Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that social housing providers are accountable to local authorities and residents.

The Government is committed to ensuring that social housing providers are accountable to their tenants and residents. The Charter for Social Housing Residents: Social Housing White Paper set out a range of commitments on how we will improve the experiences of social housing residents, including strengthening the transparency and accountability of social housing providers

Registered providers of social housing are formally held to account by the Regulator of Social Housing. The Government set out in the Charter for Social Housing Residents our plan to reform the regulation of social housing, creating a strong, proactive consumer regulatory regime within the Regulator of Social Housing, reviewing the formal standards against which landlords are regulated and requiring them to be transparent about their performance so they can be held to account. The new regime will include regular inspections of the largest landlords, the creation of new Tenant Satisfaction Measures against which all social landlords will need to report, and the introduction of a new Access to Information Scheme for tenants of private registered providers of social housing.

We will legislate as soon as practicable to bring forward these changes.