A whole storm of difficult issues face ALMOs and the rest of the social housing sector over the coming year.

A crowded, fast-moving policy landscape takes in building and fire safety, and improved levels of accountability to residents. 

All this, and making sure we support our customers’ efforts to cope with the most severe cost of living pressure in generations.

In my roles as Managing Director at the NFA and Chair of the Barnet Group Board, I see at first hand the impact on landlords and residents of inflation, rising energy prices and pressure on budgets in every conceivable area from public finance to construction and maintenance costs.

And, of course, from April landlords will have to start collecting data geared to the new tenant satisfaction measures.

The NFA team have been advising our members ever since consultation began on the Social Housing Green paper five years ago that there should be no waiting around for new laws and regulations before houses were put in order.

In that spirit, our guide for landlords and tenants on compliance with the new regulatory regime was published at the end of 2021, and we have just completed an update that takes in all the various changes, from building safety to tenant engagement, that have come into force since then. 

I don’t doubt that we’ll be updating it again at the end of 2023. It offers checklists for housing managers, councils, ALMO officers and residents designed specifically to answer the core question at the heart of all this change: are we ready, right now?

All this is about safety for residents – but it’s also about openness and transparency. 

The fact is that the Regulator is on the march.

• In about April this year, the new social housing regulation act now going through Parliament will get royal assent.
• That will set  underway revision of the current consumer standards – and, alongside other partners in the sector, the NFA policy team is already talking to the Regulator about this.
• The focus of the revised standards will be on transparency and accountability and neighbourhoods and communities and residents.
• When the new tenant satisfaction measures are published in spring 2024, that’s going to bring a lot of rich data right across the whole of the housing sector out into the open. This might trigger interventions.
• The Housing Ombudsman is now much, much more visible than 18 months ago, naming and shaming organisations and sharing data with the Regulator; what the Regulator hears from the Ombudsman will influence whether or not an inspection is launched.
• In some circumstances, the Regulator will come into a landlord’s organisation in the same way that Ofsted goes into schools or CQC goes into care homes. Eight pilot inspections are already underway this year – including at one of our own members.
• And we now have the new Building Safety Regulator looking at the sector’s work. Just over a week ago, new rules on the fire safety audit came into effect making quarterly inspections of communal fire doors in blocks over 11 metres compulsory along with annual inspections of front entrance doors.

All of this is about safety for residents, so that they live in decent, good quality homes. But it’s also about openness and transparency.

While the government has said it won’t attempt to create landlord league tables, there’s no doubt that our performance will be weighed up and judged. We should all be doing everything we can to become the decent, reliable landlords I know all NFA members certainly want to be.

But we are human, and inevitably mistakes will be made. So I also hope that the all-too human impulse to blame will come a very firm second to the desire to turn constructive criticism into the real improvement customers need.