Members only

By Rob Gershon

It’s been a while since I’ve watched any government committee evidence sessions, but I made an exception for the recent Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) sessions on the Regulation of Social Housing a couple of months ago. It’s a key time as the details of the Social Housing White Paper – previously but apparently no longer referred to as the Charter for Social Housing Residents – have finally been proposed as draft legislation.

The hearings have come about in response to an ITV News team investigation. The committee session on 14 March was attended by ITV’s Daniel Hewitt, who was keen to credit his hardworking production team and researchers, and two tenants with shocking but no longer surprising stories of disrepair and mistreatment from their respective social landlords.

The testimony of Angela Price, a tenant of Guinness Partnership, and Nicole Walters, whose landlord is Southwark Council, should prompt wider discussion – but, honestly, I don’t know how many times we can repeat the same calls for landlords to review processes or consider protocols when it’s clear there have been familiar breakdowns in competence, communication and culture.

The new Secretary of State for the LUHC has finally managed to publish the first inklings of what the future consumer regulation of social housing will look like. This means that some of the questions about what can be done about failing landlords can start to be answered. ‘Highlights’ include naming and shaming landlords and the establishment of a 250-strong resident panel whose role feels a bit unclear at first glance. Unlimited fines for landlords failing regulatory standards sound promising but may now only apply to commercial landlords.

This isn’t going to be a piece about my assessment or opinion of what’s in the legislation or in the accompanying guff published by the LUHC. That might come later but has already attracted the usual fervent welcoming from around the housing sector. It’s been pleasing to see that many landlord and resident bodies, along with a few others, have been keen to promote passing the legislation as early as possible.

I thought it’d be interesting to reflect on some of the steppingstones that got us here, so this is my personal history of some of the stops along the way. It won’t cover the creation and failure of the Tenant Services Authority, National Tenant Voice and other things from the ancient histories of 2010 and before. It also won’t be a comprehensive account of how the legislation came about as I wasn’t at a lot of it. It’s certainly not about taking credit for any of it because, as I hope this account will show, most of the touchstones were collaborative efforts from all kinds of people who didn’t always agree with each other and hopefully still don’t.

I’ll largely be leaving out the names of individuals in service to harmony and in case I can’t remember names or how to spell them. This preserves as much confidentiality as possible for the few things that happened in quiet, not public, meetings without minutes. A few meetings I attended, some I heard about and some are simply dark whispers that make their way from one person to the next. Although vague or rumoured in some cases, where the details from these turned out to provide context, I’ve let some of them waft around here.

It’s not right to tie all debates about what should change in the relationship between tenants, landlords and government into the Grenfell Tower fire, but the blunt truth of it is that there wouldn’t have been any reflection on safety,  landlord cultures and practices and the ignorant way in which many tenants are treated, were it not for the fire. I’d only worked in and around tenant-landlord stuff for a year and a half at HQN’s Residents’ Network prior to the fire but trying to get landlords to voluntarily improve things by including communities in decision-making was rarely easy, especially in a government policy environment where commercial purposes are valued above social ones.

When it came, the fire felt like a personal failure to me, or by me; or at the very least as if something fundamental in the whole structure of how the ‘co-regulation’ model worked had failed and would have to be taken apart and put back together. It felt immediately like the failures were systemic and that, separate to the fire safety issues, the light-touch approach to consumer regulation would have to change.

That was how it felt in 2017, and it’s uncomfortable to think that it’s taken nearly five years for government policy proposals to address these problems. But that’s where we are.

One of the first waypoints along this tale was the Social Housing Green Paper, but it didn’t come about by magic.

The ‘Voice for Tenants’ group was… well… it wasn’t really set up, it just kind of fell together in 2017 as a range of people who felt the need to do something to get the government to prompt change. The power imbalance between tenants and landlords that’d contributed to what happened at Grenfell had been a wider conversation in the ‘resident engagement’ sector for a long time prior to 2017. I was one of the people at the meetings and without a doubt one of the least active participants in the wider project. Other more long-standing activists and tenants drew on years of experience to try and shape what we should ask for.

It was pretty chaotic, with people having different views about how things should be done and a real tension between a heartfelt sense of injustice and the need to make proposals that wouldn’t alienate ministers: the kind of trade-off it’s easy to criticise landlords for, but one that reinforces how much power the government (politicians and civil servants) still holds in the way things work too.

The much-vaunted ministerial roadshows that ran in 2017 and 2018, putting tenants in rooms with housing ministers and civil servants, was the idea of this bunch, and a lot of the event admin was undertaken by its more dedicated members. A dozen or so meetings over a number of months inevitably meant three different housing ministers were in post and got to hear what residents thought directly.

Each meeting at various places up and down England was preceded by local senior landlord staff meeting the ministerial team, but nobody ever talked about what topics were discussed in those meetings. In Basingstoke, an animated Dominic Raab emerged from his telling the roomful of tenants to “think about their experience as customers” which produced a sort of collective eyeroll.

What struck me at the two events I facilitated at was that, as well as volunteers like me, each table had a scribe from the civil service. My recollection is that they often couldn’t help but get involved in the discussions themselves. Sometimes this was by giving really useful detail about how some of the issues we were discussing are dealt with inside departments. Sometimes it was by joining in with their stories about their own housing experiences.

I don’t want to romanticise it as some bridging of vastly different cultures, but I’ll always remember – fondly, if I’m honest – kind of sitting back and hearing tables of people all around in earnest conversations about the bad, the ugly and some of the good of what it’s like to have to deal with landlords, government policy and other real-life stuff.

The roadshows were accompanied by a national online consultation from the ministry asking tenants to directly feed their experiences into the internet to shape the Green Paper.  Alongside this, organisations like TPAS and HQN’s Residents’ Network and lots of others brought tenants, staff and sometimes officials and civil servants together to give slightly more technical input from those already working in tenant engagement, involvement and co-regulation.

In the earlier parts of these activities I was still months away from the things that eventually brought me into contact with Shelter and Grenfell United, but whether the meetings were geographically near Kensington and Chelsea or many miles away, there was a feeling I still can’t quite describe that combined a sense of tragedy, sadness, disappointment, bitterness, empathy, hope and a determination to put right what had gone wrong.

I was invited to join the Shelter Commission in large part because of what I’d written about the first ministerial roadshow I helped at. There weren’t supposed to be writers, journalists or whatever at these things but nobody had told me. I wrote a frank account of my experience of it for 24housing and, as I later heard it, Alok Sharma walked into where the civil servants worked the next day, brandishing a printed out copy of it and demanding to know what the hell this was, or words to that effect.

I put right some minor factual details I had got wrong, but I risked the ire of the minister and the department by leaving the piece online. I heard later from both organisers and attendees of future roadshow events that it helped them prepare for what to expect and to get questions and the points they wanted to raise addressed. I didn’t feel bad about what I’d written, and while I was actually told off at a Voice for Tenants meeting about it, I apologised for the upset it’d caused but I didn’t feel remotely sorry or guilty about the content. I also may or may not have heard from a civil servant scribe at the second event I attended that the piece had been useful for some of them, too, but obviously I wouldn’t get anyone into trouble by saying so.

Back when 24housing magazine still existed and I was semi-regularly contributing blogs to its online version, I didn’t really get much of a sense of feedback to what I’d written. Sometimes it prompted discussion on Twitter; sometimes I’d be pleasantly surprised that people would ask me about some of it, when I still used to go to housing events. While I relished the chance to write from a tenant perspective, only once do I remember asking 24 staff how many people had read what I’d written. That’s not why I did it.

The slightly laboured point I’m trying to make is that I’d made some friends, some online, and made quite a few contacts through the things I wrote, attended and interjected myself into online. Nevertheless, it still surprised me that some of this contact got me into an informal chat about the Shelter Commission with Greg Beales and Kate Webb, who were working for Shelter at the time, where I bluntly said if they were just thinking of having token tenants as part of the commission I wasn’t interested. I probably thought I was being rebellious or something but in hindsight I probably seemed unnecessarily righteous. A quarter of the eventual commissioners were tenants: Samia Badhani, David John Tovey, Grenfell United’s Ed Daffarn and me making up four of the 16.

If there’s value in reflecting on the detail of my experience of the commission it won’t be here, for fear of adding thousands more words. The output still feels like the most important thing: a series of chapters that deal with most of our current housing crises, with an entire chapter dedicated to making sure the future regulation of social housing placed the same importance on how people are treated and how their issues are dealt with as on the regulation of landlords’ financial viability and governance. For councils these things aren’t currently regulated anyway, and the commission’s ask was that regulation could be extended to various council setups and to private landlords too.

While the tenant commissioners had been the ones to prompt inclusion of ideas for regulation, and separately for placing more emphasis on tenant voice and issues at a national level, these things still had to be agreed with all the other commissioners before they could make it into the final report. This might seem like a minor detail, but to my mind it was an indicator that an admittedly small representative sample of people from across the political and policy spectrum could see the value of laws and regulations being implemented, so something positive and long-lasting could come out of the tragedy that convened the commission in the first place.

The joy of having celebrity commissioners and well-known think-tankers was that they could go off and do the press and policy stuff when the final report was released in January 2019. For my part, I got invited to a number of meetings and events through the commission and in the vein of work I was doing at HQN’s Residents’ Network, but things felt different for me now.

During the previous year I’d unceremoniously dumped myself out of the Voice for Tenants group, in part because I didn’t have time to be a full-time unpaid carer, a Shelter commissioner and much else. This was in advance of the Voice For Tenants’ idea essentially becoming pointless anyway – we’d put a proposal to government for them to do some work to find out what a tenant body they could work with would look like, and the whole thing had been delayed at first and eventually shut down by Kit Malthouse while he was busy trying to float the idea Brexit could work and angling to become the next leader of his party. Priorities, and all that.

A few things happened at the actual launch of the Shelter report. Firstly, the equipment that connected my voice to the recording machines didn’t work properly so I was saved from featuring in any media stuff – a great relief. I struck up a conversation with someone there from the National Housing Federation and we agreed to meet later for a long chat about what became Together With Tenants. I got to catch up with some of the people I’ve made friends with, and I was asked by someone I’d previously met who worked at the RSH if I’d like to apply to be a non-executive board member of it.

My initial response was to laugh – I mean, it was just before I was due to speak and I was a nervous wreck – but I remember rather weakly explaining that I was busy with other stuff like being a carer, and I attempted to fob off the question by saying I’d look at it later. Right then in that moment I was pretty sure I’d not go away and look at it later: it felt like much too grown-up a responsibility and my immediate sense of it was that taking it on would mean I couldn’t blog, tweet or moan about stuff in public.

Once the commission was over and I wasn’t spending my time poring over supplemental research documents, bringing together a regulatory roundtable and trying to convince landlords that they were going to have to change the whole focus of how they do stuff, I realised I’d have a little bit more time on my hands. I asked a few people I trusted what they thought of the idea of my applying and they were both helpful and not helpful at the same time. The central quandary was that I wanted to do it because it would be something pragmatic with an opportunity to actually change things, but there was an equal downside in that it’d remove my independence, my ability to address anything in public and specifically my ability to criticise government in any way, shape or form

I applied for the job despite my misgivings and I’m not sure my recollection of the process of interview can really be trusted. I didn’t get the job, and I don’t want to give the impression that I was delighted about this because it meant I could retain my freedom. This happens to be true, but I did also mourn the opportunity to change the shape of the regulator’s board. I felt like the interview had gone well but I was at pains to point out that whether *I* got the job or not, they really needed to employ someone who could see things directly from a tenant’s perspective.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this still hasn’t happened. I’d been equal parts wanting and not-wanting to get the job, and I was relieved in the end that I didn’t – but everyone would say that, wouldn’t they? The decision of who was appointed was eventually delegated to Kit Malthouse, and I suspect I hadn’t exactly covered myself in glory with some of my previous tweets to or about him – tweets I don’t regret but would’ve deleted if appointed, I suppose.

It took months for them to tell me I hadn’t got the job, and while I wasn’t exactly moderating my views in the meantime, a kind of malaise had set in for me at the lack of proactive change going on amongst landlords. The regulator had already started to say landlords didn’t have to wait for legislation or regulation, and even now the draft legislation is out, a lot of landlords still haven’t grasped that this means them. Yes, you.

Just as I stopped being able to balance my personal pragmatism with my enormous disappointment, I slipped off a kerb and broke my femur into three bits, conveniently taking me away from housing policy gubbins and conferences and into surgery, physiotherapy and rehabilitation.

Although I’d often felt painfully awkward on the Shelter Commission – probably hiding it with always reading everything and having an opinion on everything – I’d struck up some conversational friendships there which meant that I was the person who arranged the meeting in the pub after the commission was finished. It wasn’t exactly celebratory, but I think we all felt we’d produced something balanced, fair and comprehensive. That evening was, I think, one of the times I spoke to Ed Daffarn to tell him that whatever came next I’d always make time to help him and Grenfell United with any future stuff about the commission, housing regulation or anything else where my skills and knowledge might have some value.

Ed was one of the people I’d confided in about the regulator board job, and he’d seemed happier than most when I hadn’t got it. I suppose from his point of view this meant we didn’t have to contest things from different sides of the table on policy and regulation. At some point in 2019, what was still the Ministry for Communities, Housing and Local Government started to have informal meetings about the future shape of regulation and the regulator.

In addition to the ministerial roadshows and other consultations that’d taken place by this point, the ministry started specifically looking to get an idea of what the future shape of social housing regulation should look like. One of the ways they did this was to sound out the views of Grenfell United. GU have always been clear that their aim is to hold the government and other institutions to account, and to make changes to the way things are in the housing sector so that other residents cannot be failed so easily.

Having worked with Ed and Shelter, some of whose staff attended a series of these meetings, I was invited along, too, to help continue the ask for regulatory change. Reflecting on it, these meetings included some senior staff from government departments, and to my mind they were one of the key places where actual pragmatic policy suggestions were proposed and discussed to inform what the Social Housing White Paper should look like.  I’m pretty terrible at remembering the dates of things that took place, but this must have been in the later part of 2019 because I was still hobbling around on crutches, navigating physio and pain management.

We still can’t tell exactly what shape the legislation and regulations will take in the White Paper, or, more importantly, what the outcomes it produces will be. It’s my opinion that the dedication of some Grenfell residents in becoming self-taught experts in the technical and labyrinthine nature of housing regulation, consumer standards and the politics of it all has meant the proposals have the potential to be better than they otherwise might.

In the event of the proposed legislation, the March 2022 White Paper doesn’t feel quite so solid. It still retains a lot of the ideas given it by tenants from across the country, but I can’t help but feel that it lacks the same focus and ambition as the Green Paper or Charter. The actual changes to primary legislation were always going to be fairly thin – offering scope for later statutory changes and the design of the consumer regulations to shape how things will work, but there’s still something gently underwhelming about what’s actually written down.

My hope – I still have some – is that we’re entering the phase where tenants, landlords and government types can have grown-up conversations about what things need to look like so that we aren’t trapped in a cycle of committee hearings prompted by ITV and other news investigations highlighting how bad things that still haven’t changed are.

I feel like I’ve some justification for this hope, too – I’m still struggling to re-engage with the work I did before to try and make landlords and their relationships better, but I accept that a lot of the things that aren’t legislation yet will be designed after the bill starts to be improved and debated.

I’m currently so busy with being a carer that I’m having to make choices about what things I spend time doing, but I’m sure – and for all you know I’ve been told it in a secret meeting – there’s scope to start designing and shaping the forthcoming consumer regulations so that tenants of social landlords can be reassured they’ll receive at least the same kind of protections from failures and quality problems as people who buy a mobile phone in a shop.