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: This is not a policy that has been worked out and there are no further details on it at this time.
Q113 Nadia Whittome: The National Housing Federation says that pilots of the right-to-buy extension have shown that there is not enough money from sales to build new properties to replace those sold, so the result is a net loss of social housing. The truth is that this Government policy is going to make the shortage of social housing even worse.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: The reason you might do a pilot is to see what the effect is. If the effect is against what we want it to be, which is first of all that people can have the opportunity to own their home but not at the disadvantage of those people who need social housing, we will learn from those pilots. As we have said, we are continuing to look at this policy further.
Q114 Nadia Whittome: How confident are you in the financial position of housing associations and their capacity for building new homes?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: It is very difficult and challenging for housing associations because of two things. First of all, the issues of maintenance and making sure that we have decent homes are obviously causing some pressure on the system. Also, the whole economic situation at the moment is putting financial pressures on them, but we continue to make sure that it is a clear objective for them to be building more houses. The Government have money for them to build affordable housing anyway, so we will continue. As we move into a better economic situation, when they get their stock in order, then I am sure they are in the right place to be delivering those houses, but I cannot say it is easy for housing providers at this time.
Q115 Nadia Whittome: You would not say that you are confident in the financial position of housing associations to build new homes.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: It is difficult for them at the moment, but in the future it will be a lot easier for them. The Government will continue to look at how we will help them support that to be delivering the social housing that we need.
Josh Goodman: Just to add to that, it is clear that the sector is pivoting more and more of its spending towards the existing stock, which is what we would like to see, given some of the issues we have heard about today. We are not seeing a sector that is downing tools on supply at all. In the latest forecast that we had at the end of September, large housing associations were forecasting £17 billion of their own spending on new supply over the next 12 months, which is roughly in line with their forecasts for previous years, so we are not seeing a sector that, in aggregate, is planning to significantly reduce the amount of money it is going to spend on supply.
We should be clear, though, that that money buys less than it did before because of inflation, so the aggregation of the pressures on the sector, including wanting to spend more on supply as well as inflation, means that we may see less supply than we had before. At the moment, we are not forecasting a huge swing away.
Q116 Nadia Whittome: That is something that we discussed in the last session. You will pleased to know, Minister, that this is my final question. What assessment have you made of the impact of the requirement for net additional housing on the supply of homes for social rents?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We have not, as far as I know. This is something that we would expect the providers to look at in terms of their responsibility for what they require in their particular areas. It is not something that we have done or will do.
Q117 Nadia Whittome: You do not expect to do that either.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We do not expect to do that. We expect the housing providers to do that. That is how I understand the question.
Josh Goodman: If I understand the question correctly, why would the requirement for net additional housing through the affordable homes programme have an effect on the amount of social rent? One can buy social rent through acquisitions or regeneration as well as one could build social rent under the current net additional restriction on the AHP, so the restriction itself is unlikely to make a difference.
Q118 Nadia Whittome: Correct. A previous inquiry by the Committee showed that the requirement for net additional housing—if you are knocking down an estate, for example, you cannot rebuild the same amount; you have to rebuild more—can be a barrier to demolition and recreating estates, because the additional requirement cannot be met, so substandard housing is being left standing.
Josh Goodman: I can understand why the net additional restriction on the affordable homes programme would prevent money being spent on improving the quality or regenerating existing housing. On the particular question about whether it has an effect on the volume of social rent in the sector, I cannot see why it would have that effect, but it certainly does have an effect on the amount that is being spent on improving quality which, as the Minister said earlier, is something we are looking at.
Q119 Mrs Elphicke: Could I just clarify? I am not sure I fully followed what you were saying in relation to affordable housing new build. You seem to be saying that you are not expecting any significant change in provision over this next period.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: No. What I said was that the pressures about quality that the providers are quite rightly facing at the moment, and the economic situation that we are in, probably mean that we will plateau rather than increase, but I can see us coming out of that as soon as things get better.
Q120 Mrs Elphicke: It is probably Mr Goodman’s comments on that. Thank you, Minister. I have on my screen the housing report revealing a 22% decrease in the number of affordable homes to September 2022. The regular housing report says that we can expect, in addition to a one-tenth drop in relation to housing association output, a sharper decrease given the very factors that the Minister has outlined. I was confused by the suggestion that you thought we were going through a period where we would not see a decline in the number of new homes being brought forward.
Josh Goodman: To clarify, we are not seeing a huge swing away from the amount that landlords intend to spend on supply. As I said before, that same amount of spending will buy less because of inflation, so it is reasonable to assume that we will see some fall in the number of new affordable homes built in the coming years compared to recent years.
Q121 Mrs Elphicke: If I follow, it is not just some fall. These are quite considerable forecasted falls that we are seeing in this next period. I am just picking it up because Nadia Whittome’s line of questioning was very clear. She was asking about the position in relation to whether there will be a sufficiency of new homes brought forward, not about the value of how much is bought. Is it not the case that it is expected that there is going to be a considerable fall-away in the number of homes delivered at the moment? That is what Homes England is saying and that is what is being reported.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: They are forecasted but, as we have said, the money that the providers are putting into the system is not going down. The economic situation will get better, and we are seeing through the building sector that the cost of building is going back down again. There are people around now who want to build, and so we would hope that those two will plateau out and we will not see the forecasts that are being put forward. We do not know what will happen in the future, but we will do everything as a Government to support the building of the social housing sector. We will keep an eye on it as we do. We continually are working with the sector.
There is also an issue about creativity. We have talked about how, rather than building new houses, we might be able to bring other housing stock back into the situation. Housing providers are very creative. The good ones are creative and they will find ways of producing. If they cannot afford to build, then they will look at other ways of providing more stock.
Q122 Ian Byrne: Minister, it is very welcome that you are talking about social housing and the need for the increase. You touched on the right-to-buy pilots and the information that is going to come back from them. If the information comes back from the right-to-buy pilots that right to buy is detrimental to the social housing stock and then the replacement, are we going to review right to buy?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: If there are pilots we will always review. I would not say we would review the right to buy, but we will review the whole process and how it is done.
Q123 Ian Byrne: You will review it if it is detrimental.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Yes, I am not saying we will stop that.
Q124 Ian Byrne: That is fine. That is good for the record. I am just going to touch on tenant stigma now. Awaab Ishak’s parents made their belief clear that, shamefully, racial prejudice played a role in the housing association not taking their concerns seriously. Would you agree with that? How widespread is racism and tenant stigma?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I know that the accusation of racism came into the Rochdale case and Awaab’s very sad death. That was one of the most disturbing parts of the coroner’s report. It is interesting. We have looked at the data. There is not a lot of clear data on this issue, but in our residents’ survey in 2022, the overall satisfaction was most definitely lower in ethnic minorities than it was in white ethnic groups. It was not a lot lower. It was 57% against 69%, so there is obviously an issue in there if you read the statistics.
Funnily enough, when it came to the English Housing Survey 2019-20, that was not as clear cut at all. White social renters were more likely to say they were treated worse than people of other races by council housing departments and housing associations, and that was 14% compared to ethnic communities of 9%. We do not have the best data on this to say whether it is correct, but any racism or discrimination within this sector is unacceptable and we will do everything we can to get rid of it. The housing regulator, as they get the new powers through the Bill, can and will be looking at these issues, and it will be part of what they will ask tenants about.
Q125 Ian Byrne: I welcome your words and what you have said. You are spot on. You have touched on what the regulator is going to be able to do, but how do we stamp this out? It is a cancer within what we are talking about, if that element of racism and stigma has caused a child to die. You touched on other elements of demographics. Is there a stigma attached from people who should be overseeing this process regarding social housing and council tenants? How do we stamp that out if we do not have the data? What are we going to do as a Department?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We will have more evidence once the Bill goes through. When the regulator has the power to have regular tenant surveys and they are listening to what they are saying, if they see any particular housing provider or area where tenants are saying this is an issue, they will have the powers to stamp it out. Within the housing associations, they are now going to have to have a conduct and competence skill within the organisation. That means that we have to have a different culture within our housing associations to understand this, look at it and know how to treat everybody in a proper way. The Bill will give the powers to deal with this.
Q126 Ian Byrne: You are absolutely spot on that a change of culture is needed within housing organisations, but we also talk about builders. We have seen this with Grenfell. We have talked about a change of culture. How do we make that change of culture happen and what teeth do we need? I have a great fear about the complete lack of accountability for people who are chairs of boards where 80% of the housing has mould. It is a different subject, but you have companies supplying substandard cladding, which led to many deaths. There always seems to be a complete lack of accountability for the people who are the decision-makers here. How do we make sure that they are held accountable? What do we need?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: What we need, first of all, is to be able to easily identify it and to have a regulator that can identify it but then has the teeth to say to the provider, “You have to stamp this out. Your culture has to change. If it does not, first of all, we will fine you. If that does not work, then the ultimate is that we will take the stock off you”. You have to have that power to do that in order to start to change this, because it is totally unacceptable, particularly in a sector that deals with very vulnerable people who need support, not any form of racism or stigma. I believe that the Bill that is going through will give the powers to the regulator to do that, and that will start to change the culture as we need it to be changing.
Q127 Ian Byrne: When we are talking about the change of culture, it is obviously about ensuring that residents’ voices are heard. The Government have run several awareness-raising campaigns with social housing residents to give them that conduit and voice. Hopefully, there are more of these planned as well. How are we going to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: The way we measure the effectiveness of the campaigns is that we have an evaluation process and a framework that is published on gov.uk. We can do that, but for me the real test of it is going to be that, as we go forward into future years, first of all, the ombudsman will not be required quite as much, because tenants are being listened to by their housing providers; the regulator is listening to the tenants and ensuring that there are no big issues about any stigma of any type within these organisations. Training is all very good and we can evaluate that first training, but the proof of the training is that you have a tenant group that has a voice and knows how to use that voice.
Q128 Ian Byrne: Just following on from that, we have the Social Housing Quality Resident Panel. Would you consider putting that on a longer-term or even permanent footing? Also, there is a fear about the diversity of those panels and ensuring that we have all voices. A lot of the time we have people here who come before us from disabled groups who feel as though they are completely ignored and isolated. How do we ensure that everybody has the ability to go on that panel and has the option and the voice?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We did not start the panel until November last year. The panel has met a couple of times and there are 250 on the panel. They are very positive about what they are discussing and they are very happy with it. We cannot say how long it will go on for. We need to look at it and talk to the people on that panel about how they wish it to go forward. It is very early days for thinking about the future.
As far as the background and the diversity of the panel is concerned, I have a few things that might be interesting to the Committee. 43% are male and 52% are female, so there are more women on it than men, and 5% say they prefer not to say; and 80.4% are housing association members and 19.6% are local authority. I went to the first one and I can tell you that it is fairly split across all the regions; they come from all parts of the country. Some 36% are disabled, 23% are not disabled and 41% said they prefer not to say; 53% are white, 6% are mixed and multiple ethnics, 6% are Asian-British, 8% are black, African, Caribbean and black British, 5% are other ethnic groups and 22% preferred, again, not to say. All that data is on gov.uk. If we are talking about diversity, it is as diverse as we can make it.
Ian Byrne: Thank you for that. That was a good and comprehensive answer.
Q129 Andrew Lewer: The dismissal of Awaab Ishak’s family’s complaints and the picture of disrepair across social housing that is starting to emerge has some echoes of Grenfell and its aftermath. This Committee has done a lot of work on building safety over more than five years now. One of our main findings has been the lack of data collection being a serious impediment to any progress. Can you and the Department now commit to regularly monitoring, and publishing in full, data on all buildings that have been found to have damp and mould and other types of disrepair so that you can set a standard for the data that must be published on it?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: This is the type of data that should be collected by the providers themselves. We do not have any plans to collect national data on it. It is not the job of Government to do that. The housing providers should be collecting that data.
Q130 Andrew Lewer: Would you require a standard of them in terms of collecting, such as defining what is and is not mould? Some houses have a bit of mould and others have the profound problems that have caused the issues that we are discussing today.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Yes, I would expect them to let us know the level of risk that is on those or to tell their housing providers, who should know the level of risk, because there will be some minor mould and damp. Having talked to housing providers, some of the mould and damp is much more difficult to get rid of. Yes, you would expect them to have all that data within the housing provider.
Q131 Andrew Lewer: Have you been able to make an assessment of the scale of investment that is going to be needed to remediate and retrofit social housing because of the problems? We have had building safety and fire safety issues emerge, and obviously we have now had fatal problems with mould emerging as well. Is there any assessment of how we are going to get this sorted out?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Until we have more details, it will be very difficult to assess it. We have done some very basic assessments that give us an average of nearly £6,000 per property, but that is very basic. Until we have all the information of the levels of issue, then it will be very difficult. There are also the costs as well, as we have heard from the Committee, in terms of how many people need to be rehoused if there are major issues in some groups of buildings or individual buildings.
Q132 Andrew Lewer: There is likely to be a clearer picture emerging as these inquiries carry on.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: There will be a clearer picture emerging as we move forward, yes.
Q133 Kate Hollern: How much confidence do you have in providers’ complaints-handling processes? Do you agree with the Committee’s recommendations on the housing ombudsman’s complaint handling code?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: There is a lot more to be done. It is not working well at the moment, to be honest. That is why we are doing what we agreed that we would do through the Bill, and that is to make the ombudsman’s service stronger and the ability to access the ombudsman’s service much better.
Also, the fact that the regulator has now become not just a financial regulator but a consumer regulator allows complaints that are not being listened to by the provider to be escalated much more easily if they are endemic in a particular housing provider. Obviously, the regulator will not be interested in individual issues of complaint, but when they are seeing, through tenant satisfaction surveys, that that particular provider is not answering the complaints fast enough and acting upon those, more can be done, and they have the teeth to deal with it.
At the moment, no. We know, from Rochdale and from other cases that have come forward—they are in my inbox and, I am sure, your inbox—that many providers are not taking them seriously.
Q134 Kate Hollern: Just going back to Rochdale, you will have heard the regulator say that his grading, which was the highest one, was due to conversations with the provider. How can we make sure that residents’ complaints get through and are managed and recorded accurately?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: This all comes down to the competence, the conduct and the culture of these organisations. That is exactly why we have this Bill: so that the regulator can ensure that these providers are behaving appropriately, and they have the skills and management within those organisations to make sure that the tenant’s voice is listened to. If it is not listened to, the regulator needs to have the powers to ensure that that provider either listens or, in the last instance, it no longer is a provider. We have to do that. We cannot have a sector that is behaving and not listening, like this sector has not done over the last I do not how many years.
Kate Hollern: Too long.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Too long.
Q135 Kate Hollern: Since October, landlords have had to inform residents about the housing ombudsman from the first stage of a complaint rather than at the final response. Have the Government been monitoring the information provided?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I think we have done some figures on that. Do you have those figures?
Josh Goodman: I do not have them to hand.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: There has been a change. Since the changes that you are talking about, there has been an increase in the number of cases to the ombudsman, which is good, but that obviously puts pressure on the ombudsman because there are going to be more cases. That change has meant that people felt more comfortable to go straight to the ombudsman with their complaints. Do we have a figure? I thought it had gone up.
Josh Goodman: Yes, we have the statistics. The number of average complaints in Q2, which was the quarter before the democratic filter was removed, was 303 per month. Since the filter has been removed, it has gone up to 476 per month. There has been quite a large jump.
Q136 Kate Hollern: What do you think the impact has been of that increase? If the ombudsman is getting a lot more complaints, how do we know how they are managed and responded to in a timely fashion?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We are encouraging them, and they are beginning to appoint more officials to the ombudsman’s service. The challenge is going to be that that service is going to cost more. We are giving them the ability now to charge more in order to pay for that.
Josh Goodman: I will just add to that. The ombudsman today published a consultation on raising its fee from £4.60 per unit to £5.90 per unit, which is more than it had anticipated, partly because we, in conversations with the ombudsman, have been encouraging it to raise its fee as high as it, frankly, needs in order to get the staff it needs to make sure it is meeting the volume of complaints. It is consulting on a budget for next year, which will take it from £18 million of spend this year to £32 million next year, which gives you a sense of the pace of the increase.
We need to be honest, though, that the pace of the increase, both in spending and in the number of staff it has, may not keep up in the short term with the rate at which complaints are going up. The demand for the ombudsman service is shooting up. Over the medium term, that has to balance out because the ombudsman will just keep expanding and recruiting until it balances out. At the moment, we do see a challenge for the short term.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Nobody wants to have to go to the ombudsman, but it is a positive move forward in the fact that people, from the campaigns we have had, are going there; they know to go there and they are using the service. With them using the service on their individual personal cases and the regulator dealing with the systemic issues, those are the two things that the Government want to do to make the sector change, and change for the better.
Q137 Kate Hollern: Your campaigns are obviously having some effect, and it has increased numbers, but I am concerned that Josh feels as though the ombudsman will not actually be able to cope with the increase in complaints. Could that mean we are left in situations where people’s serious cases are not being dealt with because it does not have enough resources, enough manpower and maybe enough powers to act a bit more quickly?
Josh Goodman: I just want us to be up front and honest with the Committee that the rate of increase in demand is so great. We talk to the ombudsman very regularly about this question of, “Do you have the resources you need to deal with this demand?” I want to be honest with the Committee that, in the short term, the constraint on the ombudsman’s ability to deal with this range of cases is just the pace at which it can recruit. The important thing there is to preserve the quality of the ombudsman’s decisions. The ombudsman cannot just recruit anybody and put them straight in to it.
The only constraint at the moment is the pace at which the ombudsman can recruit people and train them up. It is planning, and it is consulting today on a very aggressive expansion for next year, following a very aggressive expansion this year. In answer to your original question, which was about can demand meet supply, in the short term, there is a risk.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I would also hope that any housing provider that knows that they have a number of cases going through the ombudsman should be looking at those cases in the time. They do not have to stop, which is something that I have to say happened in Rochdale. We know, once they went to their lawyers, the housing providers stopped. It is important that housing providers keep an eye on that. I would hope they can sort some of the complaints out before it even gets to the final stages of the ombudsman. That would be the ideal.
Q138 Kate Hollern: Perhaps resources should have gone in alongside the changes to powers. If we are saying that the ombudsman now has a huge increase in cases, but, even in the short term, does not have the resources to deal with it, could we end up in similar situations, where people’s concerns are not being addressed because of the backlog at the ombudsman?
Josh Goodman: In recent years, at no stage have we discouraged the ombudsman from raising its fee as high as it feels it needs to to meet demand. In our regular conversations with the ombudsman, our conversations are always in the direction of, “Do you have enough resources, and do you need to raise your fee higher?” rather than the other way around.
Q139 Kate Hollern: Maybe I am not explaining it properly. You are saying the ombudsman can increase his fees. He has had a surge in the number of complaints, but at this stage, because of training, and whatever else, he does not have the resources to deal with them. We are just creating a backlog of complaints.
Josh Goodman: I am certainly not saying that I know he will not have enough resources to deal with them. I just want to be honest with the Committee that there is some constraint on how quickly the ombudsman can recruit up qualified staff. It is not the case that we can put in money tomorrow and that will instantly mean that its resources expand to fill demand.
Q140 Chair: We discussed earlier the problem of some lawyers touting for business. They are telling tenants that they are not merely going to get the repairs sorted out; they will get them compensation. Can we just make it clear that, if a tenant has a concern about this, the complaints process that ends up with the ombudsman can also deal with a tenant’s concern about inadequate compensation as well as an inadequate response to the repair in the first place?
Josh Goodman: Could you expand on the question?
Q141 Chair: Yes. A tenant has a problem with their landlord. The repair is not carried out to a tenant’s satisfaction. There may be damage to property. The landlord does not offer proper compensation for that. If the tenant lodges a complaint, they can have that complaint put into the complaints process and taken to the ombudsman, not merely about the repair, but if they believe the compensation has been inadequate as well. It is that aspect of it.
Josh Goodman: What is the question?
Q142 Chair: If a tenant has a concern about a repair not being done and they are lodging a complaint, they may think that they need compensation. Their decorations may have been damaged. They may have even had an awful home to live in for a period of time. For that second part, they should not have to go off to a lawyer to get redress. Can they get redress through the complaints process, which may end up with the ombudsman?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: My understanding of the ombudsman is it is about process, not about compensation. Where the compensation side comes in, I do not know.
Josh Goodman: The ombudsman can and does award compensation to tenants.
Chair: Yes.
Josh Goodman: I worry that I am not following the question.
Q143 Chair: If the landlord says, “We are going to give you £200 compensation”, and the tenant thinks it should be more, the ombudsman told us, in response to our report, that it has unlimited compensation powers. Can the tenant lodge a complaint about what they believe is inadequate compensation and eventually take that to the ombudsman, if they feel the amount offered is unfair and unreasonable?
Josh Goodman: My suspicion is yes, but I would like to go away and check that and write to the Committee.
Q144 Chair: It would avoid it getting to the lawyers then, with all the problems.
Eighteen social landlords have been named and shamed. What effect has that had?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: It is interesting. We heard from our first speaker how naming and shaming was working. I agree with him. If organisations are not providing what they should be providing and people are suffering, in one way or another, from that, it is quite right they should be named and shamed, because others will watch that and they will not want to go down the same route.
I agree. It is just one tool in the armour to make housing providers think about what their responsibilities are and deliver what they are supposed to deliver.
Q145 Chair: You launched the professionalism review a year ago. Where has that got to?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: We agreed with the Grenfell inquiry that we would not publish until they had seen it. At the moment, it is still with the inquiry.
Q146 Chair: Is there any timeline?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I have not had any timelines from the inquiry on this. Have you heard anything? It depends on when the inquiry makes its next report. We will keep the Committee updated on that.
Q147 Chair: A lot of the answers so far today have been about the new powers for the social housing regulator. We all look forward to them coming in and being used. Why do you not require all social housing providers to register with the regulator?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: The ones that do not are so small. They are areas like small village almshouses and things like that. It would not be necessary to pressurise them to go through the processes that would have to be.
Josh Goodman: I would only add that the Committee did make a recommendation about this, which we have looked at, as we have with all the Committee’s recommendations. We are very confident, based on what we know about how the Office for National Statistics classifies the sector, that, were we to introduce mandatory registration, that would re-classify the housing association sector on to the public sector’s books. As the Committee will know, that might eventually result in constraints on the spending of housing associations, which would have an impact on the outcomes we all want for social housing supply and quality.
Q148 Chair: It is not about size then.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: It is about both, looking at both issues.
Q149 Chair: How many providers are not registered?
Josh Goodman: We do not know precisely how many are not registered. Of those we do know about, we only know of one largeish provider, which is NHS Homes, which has 9,500 properties. Of the others we know about, there are a very large number of almshouses—around 1,300—which covers about 18,000 dwellings, and four co-operatives, which have about 10,000 tenants between them. Those are the ones we know of. There may be more.
Q150 Chair: All those tenants are without the protection of the regulator.
Josh Goodman: They have the same protections as tenants in the private rented sector. Where their landlords are registered with the Charity Commission charities, they have that protection as well.
Q151 Chair: We will not go down that route as to whether that is effective. Is there nothing you can do to encourage or persuade them? Name and shame them.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: For the larger ones, possibly yes. We may need to look at them again. Having dealt with almshouses for many years, I am not sure that very small almshouses, with three or four almshouses in a village, are the issue. That is my opinion, but the Committee has a good case on the bigger ones that we should be encouraging them. I am not quite sure why they do not. By being a regulated housing provider, you would think that they would want to because of what they would get out of it. There always has to be encouragement, has there not?
Q152 Chair: Yes. It would be helpful if the Government indicated that was their preferred position and tried to move in that direction. When are we going to get a response to our report?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I can only apologise. I am really sorry. I did not want to come here because we had not given you a report. We can only apologise. Could you just bear with us until the end of the month? The Social Housing (Regulation) Bill was going to be quite a small Bill, but a lot has happened in the sector in the time it went through the Lords and then into the Commons, particularly over Awaab. That highlighted the Government’s need to look at what else it could do and use the Bill as an opportunity to look at other things that it might do. That is what we are doing. We are particularly reflecting the campaign on Awaab’s law, because we would miss a trick if we moved on and had to put another piece of legislation.
There are a number of things in there that we are looking at, and it will come very soon to the Commons for Report at the end of the month, I think. Is it the end of the month?
Josh Goodman: I think so.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: I think so, possibly. Who knows? Very soon. I keep getting dates and they get changed. The important thing is that, in terms of all the issues that we know about now, which were not so important or were not on our radar as much as they are now, when the Bill started, it would be wrong of us not to use the Bill for what we can to improve the sector at this time.
Q153 Chair: We will get the report at the same time as you indicate what changes you might want to make to the Bill.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: Yes, because we are looking at your report at the same time. That has been part of our thinking as well. Hopefully, it will be a much better and more positive report than it might have been.
Chair: Thank you very much, Minister and Josh, for coming in. That has been a useful contribution. There are obviously quite a few issues we will be wanting to keep an eye on, because, in the end, coming back to our initial conversations, it is about action at the end and outcomes. It is not about promises. That is what we want to see.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook: You are right.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed. That brings us to the end of our public proceedings for today.