Standards & condition
What is the Decent Homes Standard?
The Decent Homes Standard is a minimum standard for social housing covering serious hazards, repair, facilities and thermal comfort. Extending it to the private rented sector has been proposed.
It is built around four criteria, the first of which is the absence of serious hazards assessed under the housing health and safety rating system — the same framework local authorities use when they inspect private rented property.
For private landlords its relevance is partly prospective. Extension to the private rented sector has been proposed and consulted on, and a portfolio assessed against it now is a portfolio that knows where it stands.
Separately from the standard, landlords have repairing obligations and hazard-based duties that already apply, and those are enforceable today regardless of how the standard is extended.
What goes wrong in practice
- Treated as irrelevant to private landlords, when the underlying hazard framework already applies.
- Property condition assessed against tenant complaints rather than systematically.
- Disrepair reports handled reactively with no record of what was found and when.