Social housing tenants in Sheffield could get £25,000 compensation for mould, damp and disrepair

Clive Betts, MP for Sheffield South East and chair of the cross-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee, made the recommendation in a report published this week.

He said some social housing in England had deteriorated so badly they were unfit for human habitation and providers needed to significantly improve their complaint handling processes.

He said: “Too many social housing tenants are living in uninhabitable homes and experiencing appalling conditions and levels of disrepair, including serious damp and mould, with potential serious impacts on their mental and physical health.

“The poor complaint handling of some providers not only adds insult to injury but the resulting delays in resolving tenant complaints actively contributes to the levels of disrepair. Sadly, beyond the distress of experiencing poor living conditions, it is undeniable that tenants also face poor treatment from providers who discriminate and stigmatise people because they are social housing tenants.

“This must change. Providers need to up their game, treat tenants with dignity and respect, and put tenants at the centre of how they deliver housing services, including by regularly monitoring the condition of their housing stock.

“Where they fail, providers should face the prospect of tough action from a more active regulator. Given the financial loss, inconvenience, and distress caused to tenants from serious cases of disrepair, the Government also needs to equip the ombudsman with the power to award far higher levels of compensation to tenants when there has been serious service failings.”

The committee’s Regulation of Social Housing report addressed a series of issues relating to the supply, quality and regulation of social housing in the country and made a number of recommendations for improvement.

Disrepair was attributed in part to the age and design of the housing stock, which the committee said was never built to last and is now approaching obsolescence.

Sheffield Council housing

The local authority has come under fire for its handling of its housing stock.

Recently, it was revealed that 5,922 council households were waiting for delayed repairs.

One tenant was waiting 818 days (more than two years) for the council to make their front door fire safe and another waited three hours just to get through to the housing repair service on the phone.

But despite underperformance in the repairs service, the council is planning to cut it by £5 million.

The council spent more than £1 million fighting a rocketing number of disrepair claims between the start of the 2018/19 financial year and August 2021.

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Council officers said the 322 per cent increase in cases was down to claims management companies using “aggressive marketing tactics” to target tenants who were unhappy about the state of their council homes during Covid-19, when government restrictions shut down all but emergency maintenance work.

The costs and details of the increase were revealed through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Local Democracy Reporting Service.