Sovereign Housing Association has breached the Home Standard, the latest judgements from the Regulator of Social Housing show.

The Regulator said because of the breach, “there was the potential for serious detriment to Sovereign’s tenants” and will consider the organisation’s governance grading because of it. Currently, Sovereign has a G1/V1 rating.

Sovereign made a self-referral to the regulator after it identified some potentially incomplete data about the number of communal areas it was responsible for.

Having considered the information provided, the regulator concluded that “Sovereign has failed to meet statutory health and safety requirements in relation to communal fire, electrical and asbestos safety”.

On fire safety: “The regulator has learned that for around 2,000 of its blocks, Sovereign did not have a clear record of whether a fire risk assessment (FRA) was required.

“Sovereign is in the process of validating its fire safety data, and as a result of that work has added a number of blocks to its fire inspection programme. At the time of the referral, Sovereign was unable to provide assurance that all properties requiring an FRA had one in place.”

And it was a similar story in other areas of safety.

“Sovereign is also required to ensure that electrical installations are in working and safe condition both at the start and subsequent duration of all tenancies.

“Sovereign has reported to us that for around 2,000 blocks, it did not have a clear record of whether these required a current electrical installation condition report or had previously been inspected.

“For asbestos safety, the evidence provided to the regulator showed that several hundred communal areas had never had an asbestos survey and a similar amount had surveys but not been included in the re-inspection programme.”

The Regulator notes that Sovereign has “already begun an intensive programme of data validation to resolve these issues” and a root cause analysis is also underway.

Mark Washer, CEO at Sovereign, said: “Our customers’ safety is our number one priority. As soon as we uncovered the fact that historic data on communal areas was incomplete, we set in train three major recovery programmes.

“We have been working round the clock to establish both whether our blocks have a communal area that should be subject to checks, and if so whether those checks are up-to-date.

“We have invested over £1.5m in these programmes, and I am pleased that have acted to put this right so quickly. We have completed the overwhelming bulk of inspections, and we will have finished the remaining inspections by the end of February.”

“We have been in contact with the Regulator throughout to ensure complete transparency and we will continue to update them as we conclude these recovery programmes.

“It is completely unacceptable that our data and processes meant we did not have a clear picture of whether our blocks have communal areas and if so if they need safety checks.

“Everyone at Sovereign from the top down has a responsibility to ensure that our processes comply with appropriate legislation and to guarantee the safety of our customers.

“Throughout the recovery programmes we have taken a risk-based approach, ensuring that we focused first on higher-risk blocks and vulnerable customers. But we will continue until every last property we own has up-to-date safety records.

“I recognise that managing data in a large and complex organisation like Sovereign, with over 60,000 homes, and which has been the product of successive mergers presents challenges.

“However, there is no excuse of failing to keep accurate records of a building’s safety. The measures we are putting in place as part of our Building Safety and Compliance Framework must ensure that this can never happen again.”

Other judgements today see Settle Group retain its G1/V1 rating and Aster Group keep its G1/V1 rating on an interim basis after its merger with Central and Cecil.

Hyde Housing retained its G1/V2 rating and ForHousing kept its G2/V1 rating.