It’s not all about the cash, says HQN Director Chloe Fletcher. The NFA’s former Director of Policy rejoined old friends and colleagues at this year’s annual conference in Birmingham to give the day’s keynote speech. Talking about an equally pressing need for culture and attitude change in council housing management, she set the scene for the day’s focus: with a raft of new regulation in place, delegates discussed how we now put into practice all we have learned since the dreadful loss of 72 lives in the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017.

FOR the whole social housing sector, the tragedy at the Grenfell Tower was undoubtedly a Ground Zero moment. So it’s right that we should take time to stop and ask ourselves – how far have we come since then?

I do believe we have made progress. At the same time, the data tell us that there is still a lot that could be improved, and that not every landlord is doing what they should be doing. We are still, for instance, seeing a steep rise in the demands for formal investigation by the Housing Ombudsman from social housing residents unhappy about how their landlords have handled their complaints. The most recent data show a 60% increase in the year to March 2024, and there is every indication that the number will have risen again when the data to March this year is published.

More of those complaints are being upheld – 73% in the last set of figures – and higher financial compensation is being awarded mainly because of the length of time that landlords found to be in severe maladministration have allowed disrepair issues to continue. The Ombudsman predicts that this trend has not yet reached its peak; complaints will continue to rise for a while before levelling out to a ‘new normal’.

It is a sobering and unhappy business to sit down and read some of the stories in the Ombudsman’s casebook. For many of us, committed to a job that we regard more as a vocation than an occupation, the big question we can’t avoid is – how would I feel if a landlord had treated a member of my own family like this?

All these years after Grenfell, the big issue is still whether tenants are being treated with kindness and compassion. Are we trying to help them as much as we possibly can? Or are we letting other pressures get in the way of our focus on the core housing management and services job we are asked to do?

We are supposed to have moved on from the old bricks and mortar-focused approach that was so much a part of pre- and post-war social housing management, and be fully committed to a person-centred culture that recognises every stock unit is first and foremost a home.

I started my career in local authority housing management, and was an early convert to the change fostered in the early 2000s by the introduction of the ALMO model: a wholly council-owned and supervised organisation, but separated from the day-to-day local authority service machine so that staff could be fully focussed on the highly specialised needs of housing management.

Many of those ALMOs are now gone, and what is emerging from the new Regulator of Social Housing inspection regime is how many councils are non-compliant with the consumer standards and have been given C3 or C4 ratings.  The non-compliance of councils on inspection or through self-referrals so far mainly comes down to core issues around the safety and quality of their housing stock.

After years of cuts to social housing funding by the previous government many councils now need additional funding from government to maintain their homes to the current Decent Homes Standard, let alone making it fit for the future.