About Decent Homes

In its Green Paper ‘Quality and Choice: A Decent Home for All’ (July 2000), the Government set two targets:

1. To reduce by 1/3 the number of social housing properties which fail the Standard by 2004

2. To have all social rented homes meeting the Standard by 2010

According to the Government, ‘A decent Home is one which is wind and weather tight, warm and has modern facilities’. The Government made it their priority to reverse the decades of neglect and this standard was to be the cornerstone for improving people’s quality of life in the home.

The Government are keen to separate the strategic and day-to-day management of the housing stock.  As such, a new financial framework has been incepted that empowers Local Authorities, with the consent of their tenants, to:

• Devolve management of the stock to an Arms Length Management Organisation

• Participate in the Private Finance Initiative

• Transfer all or part of the stock to a Registered Social Landlord

Once the Options Appraisal has been completed and an appropriate body has been appointed to manage Decent Homes delivery, work on the stock can begin.  The repair, maintenance and improvement requirements are based around four key components:

• Fitness for Habitation

• Disrepair

• Modern Facilities

• Reasonable Degree of Thermal Comfort

Significant funding has been mobilised to improve kitchens, bathrooms and heating systems in order to meet the aforementioned requirements.

To ensure that all social housing tenants have decent homes, the Government is dependent on the social landlords. To deliver, social landlords need to quantify the level of non-decent housing in their stock, develop an investment strategy to deal with this and measure progress towards its elimination. The criteria included in the decent home standard reflects the type of work social landlords undertake to their housing stock.