Has social housing changed since Grenfell?

Nine years ago, a different government promised reflection and transformative policies for social housing tenants. But did it come to anything?

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“Long after the TV cameras have gone and the world has moved on, let the legacy of this awful tragedy be that we resolve never to forget these people and instead to gear our policies and our thinking towards making their lives better and bringing them into the political process.”

So ended Theresa May’s sombre statement to Parliament on the morning of 22 June 2017, just over a week after flames ripped through Grenfell Tower.

By ‘these people’ she meant social housing tenants who felt alienated from the political process.

A few months later, her government launched a Social Housing Green Paper which was supposed to represent the first step on the path to delivering this promise.

The paper would prove a “wide-ranging, top to bottom review” of the issues facing the social housing sector, said then-housing secretary Sajid Javid, and would “kick off a nationwide conversation on social housing – what works and what doesn’t work, what has gone right and what has gone wrong”.

Nine years on, all of this feels a very long time ago. With Brexit, the pandemic and endless political turmoil pushing it down the agenda the green paper’s journey to white paper, then bill, then act took six years and three prime ministers.

The final upshot was a new regime of consumer regulation covering social landlords which came into force in April 2024. This new regime means social landlords are graded on the services they provide to tenants - and required to report across a number of key areas, using standardised metrics to measure satisfaction with services. It also introduced some new requirements for professional qualifications among housing managers.

There have been other changes. To the new consumer regime of regulation, we can add a far more muscular Housing Ombudsman service which has taken few prisoners in its investigation of complaint handling. New legislation on decency standards (while not a direct response to Grenfell) place a much higher standard on social landlords to deal with emergency hazards promptly. Awaab’s Law - which followed the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale - set 24-hour timescales for investigating and making safe emergency hazards, and 10 day maximum periods to investigate damp and mould.

On paper, this may look like progress. But viewed from another angle it can quickly feel like very little has changed.

Headlines about the struggles experienced by social housing tenants and the sometimes horrible legacy of decades of underinvestment in their homes remain prominent. The death of Awaab Ishak, the discovery of the remains of Sheila Seleoane, and a drumbeat of reporting in the local press, ITV News and from activists led by Kwajo Tweneboa for a time made this feel like a national crisis.

Stories of damp and mould, leaks, flooding, windows falling out of their frames or heating systems failing remain common complaints. Talk to many of the people stuck in these properties, and you hear a clear echo of the story Grenfell residents told - a dismissive landlord hiding behind a wall of bureaucracy, a lack of care and a feeling of powerlessness when the landlord fails to act.

So, as we approach the ninth anniversary of the Grenfell fire, has social housing really changed? And if not, what is holding back progress?

“I think that it’s a mixed picture, to be honest with you,” says Joseph Jones, interim coordinator at the London Tenants Federation, and a social housing tenant in Camden when asked. “I think social housing tenants on the whole have not really seen any difference. Promises have been made by various governments, but we haven’t really seen them carried out. The regulations are good on paper, but they don’t have enough teeth to really make a difference.”

This is a familiar criticism of the reforms. A social landlord may get through its consumer grading review, but still be failing some residents, or whole groups of them. Average satisfaction scores sit around the low 70% mark. Higher than 80% is seen as impressive. Even at these landlords, that’s a lot of unhappy tenants. Complaint handling appears to a major issue, with the sector’s average score a pitiful 36%.

The Ombudsman, meanwhile, has done some impressive work on individual cases, but is slow by its nature and faces a huge workload. Compensation of a few hundred pounds several years after the event can feel a weak response compared to the scale of the problems some tenants face. And even more muscular laws like the emergency hazard requirements under Awaab’s Law depend on your access to a lawyer, and the quality of them (the zone has been flooded with ‘no win, no fee’ chancers who can make the situation worse).

“The answer to this question [has anything changed since Grenfell] starts with listening to the tenants and residents,” says Suz Muna, secretary of the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC) - a campaign group set up by the trade union Unite’s housing worker’s branch. “If they’re saying nothing has changed, it’s because nothing has changed.

“That raises the question of why are people not feeling the difference, despite new legislation coming into play. There are two reasons - one is enforcement of the rules, and the other is that tenants are not truly empowered.”

“You can put up all the legislation you want if you don’t make it possible for the victims to be able to enforce that legislation in any sphere, then that legislation is just pointless. because the people who most need that legislation are the people who have the least power most of the time,” adds Muna. “There is still very little legal aid for housing, so people cannot afford to get lawyers.”

There is a danger, though, of being too dismissive of the new regulatory regime. It may not have the immediate kick that some want to see, but the changes it brings about were always likely to be longer-term and more subtle.

Some large London boroughs and housing associations with reputations for poor maintenance have fallen foul of the regime since its introduction. Many are now working through plans agreed with the regulator to step up their handling of core service areas like building safety, damp and mould and complaints. These plans can force renewed investment and changed procedures. It sharpens focus at a senior level.

“The fact that people talk about [consumer standards] at senior levels and around the board table is important, it sets the tone for the business,” says Matthew Bailes, chief executive of SettleParadigm Housing. “In particular, questions like do you know the quality of your assets? Have you got a grip on the compliance issues? Do you know your residents and what they think about your services? Those three questions, which are at the heart of a lot of these inspections, they’re definitely, definitely much more prominent around the board table.”

This feeds slow change - which is all a regulatory system can be expected to deliver with its scale compared to the size of the sector.

“There’s an expectation management bit that we’ve all failed at, because I think when it [the Grenfell fire] happened, the shock was so tremendous, everybody thought it could be an instant change,” says Fiona Fletcher Smith, chief executive of L&Q. “But we didn’t get ourselves into that state overnight, and we’re not getting ourselves out of it overnight either. It is a slow process.”

She says that changes to how her organisation spends and prioritises its resources have taken place over the last nine years.

L&Q turns over £1.1bn a year - the bulk of it coming from rents and service charges paid by residents. In the past it plunged a lot of this money into new development, and would have been willing to cut maintenance budgets to ensure development plans stood up financially. Now, it has reversed this position - development funding is ring-fenced, it can’t suck money away from other parts of the business.

“What I found when I started at L&Q is that we were using maintenance and big planned maintenance as the balancing item on our budgets,” she says. “The change we’ve made is that the development program is completely discreet as a budget. We will not subsidise development from the mainstream repairs, maintenance or planned maintenance funding. That just can’t happen now.”

L&Q has had work to do on this - in 2023, it was sternly criticised by the Housing Ombudsman for having “consistently failed” in areas such as complaint handling and repairs, after reviewing 103 cases between 2019 and 2022. Fletcher Smith has since been leading a major improvement and investment strategy to turn this around.

Sceptical as some might be of warm words, they are backed up by finance. L&Q has a £3bn investment programme. The social houisng sector as a whole spends far, far more on existing homes now than it did before Grenfell.

Housing associations spent £10bn on maintenance and major planned repairs in 2024/5, a staggering rise from the £3.2bn spent in 2017, when political pressure was about reducing expenditure on existing homes and government cuts had pushed housing providers to drop or pause investments in their existing stock.

Bailes reflects that the major challenge for the housing sector remains the actual hard graft and complexity of good property management.

“There definitely has been a shift [since Grenfell] both in terms of caring about [services], and the time and money that’s spent looking at whether the services are right and the assets are right,” he says. “My own view is that there’s still some way to go, and some of that is not so much whether the will is there, but whether the competence is there and the money is there to do it properly.”

He feels that this is sometimes missed, both by government and the wider conversation about social housing reform.

“By and large, most of the big problems are to do with assets not being of the right standard, and that’s what residents consistently care about the most, which is not surprising,” he says. “I think that still feels like a work in progress to me, as does the competence and grip of things like data and data analytics to get underneath the skin of problems that are emerging.”

New professional standards for social housing managers around competence and conduct are “not a bad thing”, he adds, but don’t help address an issue which is much more technical and fundamental.

“For some of the organisations who have got into trouble with the new regulator, it’s very basic stuff: the data being wrong and not doing fire risk assessments or electrical checks - basic compliance stuff is missing,” he says. “That’s asset management and property management, not housing management - and I’m not sure there’s been enough focus on how we as a sector change that and get that right.”

The book Middle Ground by Joe Carpenter (review coming next week) tells a damning story of this absence of competence in running a repairs operation, as well as the impact of stigma and penny-pinching on the services tenants received.

This was embedded very deeply in some of the teams and contractors responsible and requires a turnaround which is more technical in nature than legal responsibilities and bigger budgets. The question is failure to manage contractors, to plan works, to properly investigate. Awaab’s Law - which places an emphasis on investigations and making safe - is at best a sticking plaster here. These jobs often come unstuck in finding the right long-term fix, not the initial investigation.

There is more, though, to social housing reform than budgets and regulatory plans.

A critical problem which the Grenfell evidence exposed was the powerlessness of residents and resident groups. Grenfell Tower’s residents were highly organised, efficient and creative campaigners - who engaged unions, local councillors and MPs in their battle with the landlord. Both an action group of tenants and a leaseholder group held their landlord to account.

But they had no power to be listened to. If the landlord, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its manager, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Managment Organisation, wanted to ignore them - they could and did.

Ed Daffarn, who lived in Grenfell Tower and escaped the fire, had been one of the tenants who raised these concerns. He feels social landlords still have a major reluctance to engage with residents they don’t like.

“It’s still the case today that social housing providers are only really happy to engage with the residents that they like, the residents they find non-threatening – who are kind of biddable, that they can manage and they know aren’t going to cause trouble for them,” he said in an interview with Inside Housing, published today.

Powerlessness is an inherent, systemic problem in social housing driven first by its economics. Tenants have no choice in their landlord, and no ability to move to a different service provider. Landlords, meanwhile, have a virtually guaranteed income stream and an endless flow of people who want and need their homes. This means the consumer power and commercial accountability for failures which drives a focus on service in other parts of the economy is absent. Add in the class and race elements that exist in social housing, particularly in London, and you have a huge power imbalance every time the landlord and tenant speak.

“As a customer, I can go and shop somewhere else [but] I can’t change my landlord. I can move jobs much more easily than I can move home,” says Muna, of the Social Housing Action Campaign.

Despite all the changes introduced since Grenfell, this question of power has not been addressed. Resident groups still have to ask their landlords for recognition, there is no power to force them to engage as is used - say - to require bosses to recognise and engage with trade unions.

“One of the things that I’m constantly conscious of, as chief executive is that powerlessness that residents can feel,” says Fletcher Smith. “The power imbalance is always going to be there. It’s how you mitigate against that, by genuinely regarding residents as the main reason you’re there. The big thing for me is really about listening, transparency, and empathy, and that’s where a lot of us have been trying to get to.”

She adds that there is still “loads of work to do” - particularly on transparency, where systems do not always support the desire to be more open.

For Jones, from the London Tenants Federation, he says that much depends on which social landlord the tenant is dealing with.

“I get reports from places like Lambeth which say that there is no difference to how it was before. On the other hand, the interactions that I’ve had with Camden Council as my landlord have generally been better than before, so they are now more responsive and their method of dealing with you has certainly improved,” he says.

And then there is another element of the Grenfell story - disability discrimination. The victims of the fire were disproportionately disabled residents of the tower and their relatives who stayed with them. The evidence some of those who survived gave to the inquiry painted a deeply troubling picture of how the needs of disabled residents were forgotten - not just during the fire but in the years before. They were left as prisoners in their own homes when the lifts broke down, and received little empathy or support from their landlord.

Steps towards providing emergency evacuation plans for disabled residents have been belatedly introduced, but have been widely criticised by disability rights groups for being light-touch and containing little that will actually help people evacuate a building in a fire.

“Grenfell was my political awakening, because I’m in the same situation,” says Adam Gabsi, who is chair of the deaf and disabled people’s organisation Inclusion London. He is a social tenant who lives in a building which has had fire safety issues and uses a wheelchair for mobility.

“It’s actually getting worse,” he says. “We’re currently on day number six where the lifts are not working properly. We had 64 days in 2022, 42 days in 2023. So essentially they’re leaving disabled people trapped in the house.”

Despite a requirement to provide residential PEEPS, he does not believe his social landlord has offered them to all the disabled residents in his building. The building has one evacuation chair which firefighters can use - located behind a code-locked door. But the number of key safes outside the building indicate a far higher number of people who have visiting carers.

“Landlords have a duty of care that they’re not fulfilling,” Gabsi says. “If we’re a day late with the rent, the housing association will be on the phone. But when the lifts are broken, it’s very difficult to get in contact with anyone, so where’s the priority here?”

Overall, it would be wrong to say that the Grenfell fire has had no impact on social housing. “I think it [the fire] had a profound effect on me, and I think it had a profound effect on quite a lot of people who work in the sector,” says Bailes. “It made people ask, how did we - social housing providers set to help people on low incomes get decent housing and improve public health - end up housing people in what were patently unsafe conditions?”

But for too many of those at the sharp end of a system which still too frequently goes wrong, this change will be hard to see.

“If Grenfell was meant to be the thing that saw social housing providers starting to treat their tenants with respect and with dignity, the Social Housing Bill has failed,” adds Daffarn. “Whether it’s on a micro level or a macro level, residents are not being heard, they’re not being respected, and I think that is a great detriment to the well-being of how people live in social housing. If you’re not having your voice heard, then no one’s going to act for you.”

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