Social Housing

Disrepair Is a Rights Breach

Article 8
Article 3

Damp, mould, failed heating and infestation are usually treated as maintenance backlog. In a home the state provides, sustained over months, with a child in the property, they engage Article 8 and at the far end Article 3 — and the tenant almost never has the means to say so in a forum that matters.

The word "lifestyle" has done extraordinary work in this country. It has been used to explain condensation to families who were correct all along about a building defect the landlord already knew about.

What This Seat Will Push For

Published repair performance by estate and by block. Not authority-wide averages. Residents know which blocks are being managed and which are being absorbed into a mean.
A hard deadline with an automatic consequence. A hazard reported and not remedied inside the statutory period should trigger automatic rent abatement without the tenant needing to litigate. The current system only rewards the tenants who can find a solicitor.
An end to "lifestyle" as a category. Where damp or mould is attributed to tenant behaviour, that has to be a written, evidenced surveyor finding the tenant can challenge — not a note on a file.
No retaliation for complaining. Tenants who pursue disrepair should not find their tenancy, their transfer application or their arrears history suddenly under review. This is the same anti-retaliation principle carried across the whole platform.
Fire and building safety information given to residents unprompted. Not available on request, buried on a website. Sent, in writing, to every household in the block.

Allocations and Temporary Accommodation

Transparency
& Fair Access

Almost every housing grievance in this constituency comes down to one suspicion: that the list is not working the way it is described. That suspicion is answerable with data.

Publish How the List Actually Moves

Publish, in aggregate and anonymised: bids made, offers made, band and waiting time of successful applicants, and the number of properties let outside the standard process with the reason category.

If the system is fair, publication proves it. If it is not, residents are entitled to know that too. Either way the current opacity serves nobody except the people administering it.

Temporary Accommodation That Is Actually Temporary

Families in this constituency spend years in accommodation described as temporary — often outside the borough, away from schools, jobs and family support, in properties that would not pass as permanent housing.

The commitment: publish placement durations and out-of-borough distances, a duty to justify in writing any placement lasting beyond a year, and a presumption that school-age children are not moved out of their school's reach.

The Rules That Exclude Care Leavers by Accident

A care leaver moving into a first tenancy is asked for a guarantor they do not have, references from years spent in placements, parental income details that do not exist, and a next-of-kin contact with no valid answer. None of these rules were written to exclude care-experienced people. All of them do.

Once care experience is the tenth protected characteristic, these become textbook indirect discrimination — neutral criteria with a disparate impact, requiring objective justification. Most cannot be justified; they are habit.

Corporate Parenting Reaches the Housing Department

An authority that was a child's legal parent should not treat that same young person at nineteen as an ordinary applicant with a thin file. The positive corporate parenting duty applies to every part of the council, including housing — a young person leaving care should not be presenting as homeless to the body that raised them.

Summary

Publish repair times where residents can see them, attach an automatic consequence to missed deadlines, retire "lifestyle", show how the housing list really moves, put a limit on open-ended temporary accommodation, and strip out the letting rules that quietly exclude the young people the state raised.