By Michael Savell
Nothing less than total reform will cure the problems with housing. For the last several years I have been involved with SHAC as its Treasurer, and have occasionally contributed to the various Whatsapp groups answering questions and commentating on the problems that tenants and leaseholders have with their landlords.
It is very clear that it doesn’t matter whether you are a leaseholder, shared ownership leaseholder, or a tenant with a guaranteed tenancy; the problems we face are the same. Remote and unaccountable landlords, limited routes available for justice, especially for “social housing” tenants, and a total lack of control over rising costs.
Growth Over Social Purpose
Housing associations seem more interested in growing through acquiring smaller and more vulnerable associations without sorting out fundamental problems with their own organisations.
The result is bigger landlords with the problems just getting worse. The route for all of them seems to be working with developers to build more and more poor quality homes, mainly for sale through shared ownership or leasehold.
Homes for rent are considered an inconvenience even though governments keep rewarding failure by allowing rents to rise ever closer to “full market rents”. Given that the market rent for homes is governed by the supply of properties and the supply is governed by the providers, ie. developers and housing associations, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where the problems lie.
Over the last 20 or so years the large council housing estates that were built in London and other cities have been transferred to housing associations or local councils who flogged them off to developers. This was done presumably with the aim of developing mixed communities of renters and owners.
Unfortunately and inevitably, the number of places available to rent as a percentage of dwellings is tiny. Those that are available are in blocks of flats with few houses with gardens built.
On our development there are very few houses. Out of a total, when the development is completed, of some 8000 dwellings almost all of them will be in tall blocks of flats with no outside space for families to use safely. It is almost as if all the errors made in the 1950’s and 60’s have been forgotten.
Tower Blocks Over Homes and Gardens
In those decades people were moved out of the slums that blighted most inner cities and into shiny new tower blocks with all mod cons but no gardens. Tenants became more and more isolated from each other, children couldn’t play outside as they had before and anti-social behaviour and depression was rife.
The solution according to councils was to bulldoze the problem and replace them with shiny new tower blocks. Even the councils who are building new homes are doing the same thing, building blocks instead of houses. The result is that in the council development just across the road from here there is already anti-social behaviour and tenants who moved in a few months ago are clamouring to get out.
It is total madness, and has done nothing to reduce the number of people on the waiting lists. What it has achieved is to make huge profits for developers and increase the council tax take.
Those on lower incomes are forced into accepting a tower block flat or staying on waiting lists for years. Yet there is no shortage of homes in the UK especially in the major cities. What is short is the number of homes that are available to rent at genuinely affordable rents and regulated and controlled service charges.
The Service Charge Scam
Whilst social housing rents are controlled, to an extent, by the government, service charges are not controlled or regulated and cause immense problems for tenants, shared ownership leaseholders and full leaseholders.
People move into properties with reasonable service charges only to see them increase substantially year on year with no discernible increase in the service provided. In fact very often the services offered are reduced.
Questions to landlords regarding the service charge are often ignored or brushed off, even when there are obvious errors. The routes to receiving a satisfactory resolution are anything but easy.
In most cases if you have exhausted the complaints procedure operated and controlled by your landlord then you have two routes available. The first is making an application to the First Tier Tribunal (FTT) for a determination on the reasonableness and payability of the charges. It is for the tenant/leaseholder to provide all of the evidence to support the application. All the respondent/landlord has to do is to try and refute the evidence.
At any hearing the landlord will be represented by a barrister whereas most applicants represent themselves because they can’t afford to employ a barrister. And you have more of a chance of getting some satisfaction from the FTT if you are a leaseholder or shared ownership leaseholder than if you are a tenant, although in rare cases tenants may win.
At the end of the day it depends on the judge and the members of the tribunal on whether they think you have made your case. It doesn’t matter whether you have absolutely water tight evidence, if the barrister for the landlord can offer some doubt, the chances are that you will lose.
The other route is the County Court where you can sue your landlord for a specific amount based on how much you think you have been overcharged. The benefit of this route is that the onus is on the landlord to prove that they don’t owe the money rather than the other way round. I don’t know how successful this route is because I don’t have any evidence, but at the moment it is an option to consider.
Forms of Reform
Having devoted several paragraphs to what the problems are, I would like to propose a solution, although it is not a unique answer. The First Tier tribunal system is not fit for purpose and needs to be scrapped with the responsibility transferred to the County Court or a mediation service.
All applications should be heard by lay people with legal advice available, similar to the magistrates court. Both parties should represent themselves without the benefit of counsel. If either party disagrees with the decision of the panel then they should be free to pursue the matter through the established court system.
At the moment if an applicant loses at the FTT and does not appeal to the Upper Tier they are banned from making a new application on the same grounds for other years as the decision is considered to be final. However if part of the application is successful and the landlord is ordered to rectify the error, it only relates to the year covered by the application.
If the landlord decides not to honour the decision in subsequent years, a new application has to be made. Rectifying this one-sided advantage to landlords is just one of the reforms that need to be made to the whole housing sector.
Landlords do not discharge their responsibilities properly which is why we have new acts of parliament to deal with issues, such as Awaabs Law dealing with repairs, and the Renter Rights Act which abolished ‘no fault evictions’ for private renters.
In the meantime we have no effective controls over landlords and little support for the regulation of the sector. I believe it is time for wholesale reform of housing with proper, tough regulation. If we can regulate water (badly), the energy sector (the jury’s out), and the media why can’t we regulate housing issues?
New Regulation
Tenants and Leaseholders should be able to refer disputes to the regulator for them to deal with. At the moment the Regulator of Social Housing seems to be reluctant to intervene in anything at all, and the Housing Ombudsman is not a lot better.
The regulator could be funded by a levy on the providers and should cover registered providers, councils and private landlords. I don’t understand why there is a distinction between social housing tenants and private renters. After all housing associations today are so far removed from their original purpose that they are effectively private landlords with privileged tax status purporting to be charities, but organisations less charitable would be difficult to find!
All occupiers should have the same rights and responsibilities no matter who their landlord is. Successive governments have been reluctant to tackle the issue for several reasons. Firstly, the area is a minefield and very complicated. Reform would probably be expensive to set up but would pay for itself in the end. Secondly, governments think they need housing associations to deliver “affordable housing”, so can’t afford to alienate them too much. This is totally wrong.
Councils and governments have been perfectly capable of building homes in the past so there is no reason at all why they can’t do it now. All it needs is someone to think outside the box and remove the Treasury from the equation. More and better control would reduce the cost of housing benefit, provide more homes of the type that people really need and want to live in, and it would rein in unscrupulous registered providers.
Reshaping Our Housing
In the longer term, most of us recognise that more radical solutions are needed. We need to re-evaluate and reshape our whole relationship with the delivery of housing as one of the most basic human needs.
Left to market forces and an unhealthy co-dependence between developers and government, we will never be free of the many problems we collectively describe as the housing crisis. But enacting some changes in the shorter term could go a long way towards easing the symptoms and ending the worst of the misery for many.
SHAC is working with campaign partners to establish an independent, democratic, national union run by and for tenants and residents. For more information about the project, please see our National Housing Union section.
31 January 2026
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It is a huge mess to sort and unfortunately successive Governments are just “kicking the can down the road”. A bit like Social Care reform in that sense.