Stop treating social housing tenants like children, ombudsman tells landlords

Some social housing landlords still treat tenants like children and behave in the same adversarial and defensive way as the Grenfell Tower landlord, the government-appointed social housing ombudsman has said.

Speaking after the publication of the public inquiry report into the 2017 fire that claimed 72 lives, Richard Blakeway warned leaders of social housing groups to end “parent-child” relationships with tenants and instead “see people, not problems”.

The damning inquiry into the causes of the disaster found that residents at Grenfell felt the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) was “a bullying overlord” and that aspects of its response to the disaster showed “a marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity”. It treated residents who were raising concerns about the refurbishment as “militant troublemakers” and “lost sight” of the fact that residents “depended on it for a safe and decent home”.

However, lawyers for the bereaved and survivors have criticised the inquiry’s decision to avoid making recommendations to government for reform. The inquiry panel judged that the establishment of a new social housing regulator last year created powers to set standards on competence and conduct of landlords.

But Caroline Brosnan, a lawyer at Russell-Cooke, which represented a group of the bereaved, survivors and residents at the seven-year inquiry, said that meant changing “the culture of disregard for tenants in social housing will be ignored” in any efforts to monitor the national response to the disaster.

Brosnan added: “An inquiry which was about the experience of being a social housing tenant is effectively silent on safeguarding the experience of social tenants going forward so that the tenants’ voice is lost from the process.”

Blakeway, who fields thousands of complaints from social housing tenants, told the Guardian: “That resident-landlord relationship is something that sometimes I do see and it’s not isolated. I see positive examples of a healthier, open relationship, but I will absolutely see examples of where it’s become adversarial, defensive, and the landlord appears to be reluctant to recognise there are things it needs to improve.”

He said “it should be a relationship of equals” but that instead landlords’ interactions with tenants often suggest they believe “we know better” with a “condescending, dismissive attitude towards a resident”.

Residents may raise complaints about their home but they are “just not being heard; their insight is just not treated with respect”.

He spoke after Keir Starmer told parliament the 1,700-page inquiry report laid bare the way the Grenfell residents were treated as “second-class citizens”. On Thursday, Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary, said there was an “imbalance” and social tenants suffered from “stigma”.

She said: “As someone who was a social tenant all of my childhood and into my adulthood, I completely appreciate that there is a culture in this country where they’re considered lesser people, and that’s disgraceful.”

The Grenfell Tower public inquiry report found “a toxic atmosphere fuelled by mistrust on both sides” between the KCTMO and its tenants.

In the six years before the disaster “relations between the TMO and many of the residents of Grenfell Tower were increasingly characterised by distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger … the TMO regarded some of the residents as militant troublemakers led on by a handful of vocal activists”.

It went on: “For the TMO to have allowed the relationship to deteriorate to such an extent reflects a serious failure on its part to observe its basic responsibilities.”

More than 4 million households live in social housing in England and Blakeway said some landlords were “seeing a problem and not seeing a person and that is leading to a desensitised [approach focused on] systems and processes that is just losing sight that there are people behind these complaints.”

He said there was “a lack of real thinking about who is living in social housing: who is social housing for, and then ensuring the processes and systems do not compound [any] stigma.”

And in the worst cases this can lead to the collapse of working relationships between tenants and landlords.

“There are absolutely cases that I see where you can see that the breakdown in a relationship means that the landlord is not delivering its service in the way that it should do and is obliged to under statute.”