New data from SHAC’s comprehensive national survey of 829 residents has exposed an environment of widespread service charge abuse, directly challenging the government’s refusal to protect tenants and leaseholders.
In April 2026, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Matthew Pennycook, officially rejected calls to cap skyrocketing service charges. The Housing Minister expressed full confidence in the current tribunal systems, asserting that variable charges must “be reasonable” and that residents (he ignored the plight of tenants) already possess adequate pathways to contest them.
Our research by contrast proves that the Minister is dangerously out of touch. The survey data paints a damning picture of a broken, unregulated vacuum where landlords exploit residents with financial impunity.
The scale of the service charge crisis is laid bare across 46 detailed data tables and charts within the report.
Runaway Costs
Most survey respondents revealed that their charges had spiked over the previous year. The most frequent annual increase landed between 21% and 50%, while a staggering 11.7% of residents saw their service charges more than double.
The data show these financial hikes hit housing association tenants the hardest, with London residents experiencing far more severe increases than the rest of England.
Billing inaccuracies and fraudulent demands are now systemic rather than accidental. A massive two-thirds of respondents (66.1%) reported direct overcharging by their landlords.
Furthermore, 50.8% stated that costs were split incorrectly, and 59.7% discovered they were billed for “ghost” services that were never actually delivered. Only a tiny 12.8% of all participants reported experiencing no billing errors.
Systemic Financial Abuse
Crucially, 89.5% of those who identified overcharging stated the issue recurred over multiple years, exposing a pattern of continuous institutional failure rather than simple administrative mistakes.
“Huge stress. It’s a full-time job, of course on top of other job that I need in order to actually pay for the cost of living crisis! My husband and I broke up over it, it caused constant arguments as well as constant stress from the expense.”
Southern Housing tenant, Cambridge
The survey heavily deconstructs Matthew Pennycook’s faith in the legal systems available to residents. Tenants and residents are forced to rely on landlord and other agencies’ complaint procedures which seem designed to ensure that justice is routinely denied.
Over half of all formal service charge disputes (56.3%) drag on for more than two years, and nearly a third (30.4%) consume more than four years.
Even when residents successfully prove they were overcharged, obtaining financial redress is virtually impossible. Over 80% of affected respondents received absolutely no refund. Only 18.6% managed to claw back any money at all, and a minuscule 4.2% recovered their stolen funds in full.
Information Blackout
This litany of failures is driven by a deliberate lack of transparency from housing providers. Only 24.2% of residents receive annual financial summary statements automatically. When residents proactively request them, half receive only partial data, and nearly a quarter are ignored entirely.
Of the residents who do receive a response, almost three-quarters wait well beyond the 30-day statutory deadline. Access to backing invoices is equally abysmal, with over a quarter of residents denied access outright, faced with missing documents, and subjected to obstructive landlord behaviour.
Consequently, resident confidence in official accountability mechanisms has completely collapsed. Landlords’ internal complaints processes, the Housing Ombudsman Service, the Regulator of Social Housing, and the First-Tier Property Tribunal all received overwhelmingly negative (one-star) satisfaction ratings from users.
The Human Toll
Most heartbreaking of all is the severe human toll of this regulatory vacuum. The survey found that 83.8% of residents suffer from a total loss of trust, 79% experience constant anxiety over future charges, and 52.1% report severe mental ill-health.
“As a secretary to a TRA it takes many hundreds of hours – all unpaid that would be unnecessary if Hyde got things right, did not deny anything was wrong and engaged to resolve things”
Hyde Housing resident – London.
Roughly half of all respondents have been forced to slash essential household spending on food and utilities, while over a third have been driven into deep debt. Shared owners and housing association tenants consistently experience the most acute hardships.
While the majority of residents have managed to avoid falling into official arrears, the survey reveals a shifting dynamic: the most common reason for non-payment is now a deliberate, collective withholding of funds in protest against unfair bills, rather than an inability to pay.
This finding offers hope that tenants and residents are increasingly willing to make a stand against their landlord’s hyper-exploitation which is being enabled by the housing establishment.
Seven Urgent Actions
To fix this crisis, SHAC is using this data to push seven urgent demands to rebalance the housing system:
- Expand council housing and completely abolish the exploitative leasehold system.
- Establish fast-track, accessible dispute resolution pathways.
- Enforce universal transparency laws across all landlord and tenancy types.
- Fully fund and expand Legal Aid to cover housing cases.
- Embed a strict service charge regulatory standard directly into the Regulator of Social Housing.
- Empower tribunals to order universal, estate-wide refunds for all affected neighbours.
- Introduce tough financial and legal sanctions to penalise rogue landlords.
Matthew Pennycook’s insistence that current systems provide adequate protection is flatly contradicted by the lived reality of residents. By leaving service charges uncapped and relying on broken systems of redress, the government is actively enabling financial abuse. It is time for the Ministry to look at the data, acknowledge the failure of its framework, and implement the statutory protections that tenants and leaseholders urgently need.
Our Call to Action
As a priority, SHAC wants government make it possible for tenants and residents (leaseholders and shared owners) to pay disputed service charges to a court. The funds will then only pass to landlords if they can prove the charge’s legitimacy within a specified timeframe. Otherwise, the money returns to the tenant or resident.
This proposal seeks to balance the power between landlord and tenant or resident, allowing for fast, objective, independent adjudication. We think it could do much to end the current flawed system in which landlords, having received payment, have no incentive to engage with those who believe they have been overcharged. Please sign and share our petition.
27 May 2026
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Being a social housing tenant I thought to move into a shared ownership property for more “justice” and “security”. Now I see that is not possible. We are all in the same boat and the only answer is a complete overhaul of the system to ensure fair play for all. On the social housing playing field we should not let the authorities divide us into tenants and residents – we are all social housing dwellers. Divide and rule can only benefit the authorities – not us. So I am glad that SHAC covers all aspects of social housing.
Where I live a leaseholder can use a community centre (it is a private property developer’s estate with 10% social housing) while tenants cannot. However parties from both groups meet at the local foodbank where I volunteer which says it all really.