By Rob Gershon, HQN associate

On Wednesday, 22 October 2025 Sky News aired a news piece about housing association Clarion Housing, following the emergence of a recording of a manager telling a worker to provide fake proof that fire safety documentation was in place.

It’s important to set out some of the key elements in the Sky News report, and I’ll start with the timeline the video provides. In June 2022, a manager was recorded saying the following:

“No-one is listening? No-one can listen into our calls? Ok…”

“If you don’t get access tomorrow, alright, alright, don’t tell anyone I told you this, just put it up on a plain bit of wall, take a picture, it’s done. Don’t make a habit of doing that though”.

The manager then continues:

“You’d better never tell anyone I told you that, you know, I’m trying to help you hit your targets. But let’s not make a habit of it”. “I bet I can trust you, you know.”

The worker agrees and laughs nervously as they say they can definitely be trusted, then the manager arguably threatens them, saying “If you don’t, I’ll come and find you”.

At the time, the worker agrees with their manager, but Clarion are finally notified of the conversation and the faking of the presence of fire safety documentation in September 2023, a year and a quarter later.

At this time in 2023, Clarion did nothing.

Another year later, in September 2024, a recording of the conversation is sent to management at Clarion, and they finally begin an internal investigation. Although Clarion would have now been clearly aware of what was said by the manager, they weren’t sacked until the following summer. Of course it’s right that all staff members should have a right to reply over any complaints and issues raised against them, but given the clarity of the communications in this case, questions should rightly be asked about who at Clarion knew about this incident and why they chose to do nothing about it.

Although Clarion attempted to claim in the Sky News report that it was an isolated incident, this has been their response to many other incidents in the past. When ITV news covered their terrible behaviour over multiple issues of squalid conditions back in 2021, Clarion attempted to paint these as “isolated incidents” too, even when the main story back then was the terrible conditions in more than 500 homes on the Eastfields Estate, exposed by the now famous reporting of ITV’s Daniel Hewitt, itself fuelled by the relentless campaigning of Kwajo Tweneboa, a resident on the estate.

In the Sky News report, they interview surveyor Arnold Tarling, who makes it clear that the implications of not properly providing fire safety documentation “could be death, could be serious injury to the person”. He goes on to offer his opinion that this kind of conduct is likely not to be an isolated incident. “It would be industry wide”, Tarling says, likely because of “money saving, couldn’t care less, lessons haven’t been learnt, it won’t happen to me”. He goes on: “You know, the same things that happened with Grenfell, which I and other people were warning about, are being ignored.”

While the news report covers many of the issues, there are issues it leaves out which raise questions for the regulatory system and for other landlords. Broadly speaking, these are the individual problems at Clarion itself, whether a culture of ‘compliance’ in meeting targets is to blame – frankly, where’s the Regulator of Social Housing?

Firstly, there shouldn’t really be any surprise that Clarion in particular, and other large landlords, are prepared to cut corners at the expense of tenants and residents. The Housing Ombudsman has been raising concerns and specific cases in its monthly severe maladministration reports, something I wrote about earlier this year. Since the introduction of the Regulation of Social Housing Act in April 2024, Clarion has featured in 14 out of the 18 months’ worth (see Appendix I) of severe maladministration reports. The ombudsman always tries to frame its case studies in terms of the ‘lessons learned’ from these management failures, but it’s clear that something is going wrong with the internal culture and processes in parts of Clarion’s management and departmental structures.

During the design of the Regulation of Social Housing Act, some landlord advocates claimed that the problems in organisational culture could be addressed by simply fleshing out the existing governance ratings overseen by the regulator, or that a simplified ‘C’ rating for consumer standards could be introduced. The basic argument was that introducing too many checks for landlords to carry out could create a ‘compliance culture’, where staff act predominantly to achieve targets, rather than outcomes.

This argument was always rather thin, but is punctured entirely by this Sky News piece, where the manager in question makes it clear that their focus is on meeting targets, regardless of outcomes – but the key element here is that the work to meet the target hasn’t in fact been done. If anything, the manager has made their own workload, and the workload of the staff member they told to lie about the safety checks, much lighter. This should’ve given them more time to address all the issues the ombudsman keeps telling them about, but which they clearly aren’t bothering with either.

Lastly, we return, not for the first time, to questions about what priorities the RSH has. Throughout the whole process, from Green Paper to the April 2024 legislation, it’s been clear that the government and the regulator are prepared to put more importance on the financial viability of organisations than the expectation that they will treat tenants with dignity and respect, or even, as in this case, meet the very lowest level of safety responsibilities. While this provides assurance that allows investors to continue to plough money into housing associations, it’s clear that this approach hasn’t led to the desired improvements in safety and basic human dignity that tenants should be able to expect.

The delayed Competence and Conduct standard – which is to specifically address the education and behaviour of managers, so that the culture of an organisation is supposed to be in the interests of tenants and residents rather than staff, the executive, board members or investors – has been consulted on recently but is still missing in action. This speaks of a lack of importance placed on it by housing ministers even since the government changed hands in July 2024, and leaves many unanswered questions raised since the Grenfell Tower fire and other stories about indignity and squalor raised since.

I feel like I’m repeating myself, surely because I’m repeating myself, but the problem isn’t that all landlords behave like Clarion – it’s that the system is set up so there’s no way of stopping landlords and their individual managers behaving like Clarion. Until the regulator and the sector’s representative bodies come to grips with this, tenants cannot be reassured that anything will change.

Appendix I

Since the monthly reports started in April 2024, Clarion have featured in the following monthly severe maladministration reports:

May 2024

Joint June and July 2024

August 2024

October 2024

November 2024

December 2024

January 2025

February 2025

March 2025

May 2025

August 2025

September 2025

So, from reports covering the 18 months since the ombudsman brought them in as part of its new remit under the Social Housing Regulation Act, Clarion are absent in just four months’ worth of ombudsman reports on the most critical thing it reports on – severe maladministration.