Recently the National Audit Office (NAO) completed an investigation into shared ownership, concluding it didn’t really meet any of its original goals around affordability or homeownership for many of those who’d tried it, particularly those now trapped in it. Alongside the Institute for Fiscal Studies April 2026 re-conclusion that the UK’s ‘Help To Buy’ scheme had largely helped people who could already afford to buy a home buy a bigger home, and the current government’s slightly depressing continuation of policies designed to try and get people to vote for them through a combination of similar policies, the outlook for genuinely affordable supply remains bleak.

The remit of the NOA is broad, and it has now announced it is launching an investigation into the “quality of social housing”. The inquiry’s web page claims it will focus on “the quality of existing social housing in England. It will examine whether the reforms to the sector, and to the way it is regulated, are financially sustainable and likely to meet government’s aims for the quality of social housing.”

The three outcomes the report is focussing on are:

• MHCLG’s understanding of the quality of social housing, and its vision and plans for reforming the social housing sector and how it is regulated
• The effectiveness of the system, funding mechanisms and regulatory frameworks in ensuring homes are safe and decent
• The pace and scale of change and outcomes for tenants.

From the most cursory of analysis of these goals, it’s clear the NAO might have taken on something of a Herculean task. While none of the outcomes take many words to summarise, they each represent a wide and deep set of data that cover some very broad policy areas, on topics where some very big government departments operate.

In many ways, this is perfectly normal, and well within the remit of the usual kind of work the NAO is supposed to do: to review the value for money and sustainability of government spending. The first two goals fit neatly within this framework, and the third is something of an anomaly, but one which has potentially important implications for residents.

One of the things that’s interesting about the review is that its focus on policy and government departments means it doesn’t specifically invite input on the actions of individual landlords. No doubt the sector will Welcome the Investigation and Welcome the Report and make all sorts of excuses for why the quality of social housing is still all over the place despite all the areas the NAO highlights as supposedly changing since the Grenfell Tower fire, the death of Awaab Ishak, and the introduction of policies and legislation whose effectiveness is still unclear.

The first objective, reviewing the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s understanding of the quality of social housing, is probably a bit overdue. While it’s true there have been some changes in legislation around the quality and habitability of homes, these responsibilities are currently still left within the regulatory sphere. It’d be enlightening to understand how both the wealth of data, and the continued, public revelations by tenants who are still living in sub-standard accommodation and having to battle intransigent landlords to live somewhere that’s fit for human habitation fit into the overall picture at the ministry.

The research also looks to discover the ministry’s “vision and plans for reforming the social housing sector and how it is regulated”. It will surely need a careful consideration of the scope of these plans (and this vision) to produce any meaningful data, but at least someone is asking whether there are any. Even in the wake of regulatory changes, it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether there’s enough joined-up, strategic thinking going on.

Fans of social housing regulation (raise your hands in the air) will be delighted with the second bullet point, as “the funding mechanisms and regulatory framework for ensuring homes are safe and decent” covers a whole raft of work done at the Housing Ombudsman, Regulator of Social Housing, probably the Building Safety Regulator and likely some other places, too.

It will be interesting to see what the NAO makes of a pointless Tenant Satisfaction Measures system, a set of consumer gradings that only go as high as “people are doing their jobs properly” and an ever-increasing caseload of complaints that landlords are incapable of resolving themselves that have had to be escalated to the ombudsman.

The focus on ‘Learning Lessons’ is admirable, but maybe it’s time that the new powers divested in the regulatory regime are actually used to bring incompetent landlords with poor conduct into line. Maybe someone could even introduce some kind of measures to deal with the ongoing, seemingly insoluble issues around landlord conduct and competence?

The third bullet point deviates a little from the usual business of the NAO. They’re planning to investigate “the pace and scale of change and outcomes for tenants”.

It’s here there are opportunities for tenants to make representations to the NAO around whether the money currently being spent on a bigger, not necessarily better regulatory regime, a bunch of policies that arguably haven’t made as much difference to the lived experience of residents or communities as they ought, and the continued absence of any meaningfully independent tenant presence are good value or not.

Maybe it’d be a better use of landlord’s money to reduce the contribution towards the cost of the ombudsman and the regulator by 25p or 50p each and for landlords to chip into a big pot of money they have no access to or control over to fund an independent tenant group.

Perhaps the money spent on operating a set of Tenant Satisfaction Measures that offer no way of telling whether one landlord is doing better than another could be put to better use paying for tenants to sit on the board of the Regulator of Social Housing or setting up a food pantry for underpaid housing association CEOs.

Whatever ways you think things could be better, you can now suggest them to the NAO by sending your response to the study by email, to [email protected]

(Quis Custodiet is part of a Latin quote: “Quis Custodiet ipsos Custodes?” which translates to something like “Who will guard the guards themselves?” or “Who will watch the watchmen?”. I stuck part of it in the title, suggesting you could feasibly ask “Who regulates the Regulators?” Further information on the quote can be found on Wikipedia, or probably some wildly inaccurate interpretation of it will get thrown up if you shovel it into some AI.)