From the King’s Speech to leadership jostling to continuing announcements about practice and policy, the sense of momentum that things might be happening around the sector is high, but Rob Gershon wonders whether it’s more sound and fury, signifying nothing?

The ink had barely dried on the quill used to scratch the King’s Speech back on 13 May before a raft of other announcements seemed to jostle for attention in the housing world. On 22 May, Andy Burnham did a half-hour podcast with Voicescape where he claimed he’d spend the entire £39bn housing budget on social housing. Keir Starmer wrote a dull blog in the Guardian on 1 June re-stating all the lacklustre policies he’s spent the last two years talking about but not doing, and just this week Britain’s troubled Daily Express newspaper suggested the prime minister is going to make five attempts to beat off Andy Burnham, which sounds like the worst reality TV idea possible.

If Announcing Things was an Olympic sport, the current government would be giving the previous one a run for its money on the medals table. We shouldn’t ignore areas where policy changes are good – scrapping the two-child benefit cap, tweaking Local Housing Allowance rates and generally committing to spend money on housing – but as easy as it is to turn announcements into soundbites to make them look good, most of the actual policy changes don’t go as far as they could, and certainly not as far as they should to solve the causes of problems rather than tinkering with the effects.

Already the disparity between what the government has said and what it does is starting to prevent getting the work done needed to solve the housing crises, with the National Housing Federation having to go back to the Treasury to beg them to release the money from the oft-quoted but rarely handed out £39 billion  “Affordable” Housing Programme. The Treasury’s reluctance to make the necessary investment in housing is a direct result of the government attempting to live within the completely made-up fiscal rules of the last government it has senselessly chosen to commit to – except when it doesn’t want to for spending on defence and policing riots it hasn’t exactly done much to prevent happening in the first place.

There’s the prospect of some change in the regulatory sphere, with the Regulator of Social Housing announcing two initiatives over the last few weeks that bizarrely might conflict with each other. The first initiative actually seems pretty reasonable: the regulator has appointed an “independent research consortium” to carry out an evaluation of the consumer standards that have been operating since the Regulation of Social Housing Act went live in 2024.

This approach is laudable and, for people like me who don’t think the new powers have really been put to the test yet, an opportunity to ask questions again about the wide gap between tenant experiences and the repeat customers in the Housing Ombudsman’s spotlight and maladministration reports and the glowing reviews from the regulator. Pleasingly, the range of people that will be contacted to contribute to this review will not include landlords, who have a bit of a habit of flooding the zone with hubris and flattery whenever most consultations come about.

In some ways it’s a shame there’s not a specific ask about the effectiveness of the TSMs, or whether there’s really any point in continuing with them at all, but they are a feature of the new regime so the regulator should welcome feedback on them. Originally intended to allow tenants to compare their landlords against others, the regulator has made it clear that this isn’t what they’re for any more. On top of this, there’s no standardised method of collecting, analysing or reporting the data, so it risks feeling more…manicured…than analytical.

Thanks to being outsourced, that review at least feels impartial, unlike the one the regulator announced on 9 June, which feels like it’s in direct response to some political nonsense from Steve Reed, the current Secretary of State of Red Baseball Caps and Housing, following his odd directive to the regulator in April, insisting that it becomes partially responsible for the failure to deliver enough homes by getting it to interfere in how independent housing association boards set and monitor targets for how many homes they’re going to build.

There were some really good reasons that the Homes and Communities Agency was split into two, to separate the insatiable, politicised grift of appearing to provide more and more homes from the need to protect tenants from the terrible conditions that really weren’t in the public domain back then. The Grenfell Tower fire, now approaching its ninth anniversary, had happened, prompting some change, but the embarrassing reality of the terrible conditions so many tenants were forced to live in because of a systemic failure of repairs, maintenance and common or garden recordkeeping only came to light after ITV got involved.

This politically motivated move to re-involve the regulator with the responsibilities that are supposed to be handled by Homes England feels faintly embarrassing in itself. Previous attempts to get government departments to drive supply were part of the reason that the quality of homes people lived in fell by the wayside, and a factor amongst the causes of the Grenfell fire itself. Wantonly returning to a model that pitches quality against quantity feels foolish, if not reckless.

While the messaging is supposed to be reassuring, that improving supply will not deprecate the regulator’s ability to ensure landlords are providing quality homes, this runs against much of the pitch we’ve been thrown over the last few years – that the RSH doesn’t have the resources to make use of all the new powers it was given under the Regulation of Social Housing Act. Pointless TSMs, a lack of ambition in the consumer gradings for anything beyond basic levels of competence and the continued absence of any kind of realistic tenant input at a strategic level don’t feel like the greatest of ingredients for this performative cake.