By Rob Gershon, HQN Residents Network Associate and council housing tenant

Whether homes should be furnished is barely a footnote in the government’s Decent Homes Standard (DHS) consultation of 2025. What happened to the idea of registered providers of social housing providing furnished properties to tackle the many facets of the deepening cost-of-living crisis? Popular just a few years ago, thanks mainly to the graft of the End Furniture Poverty campaign.

It can be difficult to prompt and collect opinions from tenants and residents about government consultations on housing. Clearly, there is a core of involved residents who will be abreast of the latest housing news and answer on an individual basis. Some might come to respond through their responsibilities as board members or from being involved directly with their landlord or a membership organisation. But overall, the responses tend to be relatively small in number.

As a result, participation in government consultations can often be a bit one-sided, with landlord bodies and consultancy groups flooding the space with extensive responses detailing business cases, pushing gentle lobbying against anything that might cost money and occasionally showing some surprising admissions of just how non-decent many homes might be.

The 2025 consultation on a new DHS covered a range of topics suggested by government. Having closed earlier this month, it’s too late to respond now, but what might tenant responses look like set against the professional objections of landlords? The full consultation responses will be published eventually, but for now we can only go on what individuals and groups have said publicly.

Or, in the case of the National Housing Federation (NHF), behind a membership paywall. Luckily, I’ve been able to glean a few snippets of what they said. It should be in the public domain, though you will see why they might not want tenants to find out about some of their advice.

Firstly, a little gripe of my own. It is incredible to think that the government’s recommendations for the implementation of the next DHS are set for 2035, with organisations like the NHF pushing for 2037 “at the earliest”. For about six or seven of the eight years since the Grenfell Tower fire, the Regulator of Social Housing has been pushing organisations not to wait for legislation to improve their service offerings and the way they treat people.

The Competence and Conduct standard is still a kind of pipe dream, but I find it almost beyond belief that the sector is rather blithely giving itself 20 years to get to a stage where the homes it provides are broadly decent. It’s nobody else’s fault we’ve collectively wasted the best part of a decade and don’t really have a plan for how to get to a baseline of habitable homes in the next ten or twelve years.

For this piece I have directly consulted four tenants to see what they think about the consultation and some of the responses. In informal conversations, I asked what they thought about landlords funding or providing funding for furniture or floor coverings. Although there were some variations in their responses, while they saw furniture as less critical to the decency of a home – accepting that where people had no furniture, they should get help – they all thought that the floor coverings were an integral feature for which the landlord should be responsible.

The NHF is less keen. Its consultation response states: “We understand that floor coverings are an important part of what makes a house feel like home and this expense can be extremely difficult for new tenants to cover. However, the additional expense that social landlords would face from the potential requirement on floor coverings would be so significant that we could not support its introduction without further assessment of the financial and practical impact on housing associations and their ability to deliver on other shared objectives, such as supply.

“We would like to work with the government to develop a practical approach that would increase the provision of floor coverings for residents who can’t afford to install them at the beginning of a tenancy, while also ensuring that those who can and want to are able to choose and install their own.

“We suggest a pilot with a small number of social landlords could be undertaken to generate more evidence with which to assess a potential new approach.”

When you drill down into the detail of the landlord body’s objections, it is predominantly based around the cost. It claims that the government has woefully underestimated the cost of replacing flooring because many, many more homes than the government thinks have non-decent flooring in place. The statistics the NHF come up with suggest that when tenants move out, between 75% and 90% of households have been living in homes without decent flooring. Which begs the question: Why?

It is true that landlords haven’t been expected to know the wider condition of their homes until the introduction of the Regulation of Social Housing Act in April 2024, but some social landlords, like my own, started stock condition surveys back in 2018 or 2019, when the direction of travel for the future relationship between tenants and landlords started to take shape in the Social Housing Green and White papers.

You didn’t need to have an innovation lab to see which way the wind was blowing, but it seems the sector has wilfully chosen to look the other way on these clear, key issues for tenants. Putting aside the small number of cases in which landlords feel they can’t get access, a topic we’ll return to another time, and accepting that landlords haven’t had a legal duty to provide flooring previously, it’s still confusing that something tenants think of as fundamental is not more widely prioritised by the body that represents housing associations.

The intimation across responses from the NHF and other bodies, including the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), is that landlords simply can’t afford to keep their properties in a decent state of repair because they don’t have enough money.

In fairness, it is possible to have a degree of sympathy with this narrative. Government funding was indeed cut dramatically over a long period of time for new social rent homes. But the sector trotted into the rabbit trap the previous government set, with a spring in its step. Warnings that capital grant funding would still be needed fell on deaf ears, as sector bodies sought instead to appease ministers. So, the lack of funding isn’t just someone else’s fault.

To the CIH’s credit, many of the consultation responses are more balanced than some of its peers. It focuses on resident dignity: “The standard should prevent trade-offs between essential elements, strengthen measures on damp and mould, embed resident voice to tackle stigma and improve accountability, and allow time to explore practical approaches to incorporating floor coverings.”

The Institute appears more keenly aware of the need to rebalance how decisions are made between landlords and tenants, and its response makes frequent references to giving tenants a choice. My tiny tenant panel largely agreed with this approach. If there is a budget for floor coverings, and furnishing, why not simply make it available to the tenant to choose their own? Ostensibly it is their home, although of course many policies like the bedroom tax, the benefit cap and above-inflation rent rises make their tenancies increasingly tenuous against the backdrop of the deepening cost-of-living crisis.

One tenant’s response struck me as quite understanding, given the circumstances. They understood that floor coverings and furniture could be expensive but that they believed landlords would be able to source them more cheaply due to what I shall paraphrase as economies of scale. The government consultation makes a similar assumption.

But the NHF argues that the bigger housing associations can’t meet the costs of implementing a new DHS because they are so big it will take a long time to find out what they are likely to be. And it argues that smaller housing associations don’t even have the resources to embark on a costings exercise in the first place.

All of which is a little baffling from a sector that has spent the last 10 or so years arguing in favour of mergers – egged on by the regulator – for precisely the reasons that by being bigger they’d be able to operate more efficiently and benefit from economies of scale.

Two of my tenant panel thought, economies of scale or not, that landlords would be able to source some of the necessary furnishings and maybe even flooring at a reasonable rate through other connections. One of them is aware of schemes to source previously loved furniture, as advocated by End Furniture Poverty, while another thought that, as landlords are in the business of building and managing homes, they’d have access to trade rates for floor coverings. A third tenant thought that the idea of allowing tenants to spend the furniture budget themselves could apply to floor coverings, too, noting that it’s possible for individuals to go to local DIY chains and pick up offcuts, end of line products and other bargains more easily than “somebody employed to do asset management”.

Although I didn’t talk to all the tenants about the NHF’s opposition to providing floor coverings, one was a bit taken aback at the suggestion it would increase void times to sort out the flooring in homes. Noting that void times are already notoriously long, they couldn’t understand why they would allow ample time to sort the flooring out. I tend to agree, having had to fund most of my own floor coverings at a time when my wife needed hard-wearing vinyl flooring for a wheelchair, with a bit of elbow grease and some long days our entire bungalow was screeded and refloored in just a few days. The voids thing sounds a bit of an excuse.

I was struck from talking to tenants that they considered flooring and furnishings to be an integral part of a ‘decent home’. Far more so, it seems, than their landlords. That may be natural when individuals think about a place where they and their families live and organisations think about units.

‘My’ tenants were split on the funding issues, with one saying that people who are ‘on their arses’ should get financial help. But someone else said that even though they must budget carefully, they had been able to manage their own furniture outgoings and felt the freedom of choice this gave them was very important.

In many ways the responses from the landlord side raise many more questions than the consultation asks them to answer. In part these questions are valid. Who is going to pay to keep existing homes decent when the government is so focused on building new homes and there’s not money for both?

It is clear from recent start and completion figures that some landlords are already retreating from new supply. This is objectively not a bad thing when the homes that some people are living have needed work for years, and will need attending to before the new legislation comes in a decade from now.