Social housing should be safe, secure and well maintained. If you have an issue with your landlord, it’s now easier to make things right.
The Charter says every resident should expect to:
- Be safe in their home
- Know how their landlord is performing
- Have their complaints dealt with promptly and fairly
- Be treated with respect, backed by a strong consumer regulator for tenants
- Have their voice heard by their landlord
- Have a good quality home and neighbourhood to live in
- Be supported to take their first step to ownership
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The government is already taking action to achieve the aims sets out in the Charter for Social Housing Residents. This includes:
- Allowing for residents to take complaints directly to the Housing Ombudsman Service without delay – by removing the need to go to your MP, local councillor or tenants’ panel first and to wait 8 weeks after completing your landlord’s process
- Making smoke alarms mandatory in all social homes, and carbon monoxide alarms mandatory in all social homes with a gas supply
- Launching the Social Housing Quality Resident panel to bring together residents from across England to share their views with the government on our approach to driving up the quality of housing
- Publishing new tenant satisfaction measures from the regulator to make landlord performance more visible to tenants so they can hold their landlord to account
- Publishing an anti-social behaviour information package to clarify the roles of the agencies responsible for tackling anti-social behaviour and the help and support available for tenants
- New powers introduced in the Social Housing Regulation Bill for the Housing Ombudsman to identify best practice in case handling, including publishing a new Complaint Handling Code with which social housing landlords are expected to comply and this will be monitored.
- The Housing Ombudsman can also now publish guidance on good practice and order social landlords to complete a self-assessment against this guidance when a complaint is received.
- In August 2022, we announced that the Department will highlight poor practice by landlords including on its social media platforms. We will publish `Severe Maladministration’ findings by the Housing Ombudsman and judgements of the Regulator of Social Housing that consumer standards have been breached.