By Rob Gershon, HQN associate

I want to make one thing clear at the start of this piece: the housing minister, Steve Reed, buckling once again under pressure from social landlords isn’t just about whether the new Decent Homes Standard (DHS) includes an expectation for homes having serviceable flooring.

I have two underlying reasons for this train of thought. The first is that this represents a betrayal of tenants – not in some abstract manner but in the terms of the foreword of the announcement about the DHS. The second is that it continues to undermine the goals of the Regulation of Social Housing Act, and its – loudly trumpeted but difficult to see in practice – claims that power will be rebalanced between landlords and tenants.

Obviously omitting flooring from the standard isn’t featured in the bluster of the wider policy announcement, which you can read here. Nevertheless it has quickly drawn criticism from charities such as End Furniture Poverty and has produced a thorough look at the practical issues from Middle Ground author ‘Joe Carpenter’.

Joe’s detailed look at it brings one of the main issues the government has overlooked to light: not every home is going to need a complete flooring replacement every time the tenancy changes hands or a home becomes void.

When I wrote about floorings and furnishings last year here at HQN, we already knew that the National Housing Federation was lobbying to leave tenants without decent flooring based on some really shaky assumptions. Landlords like Sovereign Network Group, named as one of the landlords who lobbied hardest to leave tenants in the cold and with potential additional risks to children, older people and disabled people, quoted some pretty wild costs to replace flooring.

In order to dissuade the government from making homes actually decent, social landlord lobbyists made the replacement of the flooring sound much more expensive than it actually would be. The Decent Homes Standard wouldn’t mandate that every home would need an expensive, new flooring replacement, as landlords claim.

Indeed, the new standard goes out of its way to ensure that homes are assessed based on their condition, rather than any assumptions made because of the age of the homes, their kitchens or other facilities. This allows a much-needed degree of flexibility that ensures that landlords aren’t making things more expensive for themselves and for tenants, such as when they automatically rip floors out of homes when they become empty for no good reason.

Put simply, a mandatory floor covering need not mean a new floor covering, as the chief executives and chief finance officers and senior staff at the National Housing Federation claim. While they are celebrating long-term above-inflation rent rises alongside denuding housing conditions for tenants, I wonder what the NHF’s ‘Together With Tenants’ group have to say? At times like these, the tenant bodies the government does find acceptable – the regulator’s ‘expert panel’ and the ombudsman’s Resident Panels – are nowhere to be seen, or heard.

It’s a pretty rare day that I miss Michael Gove being Secretary of State for Housing, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have crumbled under this kind of disingenuous policy intervention from some vocal social landlords who – let’s face it – need laws to force them to make homes decent for people to live in.

This total absence of consultation with tenants in a collective sense, sidelined once again in policy decisions, is particularly frustrating because it would’ve allowed a much more intelligent, nuanced debate about homes than dismissing floor coverings has done. Tenants understand that not every home, or every tenant, needs new flooring. Unlike landlord lobbyists they’re capable of understanding that some people need help with floorings and furnishings and some do not. A simple, human conversation would establish what the actual costs for landlords would be in each case. When I spoke to tenants for my previous piece, it was clear they all felt that if tenants wanted to provide their own flooring, they should be allowed to. As amazing as it might seem, many tenants might not want the generic, bulk-bought floorings some faceless bean-counter at their landlord would choose.

While the small group of tenants I spoke to had differing views about the provision of floorings, they all broadly agreed that where the need is greatest – families fleeing domestic abuse, families without enough money to feed their children (often because their rents keep going up faster than inflation) and homes where the floor coverings are unusable or dangerous – would be the main target of any changes within the DHS.

As rare as it is for the current government to make a U-turn, they should rethink this exclusion from the Decent Homes Standard, based on the evidence of the actual implications rather than claims from landlord bodies.