HQN director Chloe Fletcher, former Director of Policy at the NFA, rejoined old friends and colleagues at this year’s annual conference in Birmingham (May 2025), giving the day’s keynote speech. She set the scene for the day’s focus – with a raft of new regulation in place, we now have to put into practice all we’ve 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’ve made progress. At the same time, the data tell us that there’s 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’s 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’s 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’re asked to do?

We’re 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’s emerging from the Regulator of Social Housing’s new 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.

I know that many councils are really struggling with intense pressure on their housing revenue accounts (HRAs). The latest report from London Councils says councils will have to reduce their spending on council housing by £264m to avoid their HRAs going bust over the next three years. Five boroughs may completely exhaust their HRA reserves before 2027/28. Other councils across the country are facing similar issues.

There’s no doubt that 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 Home Standard, let alone making them fit for the future. With the spending review coming up on 11 June and a new government, the sector eagerly awaits to see if we get a shift towards more investment in social housing.

However, I don’t believe it’s money alone that will improve outcomes for tenants. There’s clearly a challenge in the evident lack of focus on housing of some council landlords in recent years and I believe the new regulatory regime will start to change that over time.  Both HAs and ALMOs are historically accustomed to being inspected in a way that councils haven’t been until now. Inspection is proving to be a very big challenge for some of them.

I’m convinced that the solution begins with culture and attitude. The carrot and stick of the ALMO model proved that councils could revolutionise their approach to tenants and the housing services they were entitled to expect. No council could claim the decent homes money by setting up an ALMO until it could first prove, through independent inspection, that it had a culture firmly focused on good performance and solid tenant satisfaction. They had to show that they were treating their customers with respect and responding promptly to their concerns, and councils were able to do that without a penny of extra money up front.

The lesson is that even in these times of extreme financial constraint, culture change can – and must – be made to happen.

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This article was first published on the NFA website here.