By Rob Gershon, HQN Residents’ Network associate 

I don’t like Christmas, and a lot of the time, reading news about and getting stuck into various bits of policy about social housing can be pretty miserable, too.

But I’ve decided to give the gift* of a look at the year in the UK housing sector through some daily snippets, loosely in the form of an advent calendar. Just to make it even better/worse, I’m going to do it in alphabetical order, and probably just leave out a couple of the worst letters, in order to freshly squeeze the alphabet into 24 days.

A is for Awaab’s Law, Accountability and the Affordable Homes Fund

On 27 November, 2025, Awaab’s Law was finally passed and now sets a specific expectation on social landlords to investigate and make a plan for damp and mould issues in social housing. For the sake of brevity I’m not going to cover the full implications, available all over the place, but it’s another example of a piece of legislation which feels like it shouldn’t be necessary… but is. We shouldn’t need a specific law to ensure that the actions of social landlords don’t end up killing people, but we do. It’s a positive development overall but leaves important questions in place for how it’s implemented and monitored in future.

A is also for the Affordable Homes Fund. Technically it’s now called the Social and Affordable Homes Programme 2026-2036 but I already have stuff for S and maybe-day-19. After years of a frustrating lack of specific investment under previous governments, the scheme finalised this year does at least attempt to offer funding for ‘affordable’ and social rent homes. This is good news up to a point, but the overall ambition is reassuringly pathetic, with 300,000 affordable homes and the possibility of 180,000 social rent homes delivered over an entire decade, less than 20% of what’s really needed over this time.

A is also for Accountability, Avarice and Accessibility, but there’s only so much room behind these tiny cardboard flaps.

B is for Bedroom Tax, Build Baby Build and Budgets

It’s impossible to navigate the policy landscape of the UK’s housing sector without stumbling over the politics of it. There simply wouldn’t be a social housing sector without government funding, laws and regulatory bodies. Prising open the little door with a red bauble on it, we find one of the worst government interventions still hanging over tenants – the Bedroom Tax. There was a time when the Labour Party was vaguely against it, but now they operate it with their own kind of festive cheer. The housing policy equivalent of Scrooge dressed as the Grinch gleefully giving Tim Cratchit a good kicking.

The modern political environment doesn’t contain a lot of heroes, but choosing Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime to base your flagship housebuilding policy on really takes the Stollen. We’ll cover T is for Targets later, but putting on a red hat, sitting people on your knee and making up stories about presents is no way for housing policy to be decided.

B is for Budgets, too. The 2025 events saw the government look another gift-reindeer in the mouth, stalwartly refusing to provide the capital funding necessary to turn long-term spending from Benefits to Bricks.

Finally, B is for Brexit, which continues to make housebuilding much more difficult and expensive, for Bromford, and For Bailii, the website where the Case Law eventually gets published when disputes ultimately have to get resolved in court.

C is for Complaints, Communication, Competence, Conduct and Christmas

2025 saw a wealth of data about Complaints from two main sources – the Housing Ombudsman’s annual statistics about them, and the tenant satisfaction measures, that show that something is still fundamentally wrong with the way landlords are dealing with complaints. While it’s great that the sector has more data about complaints than ever, it’s still not clear why there isn’t a unified plan to stop landlords being so combative within their complaints procedures, and to prevent them entrenching their failings further in their communications.

While sector chiefs have been focussing on a completely different C – Rent Convergence – there’s been a delay to what’s a priority for tenants and residents: the Competence and Conduct Standards. All we’ve really learned about it so far through government consultation is that ‘senior’ managers will have to acquire some form of qualification to tick the box of the competence side, but there hasn’t been any public discussion about what the expectations around staff conduct are. For a lot of staff, this isn’t a problem, with dedicated, knowledgeable staff knuckling down to get stuff done, but it’s clear from regular exposés and news reports that some organisations have deep cultural problems.

Communication is often at the heart of things going wrong in the housing sector, and if I have a wish for 2026 it’s that boards and executives stop deploying them for how they wish the world was, and use them to highlight and improve how it actually is.

C is also for Christmas, honestly the worst time of year with its novelty calendars, cake, crackers, cheese, company, camaraderie and seasonal cheer. Yuck.

D is for Doors, Let’s Do It.

Homes and advent calendars have a few things in common. They’re not usually both full of chocolate and most of them you don’t throw in the recycling after a month, but they are both accessed by Doors, real and metaphorical. Proving that some People are Strange, conversations about doors sometimes focus on their uniformity, but more than anything, the physical and notional boundaries and realities of homes are defined by doors.

Wherever you live, be it on Moonlight Drive, Dawn’s Highway, on Love Street or even Down on the Farm, doors are the thing that grant residents a modicum of control over who has access, or no access, to their lives. Whether it’s the End of the Night or you’re Waiting for the Sun, doors are the portal to and protection from the outside – a reminder that Freedom Exists, your way of determining whether people can be Close To You.

Inside housing, internal doors let you separate the places you can Get Up and Dance or consider a Lament. They let you traverse from the Hardwood Floor in your Soul Kitchen and Break On Through to another room, whether you’re an LA Woman or a Back Door Man.

Before the advent of door cameras, you could never be sure who was coming to visit, a Wandering Musician, an Unhappy Girl, a Wild Child or a Feast of Friends. These Strange Days it’s more likely to be someone without any qualifications coming to do a stock condition survey.

D is also for Domestic Abuse Policy, Disrepair Claims and Disposals. Maybe next year.

Anyway, this is the end, beautiful friend. But wait, It Slipped My Mind, I’ll be back tomorrow with the Es. So I guess technically this Is The End.

E is for Electrical Safety, EDI and Engagement

This year the government applied legislation on electrical safety that already existed in the private rented sector to social homes. It means landlords will have to have a qualified person check every home at least every five years. It’s tempting to think this could be included in stock condition surveys, but they don’t require any qualifications, yet.

Coincidentally, I had a visit from an electrician this week. They clearly loved their job and seemed thorough and good at it, fitting a new, uncannily quiet extractor fan in one room and plotting to install another. We ended up talking high policy, and I was exasperated to learn they’ve decided to leave their job to work elsewhere, finding the bureaucracy and inefficiency at my landlord getting in the way of their work. Recruitment and Retention ‘R’ for another day.

E is for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, a framework of ideas designed to stop excluding people and to challenge ingrained privilege and cultural biases. This practice is under threat after being effectively dismantled by the authoritarian regime in the US, but we shouldn’t be complacent about politicised attacks on it here at home, either. The Equality Act and its many implications in the social housing space are too big to tackle in a tiny calendar, but more needs to be done.

E is sadly for Engagement, the catch-all term that’s both good and terrible to describe having to talk to tenants and residents. Some engagement is now effectively mandated under the Regulation of Social Housing Act, but it’s messy. More landlords should use this as an opportunity to bring residents into decision-making – but because regulations offer a lot of leeway, usually they don’t.

E is also for Excessive Executive Pay, Enforcement and Editorial Control -snip

F is for Federations, Foodbanks and Fiona

I’ve been too distracted from housing stuff for most of the year to realise it, but 2025 was pretty monumental for independent tenant groups. Wales’ has its National Independent Tenant Voice Cymru; England has a triptych of startups – the ‘Voice for tenants’, The Social Housing Action Campaign’s ‘National Housing Union’ and the ‘National Tenant Federation’. I’ve both Fond and Frustrating memories of being involved in a previous incarnation of such a group immediately after the Grenfell Tower fire. It ultimately Failed due to a lack of political will in government, but at least the first half of 2025 was overseen by a secretary of state who’d lived in social housing and so there’s been the sense this year that, politically, a door is ajar.

As well as a National Tenant Federation, we also have the National Housing Federation, and it’s been interesting to see they’ve offered an umbrella for the Stop Social Housing Stigma campaign (see you on Day 19). They’ve also been lobbying hard for rent increases and rent convergence, and seem on the wrong side, from a tenant perspective, on national debates about disrepair claims and other stuff.

Foodbanks have been a disappointingly prolific feature since the coalition’s welfare reforms of the early 2010s. While some champion their community focus, I’ve always held the view that they shouldn’t be necessary, and their provision is an act of shame rather than charity. This isn’t to undermine the necessary work that they do, but seeing housing providers offer various foodbanks, pantries and other services is something I can’t celebrate.

F is also for Fiona (MacGregor) who announced this year, not for the first time, that she’s stepping down as Chief Executive of the Regulator of Social Housing in 2026. It’s been such a period of change for the RSH, as the Regulation of Social Housing Act takes shape, but we’ve run out of room behind today’s little door so might have to revisit this in the Rs.

G is for Green Shoots, Governance and Growth

Every day so far, the text behind these advent calendar doors has been getting smaller and smaller, some of it bending around to fit the edges as I aim to write fewer words and every day write more. Today is a Sunday, Day 7 of Advent, so I’m going to try and stick to my original intended discipline of 200ish words per day. Oh no. That’s 68 already!

I can’t stand the term ‘Green shoots’ when used in the context of the Tenant Satisfaction Measures or the wider Consumer Standards gradings. Just because it’s the first couple of years of measuring this stuff, it’s unreasonably lenient to infer things are going to get better. Getting better requires better governance, radical changes in the way staff are trained and departments are structured and a complete rethink of the way landlords cede power to residents. It will also mean a change to the way the regulator operates inspections and the consumer gradings. This isn’t happening in general and until it does, we don’t have green shoots, we have limp weeds.

G is also for government and its inability to grasp that if you want growth in the economy you have to build between 90,000 and 100,000 genuinely, properly, social-rent-y homes. Housing costs are at the heart of the cost-of-living crisis and a more general inability for everyone to spend money elsewhere in the economy. You don’t save money by not investing.

G is also for Grumpy, Grinch and Goodbye.

H is for Home

The meaning of home seems simple at first. When we talk about homelessness and the provision of homes people ‘locked out’ of the housing ‘market’ can afford, we lean on basic expectations: People deserve to live in Decent, warm, affordable homes. No matter whether you own your home or not, the concept is supposed to be the same – somewhere you can close – or open – your door and experience a sense of belonging, of safety… simply a place you can call home.

In the UK, this idea is skewed by a national idea about home ownership. Politicians setting out how government spending is structured lean in to the ‘dream of home ownership’, as if people everywhere go to sleep and let their imaginations run only as far as four walls and a roof and maybe some bay windows. For some, homes are assets, stock, units, blocks, estates… bricks and mortar, just vessels for a host of transactional interactions.

When you are a tenant, somebody else decides if you can have pets, how you can decorate the place you live, what rules and regulations you are required to live by, what your responsibilities are. While it can be liberating to meet the cost of repairs and maintenance through your rent rather than having to find the cash when something goes wrong, someone else decides which staff or contractors do the work, even if they’re cheap and rubbish. Someone else decides which property you’re allocated, who your neighbours are, and whether they’re going to fit dangerous products to the inside or outside of the place you would like to think of as home.

In tenancy terms, home is like Christmas, and other seasonal or denominational holidays; it’s an idea about having a choice to envelop yourself in your personal community that has been ruined by commercial interests and people turning up when it’s not convenient or not showing up at all. Much like your in-laws, you can’t choose your landlord, and they both get in a huff when you tell them how to do things properly.

Also, there’s no Christmas ombudsman or regulator yet, but maybe there should be C gradings for Christmas Satisfaction Measures. I give it a one out of 10.

H is also for Humbug, Hubris and Humanity. Oh, the humanity.

I is for Innovation, Inspections and Information

For a little over a decade, the social housing sector has spent a lot of money producing no innovative ideas. At best it has allowed some systems and business analysts to give themselves silly job titles and imagine they are disrupting things but, in reality, not one single useful idea has been generated.

In part, this is because there is a wide confusion of innovation with newness, and in this context ‘new’ just means ‘things other sectors have been doing for ages’. At worst, practices masquerading as innovative have entrenched problems that exist between tenants and landlords – automating systems that used to involve human contact, removing the ability for formal or informal input from tenants and communities in the pursuit of business efficiency.

In this context, the government launching the ‘Social Housing Innovation Fund’ should be a good idea. It is a direct response to the issues highlighted in the expansive Green Paper that followed the Grenfell Tower fire, those that plague Ombudsman spotlight and maladministration reports and the recurring mistreatment of tenants by landlords popping up in cases in the media. It seeks to find new ideas to embed tenant and resident ideas in the way landlords conduct their business, but applications for grants from the £2m fund only allow the ideas to come from all the old places. It seeks to replicate and disseminate these ideas but we know they won’t be enforced given the current interpretation of ‘involvement’ from the regulator.

Which brings us to Inspections. The regulator recently faced accusations that their inspection regime was ‘light touch’ at a committee hearing on ‘Housing Conditions in England’, and questions remain about why the regulator won’t speak to tenant groups directly. With the United Nations also weighing in this year, criticising turgid conditions at a landlord that has the second best regulatory gradings for governance, financial viability and consumer standards, the state and purpose of the Inspections regime might benefit from an injection of cash from the innovation fund, or better still some resident input at the regulator itself.

I is also for Information, with the government’s Social Tenant Access to Information Requirements (STAIRs) also getting a published policy statement this year, with landlords expected to publicly publish information about how they manage their homes.

Due to take effect in October 2026, this is something for next year’s calendar, given that I is also for ‘I have written far more words than I intended’. I also got away without mentioning Involvement. Result.

J is for Jobs and for Justice

2025 saw the weird, quasi-religious, right-wing think tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) launch a consultation on solving the skills and labour shortages in the UK construction sector. Founded by Iain Duncan Smith, one of the nation’s least educated and noisiest proponents of Brexit, the CSJ wonder what could possibly have led to a decrease in the number of people coming to the UK to help build homes and other projects, especially from the EU. It’s a genuine mystery to them, the same think-tank that birthed Universal Credit and many of the policy ideas that have directly caused the current cost-of-living crisis. They wouldn’t know social justice if it leapt up and bit their noses.

This week saw the launch of a fascinating report from the Chartered Institute of Housing on ‘Voices of the Future’, the research, which highlights the views of 900 ‘young’ housing professionals, paints a picture of people who want to be dedicated to the cause but whose attempts at implementing change are often stymied by inflexible organisational cultures.

The report shows people are still falling into, rather than choosing housing as a career and ‘inconsistent experiences’ of training, pay and progression are amongst the factors causing job burnout and presumably leading to some people leaving the sector. Focus group feedback mentioned in the report reflects briefly on the effect poor media coverage might be having on recruitment and retention, with a failure to tackle repairs and maintenance possibly overshadowing the good work most employees want to do.

J is also for Justice. 2025 saw the passing of the eighth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, and the ongoing criminal investigation has still not produced any arrests or sentences. For years there has been an assumption that the inquiry phases would need to play out before the work of the police could start in earnest, and whether or not this should be the case, the inquiry is now closed and the focus should have turned to using the evidence it discussed to secure justice.

Structural changes within the sector centred on the Social Housing (Regulation) Act are one thing, but individuals and organisations were clearly responsible for what happened and should already be facing criminal charges. Our criminal justice system is founded on the idea that people have a chance to face their crimes and defend their actions, and this should be happening already for those whose actions led to the Grenfell Tower fire.

K is for Kerry

This isn’t a post about the social housing year but it’s my advent calendar so you’ll just have to deal with it.

Kerry was my wife, and she died this summer after we’d spent 28 pretty glorious years married. If it hadn’t been for Kerry, I wouldn’t have been forced to start writing about housing stuff – with the bedroom tax – or on to social media to agree and debate and fight with people about it. I was Kerry’s carer for a good number of those years and it was the spiteful injustice of being told we had a spare room that prompted a descent for me into realising the adapted bungalow we’d been allocated wasn’t really our home, it was just someone else’s asset.

When I met Kerry, she was managing a residential care home for older people and soon rose to be service manager across the whole county. Her ethos was that home was just as important as care to her residents, and she got in good kinds of trouble with her council employer for putting the priorities of ‘her’ residents ahead of the impersonal habits that councils form in providing services.

I ran everything I wrote, or agreed to attend and speak at, or get involved with in the housing sector past Kerry, she was thoughtful and considerate of who it would help and what pressure it would put on me and my caring role for her. But mostly as I head into my first Christmas without her, I miss the fact Kerry was a proper fan of the humbug, too, and I miss our shared, playful, two fingers up at it.

K is also for Knackered, Knowledge Exchange and KPIs, so it’s not like we’ve missed much housing stuff.

L is for Lawyers, Landlords and Lots of other things…

I’m sorry if you’re here for Leasehold, L&Q or loads of other stuff. There’s only so much room behind these tiny advent calendar doors, and although they’ve been growing in surface area since A is for adroit, I’m just going to give those issues their own little bit of tinsel next to the magic window.

Lawyers get a pretty rough ride in the public domain. Whether it’s governments and the Daily Mail blaming them for having the audacity to uphold peoples’ rights, wholly inaccurate media portrayals of suit-wearing, pencil-pushing pedants, or Attorney Generals who earned £2m on top of their MP salary and spent half the year living abroad, they are often the butt of barbs and jokes. Sometime from places of love but also from licentious, litigious and lazy detractors. But not in THIS very serious advent calendar.

2025 saw the government start to ask questions about ‘claims farmers’. December saw a joint consultation between the ministries of Housing and Whatever and the Ministry of Justice “focusing on cases where tenants consider seeking redress through the County Court” for disrepair. We know from comments by the Housing Ombudsman that legal redress is hardly ever the first port of call for tenants, with multiple systemic failures at Landlords often forcing them to go outside the complaints ‘process’ to get redress.

The 2018 ‘Homes (Fitness For Human Habitation) Act’ invites tenants of all tenures to take their landlords to court when their homes do not meet this low bar, so it’s not surprising there are more cases – frankly it’s about time – but it is only right and proper that tenants are not taken advantage of by unscrupulous legal practitioners and other losers.

Oh no, how unusual for a topic featuring lawyers to have overrun the word count. Lawyers are great. Let’s say your housing association has failed to address your damp and mould issue, decants you for 461 days, moving you on 19 occasions without any consideration to your rights under the equality act, possibly then unlawfully evicts you and treats you along the way by ignoring, gaslighting and harassing you… you don’t want to end up in court trying to remember all that stuff yourself. You need a Lawyer!

L is also for Landlords. The feudal implications of this term make a lot of the modern housing sector a bit queasy. They don’t like to see themselves as privileged people wielding disproportionate power over others. Often HA mergers produce weird organisations with abrupt made-up names like BUNGLE or KAZU or MOLDI, but there’s a Landlord and Tenant Act for a reason, and no Landlord and Customer Act. Merry L-la Christmas!

M is for Mould, Middle Ground and McIntosh

It’s the weekend, we’re over halfway towards the worst day of the year. It’s time to respect my intended word count of 200ish and celebrate Good Things!

Mould – This Alphabetical Advent started with Awaab’s Law, and it’s an issue which has defined Housing’s 2025 in other ways, but it’s great to see Giles Peaker report that the law has already been used for good. I remember some sector leaders saying we didn’t need a law for organisations to do basic things, but they were wrong.

Middle Ground and McIntosh – 2025 saw the publication of Middle Ground, by mystery author, “Joe Carpenter”. I haven’t read the book yet, and HQN’s Alistair McIntosh’s Book Review and Interview with the Author have been my touchstones for it. I might buy it for myself but definitely not for Christmas.

In my resident involvement work over the last decade, some of my most memorable meetings with people who aren’t tenants have been those trying to work in the ever-fluctuating ‘involvement and engagement’ space. When it’s done well, those staff are full of good ideas based on listening to people, but often those teams have been reduced or cut completely, lost in mergers to worse systems or faced being ignored by departments that hold the purse-strings and make decisions.

I would hope that what are sure to be revelations in Middle Ground for some boards and executives will help inform change across the sector. Look at me, 100% positive.

M is also for Managed Move, Mortgages and Misery. Oh, and Merry, I suppose. Pfft

N is for New Homes Targets, No Access, NHS and Net Zero

That’s a lot of Ns in the title, and I left out ‘No To Christmas’, a campaign I just made up where people get a grip and buy no presents and spend no money. You’re welcome.

A year and a half into the current government, setting a 1.5 million New Homes ‘target’ for England seems even less wise than it did on the day somebody plucked the number out of the air based on how great they thought planning reforms were going to make delivery. As a long-time supporter of the building of more homes, it’s not that I don’t think it’s a good idea, but pledges require policy and practical intervention and these all begin with P.

N is for No Access, featured in ‘Opening the Door’ – this week’s joint research by a host of three letter acronyms – NFA, CIH, LGA, ARCH, CWAG and HQN. That saves on the word count. Having witnessed in the past some landlord interventions deliberately attempt to paint what were not No Access issues as if they were, it is refreshing to see the breadth of the research presented. From culture and systems change to better communications and IT, some of the proposed solutions are familiar across a number of other outstanding improvements required in the sector.

N is for NHS. We are warned this week it faces its gravest pressure since the pandemic politicians are pretending didn’t…hang on…more Ps. For years the interdependence of good health and good housing have been understood, and we can only hope that this year’s legislative shifts on home standards put less pressure on the health services in future.

N is also for Net Zero. “If all homes constructed in future are built to a low carbon standard, there should be no need to retrofit these homes before the UK government’s net zero 2050 deadline.” This was the heady claim made in the government’s 2019 (updated 2022) document setting out how all homes built from 2025 would be “low cost, low carbon”. Thank goodness that has worked out and now homes are all much cheaper and more energy efficient. Planet: saved.

N is also for Noel Edmonds.

O is for Ombudsmen, Overcharging and Oh No

I am aware the Housing Ombudsman service is not perfect. Somewhere between tenant expectations, the legislative framework its remit operates on and the…chosen behaviours…of landlords, it straddles the specific areas of addressing complaints and a host of other things it can only hope to signpost.

O is for Oh No, I forgot to cover Lessons Learned back on day 12, and the Ombudsman Service continues its attempts to get landlords to learn lessons from their own failures, and the failures of others, through spotlighting issues and providing information about how to improve services. The repeated appearance of some landlords in the monthly maladministration reports and the spotlight reports would suggest that despite the availability of this information, many will not or cannot learn these lessons.

O is also for Overcharging. For years, service charges have been a contentious issue, and this year saw the government launch a consultation on ‘strengthening leaseholder protections’. While this sounds a bit vague, one of the aims is to make sure that service charges actually relate to services being provided and represent value for money, rather than, say, collectively being fleeced for no good reason. Notably the Secretary of State used this December to announce the government seeks to ‘End Leasehold’ within this parliament, in part because of the onerous costs it places through service charges.

O is for Overton, Owner Occupier, and also Out of Hours, which is what I have just run out of, so I’m off.

P is for Power, Procedure, Patches and Performance Improvement Plans

“Line up the suckers who refuse to recognise the truth”, suggested Ice-T in his 1988 tune “Power”. Presumably so Ice could give them all a stern talking-to about the need to cede, share and disseminate power as the only solutions to address its imbalance.

So it is in social housing in 2025! The Regulation of Social Housing Act promised “a major reset of power between tenants and landlords”, albeit it envisaged doing that through access to information and the Tenant Satisfaction Measures. Let’s face it – there’s been no such reset. The framework in place even after the act relies on landlords making choices about power and the regulator enforcing them, and for whatever reasons both have chosen to eschew these paths.

At the very, very least, publicly available Regulatory P is for Performance Improvement Plans would go some way to sharing with residents, and other landlords, whether landlords have recognised what the problems are when things go wrong, and allow residents to be involved in designing solutions that would help resolve and improve issues at downgraded landlords, and other landlords where nobody has realised things are going wrong yet. Two-page carbon-copy regulatory judgement updates, a failure to deploy any of the new powers in its remit and an ongoing revolving door between the regulator and senior housing executives are eroding trust in the ability of the new regime to rebalance power before it has even really got going.

I was chatting to a colleague the other day and we discussed the cyclical nature of structures within the housing sector – that over 10 years things ebb and flow… but basically end up back where they were, often these days being badged as ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ (see I for details). That over 20 or 30 years the fashions of smaller patch sizes or funding for engagement or political servitude come and go but never really change. In part this is because these cycles might witness a change in Protocols or Procedures, but they never seem to break through to disrupt underlying cultures and power structures.

P is also for Pantomime, Piranhas, Performance Reviews and Poppycock.

Q is for.. Quickly doing something because you’re leaving out X and Z

Q is for Quality Homes, an ongoing aspiration that still faces many challenges in 2025 and beyond. With a festive smorgasbord of policy announcements and sector activity relating to quality this year, a new decent homes standard, the ongoing work of the building safety regulator, and providers undertaking stock condition and energy efficiency work, quality has become more of a priority. It probably shouldn’t have needed to be focussed on because homes should always be built and maintained to a certain standard but what are you going to do?

The Ministry of Whatever and Housing has just published a report on residents’ experiences of housing safety and quality. It has graphs and everything! The reason I’m including it here is because alongside the potential yawnfest of ‘systems thinking’ (I’m only joking, I love it!) it prioritises complex concepts of trust and focusses on the importance of outcomes, things that often get lost in both government and landlord policy-making and process-setting. We’ll cover this more in T is for Tenants but it’s an example of where government is using direct resident interaction to gauge the effect of and inform future development of a pretty wide bunch of work.

Q is also for questions. Despite the mountain of consultations and reports on housing this year, querying what people think of pre-decided government policy aims, many of the consultations and those which have had responses leave many questions unanswered. From the skein-thin suggestions for competence and conduct standards to the potentially dodgy loopholes in the access to information scheme (STAIRs), there are a lot of things that could have been resolved with a bit more formal standard-setting that haven’t been. Alongside a bit of uncertainty about the purpose and thoroughness of the consumer gradings in general, going into 2026 will mean many issues haven’t quite been resolved and will need continued input.

None of Santa’s reindeer names begin with Q and my quest to find other quite interesting words has failed. It’s quackers.

R is for Renters’ Rights, Regulation, Rough Sleeping and Racism

Lots of people have been critical of the early part of the current government’s term, and often with good reason, but November 2025 saw confirmation that long – very long – awaited reforms to the private rented sector would be introduced. While this may be a social housing advent calendar, the little house painted on today’s door reminds us that tenants of all tenures often face similar challenges with their landlords. The early phase of the act next year should see the end of ‘no fault’ evictions, and later promised actions include the introduction of a landlord database and a private sector ombudsman. R is for Rejoice!

We’ve covered a lot of Regulation issues already in the calendar, so I won’t go on too much about them again, but as things stand 2025 risks representing a real reduction in the regulation of the Social Housing Act’s original intentions. Tenants rightfully expected radical change, but further reform is required to realise this reset.

R is for Rough Sleeping. The ongoing failure to build the social rent homes the country needs has resulted in a 20% increase in rough sleeping over just the last year. 330,000 people are now considered to be homeless or at risk according to Crisis’ excellent but depressing Homelessness Monitor for England 2025. The report notes that the effectiveness of homelessness prevention measures is in decline, and that councils spent an eye-watering £2.8 billion on temporary accommodation over the last year – enough money to have grant-funded 28,000 social rent homes, instead frittered away in just one year.

R is also for racism, and against the troubling context of riots and protests fuelled by ignorance and bigotry, July saw the release of damning research from Herriot-Watt University that shows the housing system produces outcomes that are systemically racist, with families feeling forced to change their names, and disguise their identity and cultures in order to try and access Britain’s crumbling housing and homelessness system.

Well, this has all turned out to be much more depressing than I’d hoped. Merry fricking Christmas. Less than a week to go now, then we can all get back to some semblance of normality after the big annual cutting down trees festival is over.

S is for Standards, Surveyors and Systems

Having overlooked the Decent Homes Standard behind Door 4 and covered quite a lot of the other standards consulted on by government this year, I think I’m just going to reflect on what a difference a couple of them have made to me this year. I’m not great at keeping track of when things happen, so take my timeframes as guidance rather than exact, but the introduction of Awaab’s Law and the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard have completely changed my interactions with my landlord this year.

A couple of years ago, we had a small number of visits from council employees – you’d think I’d pay more attention to who they were, probably surveyors – to go over a number of issues that had been raised. The surveyor, who has now retired, noted some issues with the ventilation in the wetroom and the kitchen – it turns out we’ve never had an extractor fan to the outside in the kitchen, and the wetroom one wasn’t working properly. We also had some damp and black mould in the ‘spare room’ and a possible small leak in the roof somewhere. Promising to get these things resolved, the surveyor left and we never heard anything about them ever again.

I’m strongly confident none of this work ever got done because the surveyor retired. When we talk about data, systems and sometimes IT within the housing sector, it’s about as interesting as discussing paint drying, but the end result of systems that don’t work because they have been designed without the people who use and depend on them is that stuff gets missed.

Fast-forward to 2025 and my stock condition survey picked up all the issues again, but this time, Awaab’s Law was in place, so I got another visit within two weeks to review the issues and make a plan to resolve them. Even as I type Day 19’s scintillating Advent Calendar entry I’m awaiting a visit today to come and make a mess of my kitchen to install ventilation. At least, I think that’s what it’s for. The system that sends texts to remind residents about appointments repeatedly just sends the same unhelpful message informing me the appointment has been made. /shaking my head.

S is for Solar Panels. I have been pleased but slightly surprised to discover that’s what the council will be fitting to the bungalow to make it reach an EPC ‘C’ grade. I would have thought replacing the ever-so-slightly-wonky doors might have been a better first step, but what would I know?

S is also for Stock Condition Surveyors. I was slightly taken aback to realise there are no professional qualifications required to perform them. My stock condition surveyor told me, and furthermore he’s in the process of trying to set up a City and Guilds qualification for it. While this seems like an amazingly good idea, it’s a bit weird there are no Standards for this crucial role that underpins so much of what’s going right – and going wrong – across repairs and maintenance and conduct and competence in the sector.

Anyway. I’ve never had so many visits from my landlord. It’s kind of great, but it’s a shame it’s taken laws and standards to get them to do the basics right.

S is also for Solipsism, Sectoral Myopia, Shelter and Secret jeffing Santa.

T is for Tenant (Satisfaction Measures, Power), Time Travel and Turning The Tanker

Quite a few years before ‘Back to the Future’ and 50-odd years before HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’, Charles Dickens treated us all to the terrifying prospect of time travel. Travellers from the past and future dragged heroic Christmas refugee Ebeneezer Scrooge back and forth along his timeline to show him how much better things would be if only he hadn’t spent so much time enjoying the CEO pay gap. Scrooge offsets his guilt by buying a turkey for hungry people at Christmas and then presumably feeling great about himself for another year.

Wafting along my own threads of time, I recalled this week that a decade ago I was involved with the ‘SHOUT’ campaign for social housing. Then, as now, I was impatient for policy change. While I was hopeful the unassailable economic case the campaign made for building new social rent housing couldn’t be debunked, it felt like the evidence faced too many obstacles based on entrenched political dogma.

“It takes a long time to turn the tanker”, my friend Martin said at the time, and this phrase has stuck with me ever since. Decades of pouring money into benefits rather than bricks can’t be changed overnight, but I’m allowing myself to hope that the Social and Affordable Housing Programme starting in 2026 is at least a tug or two at the front of the ship.

2015 Rob Gershon, while still grumpy and cynical, couldn’t have imagined that only a decade in the future there’d be a redesigned regulatory regime. He’d have scoffed at the Tenant Satisfaction Measures as just a blithe renaming of Key Performance Indicators but would be fascinated that there are multiple instances of groups trying to get tenants some actual power. 2025 Rob hopes 2026 Rob feels a bit more confident about all the regulatory stuff…it feels like it has a long way to go to make any real change and it remains shameful that it has taken deaths and disasters to have prompted it.

2035 Rob is having a good laugh that we’re only two years away from building 1.5 million actual new homes, not some spiv-doctored ‘net additions’ malarkey.

T is also for Treats, Tinsel, Top Trumps, Thinkhouse and Turnips.

U is for Universal Credit, Under-occupation and useless former politicians

Imagine making Michael Gove one of the judges of the 2026 Orwell Prize’s category for ‘Reporting Homelessness’. Causing homelessness would be appropriate, but this feels… sometimes the world seems U is for Upside Down.

Universal Credit and Under-Occupation are entwined, so I have decided to toss a chocolate coin to decide which to mention first. Ever since its inception, Universal Credit has been a driver of poverty, has underpinned the depth and width of the cost of living crisis, and as each year passes with a frozen overall household benefit cap and above-inflation rent rises, leaves people with less and less money to provide basic things their family needs like food, clothes, furniture and most importantly Christmas presents.*

Before the arrival of the Coalition Government and Universal Credit, Trussell (Trust) the foodbank network gave out 20,000 food parcels in 2010. The last couple of years have seen levels more or less around 3,000,000 food parcels, meaning Universal Credit has been a bit factor in a roughly 15,000% increase in ‘food poverty’, which of course is just poverty. Widely misrepresented as generous and easy to access, Universal Credit is a modern travesty.

Under-Occupation was one of the reasons the Coalition Government vaunted for reducing people’s access to the vital funds they needed to meet their housing costs, with the ‘removal of the spare room subsidy’ amongst other measures that have driven the country going down the toilet.** Hilariously, one of the reasons given was to ‘reduce under-occupation’, with claims of ‘workless’ families living in overly large taxpayer-funded homes. Obviously, this was a massive lie, with this year’s ‘Housing Quality’ stats from the government, due for a refresh next month, showing soaring under-occupation in owner-occupied homes and barely any change in the historically low figures in social housing. Indeed, changes to the social security system have seen a sharp spike in overcrowding in social rent homes, something you wouldn’t guess from the current government’s attempts to slash even further the support available to the least wealthy people in the nation. Scrooge would be delighted.

U is not for many other things, but U is valued and loved.

V is for Viability, Vulnerability and Vexatious

The launch of the ‘C’ for Consumer rating for registered providers of social housing has come with such uncertainty and a sense of inconsistency that the other regulatory gradings – G for Governance and V for Viability – no longer feel like the reliable indicators they once were. If a C1 can be awarded for just barely scraping into competence, what does that say about a G1 or a V1? The Viability grading has somehow become Queen, with how an organisation is run and how it treats people feeling like they play second fiddle to whether an organisation is about to topple over financially and end up merged with another. Of course, it’s possible that the C grading is just marked differently than the others, but if so: Why?

V is also for Vulnerability. The ‘V word’. Used almost constantly to describe people when the truth is usually that they have been made vulnerable by a systemic failure or a failure to consider their needs. ‘Vulnerability’ has become a problematic threshold for the provision of homes and services, with ‘protecting the most vulnerable’ a sort of excuse to leave everyone else to their own devices.

V is also for Vexatious, a word we’re potentially going to hear a lot more of as the Social Tenant Access To Information Requirements get settled in. Claiming requests are ‘vexatious’ has long been used to deny Freedom of Information requests and to thwart tenants resolving issues through complaints processes. Once your landlord has failed you so many times that you blow your lid and get angry with them, they can apply to court to reduce the security of your tenancy or insist on only speaking to you through a proxy rather than trying to fix the rage-inducing problems in the first place. Like Vulnerable, Vexatious is a word that often masks a deeper, wider problem.

V is also for Value for Money, the process by which organisations choose the cheapest possible solution and then wonder why it doesn’t work properly. Also, what you get from a free daily alphabetical advent calendar.

W is for Wellbeing, Worklessness and Waiting

Wellbeing ss a completely made up industry designed to make people happy with things that they should rightfully feel miserable about. Whether it’s working with wholly woeful people or feeling you’re weighed down by wretched anchors, sometimes it’s good to feel bad, as we all should at the worst time of year, Wary Christmas. As it’s the festive season, I’ll begrudge a little mindfulness. We all need to look out for ourselves and others, as we should the rest of the year, too.

Worklessness is a completely made up word. It has come to be used as a pejorative term that is rife throughout the housing sector. It puts paid work on a shoddy pedestal and demeans the role of volunteers, the work of unpaid carers and many others caught in unpredictable economic tides. We should celebrate people not having to work as technology and apparently AI make the need for pointless human labour obsolete, but instead we’re forever trying to ‘help’ people back into the trudging monotony of many workplaces to make ourselves feel like we’ve done them a favour. There’s enough money in the world to celebrate worklessness, it’s just been redistributed to psychopaths and tax-reducing investment funds.

W is also for Waiting, which is what you have to do when things go wrong, even though the complaints processes of housing providers have been whittled down to 2 stages. I fondly* remember hearing of one organisation that had a five-stage complaints process in the bad old days. The ‘success’ of the Housing Ombudsman, whose annual spend topped £25 million for the first time in 2025 as a result of employing lots more people, has meant that the wait for a complaint to be resolved has stretched back out to a year, where it briefly shrunk down to six months before efforts to publicise its existence made more tenants aware of it a few years back.

W is also for Wenceslas, Wassailing, Beef and/or Mushroom Wellington and other festive treats. If you aren’t ready for Christmas yet, it’s probably too late. You’re just going to have to W is for Wing It.

Christmas Eve! X, Y, Z! Xenomorphs, Yippee Kay Ay, The Zenith

So we arrive at the Zenith of the 2025 Alphabetical, mostly social housing Advent//ure calendar. I’ve booked my hotel for a few days so that I don’t have to haunt anyone else’s Christmas nor struggle with the ghosts of Christmas past at home. Also, there will be no cooking or washing up. Hopefully you’ve made your preparations for whatever you intend, too. Remember, if you’re under loads of pressure then you might consider doing it differently next year, so you ain’t. Merry Christmas.

With no chance of hoping to stick to my original self-imposed word limit of about 200, let’s not dally, but also let’s not take too long to cover the end of the alphabet and advent with X, Y and Z.

There are quite a lot of words that start with X but I’m not sure any of them really count for housing. That hasn’t stopped me on other days but there’s no time to stretch any analogies with xylophones or xenophobia. Let’s just note these festive instances and move on to Y.

Y is for Yippee Kay Ay, a well-known saying from a great Christmas movie. It’s also the progenitor for absolutely loads of terrible puns – Yule never believe it, Yule learn, Yule be holding your sides so as not to injure your ribs with laughter. Y is for Yarlington Homes, who more than a decade ago had that weird additional conditionality gig going on, like the Bromford Deal and some other organisations that embraced cuts to welfare and stigmatising tenants in line with evidence-free political positions. Yarlington are gone now, rolled up like so many failed organisations into a merged org with a silly name.

Y is also for Yorkshire Housing, who launched an ill-fated TV series in 2018 called ‘Housing Yorkshire’. It purported to follow ‘frontline officers’, like they’re in an army, but intentionally or otherwise ended up portraying most tenants either as targets for saviour complexes or fraudsters. Don’t do that again, eh?

And Z. I’d have ignored it completely if it weren’t for John Townend’s gentle LinkedIn ‘encouragement’. The joy of only having 24 days in an advent calendar is that you can leave out two awkward letters from the 26 total!

Z is for Zenith, the highest pointy bit on a triangle or other form, the supposed nadir of an achievement and one of the greatest British comic books ever penned. As everyone zigzags toward Christmas and the New Year, zipping around buying things, zeroing in on last minute gifts and spending zillions of pounds, I simply can’t think of any Z words. So, it’s time for me to zone out, watch some Zoolander and play some Ziggurat.

That’s it… we’re done here. Bloody Christmas.