What will the Social Housing White Paper mean for social landlords?

Read the HPA Headline Report March 2021

The new Social Housing White Paper published in November 2020, aimed to ensure that all tenants are safe in their homes and have the power to hold their landlords to account, and underlines the central importance of the relationship between landlords and tenants. It requires greater landlord transparency and accountability, and a designated person in charge of health and safety in order to improve fire safety in homes and buildings.

This 2-hour online workshop brought together 35 representatives from social landlords across the country to discuss what these changes will mean in practice, how they are being implemented in their organisations, and the potential challenges of the White Paper.

Some key findings from the workshop included:

• Tenant engagement needs to be central to everything landlords do and must be embedded into every level of the organisation. Engagement must be meaningful, and tenant’s views must be acted upon. It is important to offer many forms of engagement to meet the needs of different tenants.
• Tenants need to have the right skills to challenge their landlords and understand how things work. Training is crucial to ensure tenants have the right information to make changes.

Landlords face a huge challenge they must make homes safe and improve the quality of their existing stock to meet net zero, this places a huge pressure on budgets. Landlords need to find innovative ways to respond to both these pressures.