Against the backdrop of the legislation moving through Westminster to reform the private rented sector in England, Ben Cooper has published a report for the Fabian Society seeking to establish a new quality standard to be implemented for all rented housing in England.

What is the problem and its wider consequences? Cooper reports from the 2022-23 English Housing Survey that a fifth of households in the PRS (a million) live in non-decent homes; the equivalent figure is 10% and 430,000 households in the social rented sector. In both cases, the trend is proportionately downward, but because of the growth in the PRS, the absolute numbers in non-decent PRS homes grew between 2020 and 2022. There is also regional variation across the PRS in England with disproportionately worse figures for the North and Midlands. For social renting, the Midlands also performs relatively badly.

As Cooper says (p.3): This is a crisis of housing quality – yet receives far less attention than the important housing affordability crisis. Interestingly, he points to several systemic implications of low-quality rented housing, which can be expressed as avoidable, preventative costs to the economy and society:

• Poor quality housing contributes to the cost-of-living problems and financial insecurity
• It makes health problems worse
• Poor quality housing is a barrier to education
• Substandard rented housing reduces productivity and employment participation.

A New Standard

The report proposes a new standard for rented housing (pp4-5)*. In the private rented sector, there would be a digital register of all landlords, letting and management agents, there would be limited targeted funding to help landlords achieve new housing quality standards, as well as funding to facilitate conversion of low quality PRS stock into good quality social housing. There would also be a prohibition of poor quality PRS units being sold within the PRS.

The standard would also enable local government to establish long term leasing to meet social objectives. Local authorities could seek to improve quality through selective licensing schemes, establish local ‘good home’ agencies to provide improvement services, advice and information, and strengthen tenant rights by ensuring access to tenant advocates. The standard would reverse the recent encroachment of permitted development rights, policies which are associated with often poor-quality residential outcomes. Councils would also be able to raise and keep new revenues to help grow and maintain staff capacity working to improve housing quality.

What are my reflections?

First, it is good to see a systemic approach to the existing housing stock. The stress on building local authority capacity and the local service and information hubs complements our earlier CaCHE work for the Good Home inquiry. There we highlighted the need for a return to investment in the existing housing stock, sought smart ways to self-finance these activities on a non-profit basis and championed the information benefits of local specialist hubs to help consumers.

Second, while it is always welcome to make strong evidenced cases based on avoided costs and prevention, it is vital that these notional savings can be made real and cashed for the benefit of tenants and society.

Third, the PRS national database has great potential. However, the experience in Scotland suggests that to be effective as a policy tool, it needs to be established in such a way that the data can be used widely and that there is scope to add key information, e.g. at an individual property level, including rent, tenancy and property attributes. This will, in time, yield important market data to support monitoring and local market management and support the direct goals of housing quality enhancement.

Finally, standards can and do work to achieve objective improvement in quality and as a means by which recompense might be had, but they need to be flexible and should be periodically revisited, and thus be able to reflect changing and evolving priorities around housing conditions.

There is a lot more in this report than I have had space to discuss. It is worth looking at.

* There are also social housing elements to the standard but these are not part of the purpose of this blog.

• This article was originally published on the CaCHE website.