In the year 1969, prescient ‘rock-pop duo’ Zager and Evans released their most one-hit of wonders, ‘In The Year 2525’. Viewable on Youtube where the pre-MTV music film looks like it was shot at a cheap prototype of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the song was a contemporary work of science fiction, at number one in the charts during both the first moon landing and the Woodstock festival, it says on Wikipedia.

Also seeming to lean on Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel ‘Brave New World’, the song foretells a post-truth society where independent thought is eradicated and the nature and form of humanity is eroded as machines take over stuff, like answering customer complaints and writing policy documents. I mean, that’s probably what they meant when they sang “Your legs got nothing to do, Some machine is doin’ that for you”.

“What the living hells does this have to do with punting the responsibilities of the Decent Homes Standard another 10 years into the future?”, I hear you ask**.

In order to maintain its musical coherence, the song repeats a rhyming set of years, beginning with 2525 and skipping thousands of years forwards through the development of society-destroying technologies that have happily only taken humans a few decades to perfect in reality. It certainly hasn’t taken us until 3535 to eradicate truth, as any good housing comms team knows, and 6565 is distinctly pessimistic for the introduction of test-tube babies, sketched out by Huxley in 1932 and first plopped into an actual test-tube in 1978.

Making up years in the far future for bad things to happen, as the song proves, has been around for ages, so the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Government insisting the Decent Homes Standard doesn’t have to be in place until 2035 is not a new technique. Given the paucity of new policy expectations for landlords within the actual policy, it risks being a work of dystopian science fiction itself. As Zager and Evans predicted, profound untruth and political uncertainty make it unclear what kind of future government will be in place in even one decade’s time, let alone a thousand of them.

It’s already been nearly six years since the publication of the Social Housing Green Paper, and since then the Regulator of Social Housing has repeatedly been telling the sector it regulates not to wait for legislation to be better landlords. Nobody really took heed of this advice and so now we all have to pretend the publication of the Decent Homes Standard is the starting point for improvements to be considered, planned and maybe delivered.

Meanwhile, private landlords will be scratching their heads pondering what kind of charlatans would rent out a home without flooring, or for that matter, furniture. The statistics might say they have further to go on overall decency, but at least they aren’t complicit in a systemic approach that will leave trip hazards, thermal inefficiency and general discomfort in the immediate path of their tenants. Add to this pushing tenants further into poverty and forcing domestic abuse survivors into a new kind of controlling relationship they have no power over as they’re expected to live in bare boxes and you’d be forgiven for starting to wonder who the tenure good guys are.

It’s not all bad news, for “In the years 7510, 8510 and 9595” Zager and Evans paint a picture of mankind facing divine retribution for its abuse of technology, biological meddling and the deployment of nudge theory in customer services systems. Whether by some assumed deity or just through its own disinclination to hurry up with the decent homes thing and have some proper competence and conduct standards, the species is tidily extinguished because it has “taken everything this old earth can give, and… ain’t put back nothing”. Woah-oh.

In The Year 2525’s main power, like Huxley’s magnum opus before it, is that it sketches out how bad things could be, not how bad they have to be. Just because the IT department is busy building machines that turn lies into the truth doesn’t mean a profound change in the focus of organisational culture can’t occur elsewhere; to fit some carpet, stop pretending damp and mould is a mystery that can be solved with a wash and some paint and divest some actual power over procurement, and maybe recruitment, to the communities you work in.

**What? This dystopian hellscape isn’t going to write itself without some kind of narrative hook. Honestly, delving into humanity’s depressing rock history and gazing into its potentially depressing housing futures is something you can hardly expect an AI to do, so I’ve gone with this more anthropomorphic approach.