Last week (27 July to 2 August 2026) was another of those weeks that contained a slew of housing news.

The appointment of a newish team at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Biscuits prompted ongoing speculation about whether the newish government finally understands the housing brief.

The Housing Ombudsman Service released not one but two impactful reports – one on its duty to monitor compliance against the Complaint Handling Code and one on the shape of STAIRs; oh, and the outgoing Housing Ombudsman, Richard Blakeway, gave a cool interview to the Residents’ Network in an HQN podcast you can hear here.

The regulator published its ‘Regulatory Casework Review 2026‘, which highlights all the themes of things that landlords are getting wrong, but everyone is too polite to talk about, as well as some of the good stuff.

Basically, there’s still loads of stuff that landlords do that needs to change before trust can be rebuilt with residents.

Against this backdrop, the trade body for housing associations, the National Housing Federation, made its own announcement concerning its new Code of Conduct for 2026. It’s only been four years since the previous Code of Conduct in 2022 but it’s not too soon for it to have been overhauled in favour of attempting to place residents as a more central concern when it comes to the ways housing associations operate and make decisions.

For years landlords have been saying ‘tenants/residents are at the heart of everything we do’ but it’s the kind of stale mantra that sits alongside ‘8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas’, or ‘Carlsberg: Probably the best beer in the world‘. It’s just PR fluff that has little meaning. While some landlords are making a genuine effort to change, many are not, and it’s into this environment the new code arrives.

I want to say some nice things about it because it does make an effort to centre residents in a way that’s been missing from National Housing Federation priorities since forever. This absence has become ever more glaring as scandal, squalor, maladministration and tragedy rock a sector that sometimes feels like it’s trying to carry on regardless hoping it’ll all pass.

Change has finally been prompted, most likely by the long-trailed upcoming implementation of the regulator’s ‘Competence and Conduct’ Consumer Standard, which was going to be an obscure, pointless subsection but is now, thankfully, going to get its own standard (maybe it’s not pointless filling out government department consultations after all).

A review of the way staff and board members behave is therefore welcome against the changing regulatory backdrop and the gap between what providers say they cherish and what they often prioritise chasing – rent and service charges.

There’s a very big problem with the 2026 Code, though: it sets out to tell ‘Involved Residents’ how to behave. After checking to make sure it wasn’t April the 1^st or that I’d somehow misread it, I was astonished to discover that many sections of the code expect involved residents to adhere to mandated types of behaviour in the same way staff and board members do.

There are some wishy-washy carve-outs in the introduction of the document that make it clear landlords only have to include the bits of the code they want to (ikr), and this includes if or how they apply to ‘involved residents’:

“The code is intended to apply to residents who have a formal role in the housing association’s governance, scrutiny or decision-making arrangements, such as scrutiny panel members, resident committee members or residents who attend board or committee meetings. Each housing association should decide, after appropriate local consultation, which involved resident roles are covered by the code. Other resident groups may choose to adopt this code – or aspects of it – adapt it for their own purposes, or operate under their own code of conduct.”

The fundamental problem is involved residents are not the same as staff. They can sometimes be board members, where a code should apply, but formalising the behaviour of usually unpaid volunteers in the same way you do employees is entirely inappropriate. It removes the independence and agency of involved residents because the code seeks to protect the reputation and confidentiality of housing associations above other considerations.

Personally, I’m a fan of involved resident groups. There’s some – justifiable – concern out in the wider world about whether they’re really a solution to anything, because their agendas, scrutiny topics and general formation are often controlled by landlords; but, despite this, I’ve seen some landlord behaviours forced to change over the years and even these formalised structures used in a quietly subversive way to change priorities in favour of residents. Any possibility of that kind of action will be prevented from happening ever again if landlords sign up to a code that prescribes tenant and resident behaviour.

Certainly, in that same time I’ve seen some effective resident groups wrapped up and closed down by landlords because they challenge the organisational narrative. You could say that this new code will prevent that happening, but only because it bakes in obedience from the start.

Amongst other things, ‘Involved Residents’ rules cover:

B5 “When representing the housing association through any medium, including social media, you must at all times act with professionalism.” This blurs the line between resident and landlord.

C1 “You must formally declare to the housing association, at the earliest opportunity, any interests, roles and relationships that could – or could reasonably be perceived to – affect your ability to act in the best interests of residents as a whole and of the housing association; you must make sure that these interests do not interfere with your ability to carry out your role effectively.” This could become deeply controlling if ‘involved residents’ seek to act in the best interests of residents in a way landlords don’t like. Where residents might be involved with work on panels or boards for the regulator or ombudsman or campaigning for a national body, this would potentially exclude them from also being able to act as an involved resident at their landlord – a pointless, counter-productive distinction.

C2 is equally odd, making any ‘relationship’ to a resident or customer something that must be formally declared. Who gets to decide on what basis residents can and can’t have friendships and relationships and whether they influence how tenants think? It’s ridiculous, as are most stipulations in section C covering ‘conflicts of interest’. Compounded they represent a limiting and controlling approach to the work involved residents do.

Section D on bribery, gifts and hospitality seems to have been written in a cultural vacuum, where only involved residents “must not seek or accept preferential treatment in the provision of housing or related services”. Apparently, it’s fine for staff and board members.

Although all the sections grate in relation to residents, Sections O and Q are others that stand out as particularly inappropriate. Given the pushback on any staff below senior management needing a qualification under the regulator’s Competence and Conduct standard, it’s surprising to see involved residents expected to maintain continuous professional development at all times.

It all feels a little like harking back to the days of ‘welfare reform’, when some landlords jumped in with both feet to set higher levels of conditionality on residents for the way they should live their day-to-day lives. It’s not quite as morally dubious as that, but telling tenants how to behave, and what they can and can’t do in public, flies in the face of an era where there’s a possibility there might be a genuinely independent national tenant body.

It’s difficult to know where this terrible idea has come from. We never seem to hear publicly from the National Housing Federation’s ‘Together With Tenants’ team whenever there are policy issues or problems to discuss, so perhaps this is another occasion where they’re rubber-stamping what landlords have already decided.

I welcome the Code for Staff and Board Members. As official, usually paid representatives of landlords, it’s about time many of them altered the way they think and talk about residents. Mandating the behaviour of residents, however, is inappropriate and anachronistic, and should either be stripped out of the code or ignored by landlords who value the challenge that formalised groups should be able to provide, privately and publicly. Anything else stinks of bowing to entrenched power for all concerned.

The optics of landlords telling residents what to say and how to behave is bad enough, but the detail in the code makes it worse. Many formal frameworks already struggle with informal external criticism, and this venture risks making tenant involvement an elite but subservient sport.