The road to a Decent Neighbourhood Standard
Dr Halima Sacranie, Director of Housing Research, Centre for the New Midlands and Nicola Bacon, Founding Director, Social Life England has had a Decent Homes Standard for 25 years which has served as clear, enforceable minimum for the quality of the home. While there are many aspirational design guides and frameworks, there’s […]
The Policy and Politics of Improving Standards in the English Private Rented Sector (PRS)
By Dr Alice Earley, Research Associate, UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, University of Glasgow, Kenneth Gibb, Professor in Housing Economics at the University of Glasgow where he directs the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, and Alex Marsh, Professor of Public Policy at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. This piece is […]
Supporting resident-led governance models to work more effectively in multi-occupancy buildings
Following the Grenfell Tower fire and the wider building safety crisis, governance problems associated with leasehold arrangements in multi-occupancy buildings (MOBs), such as blocks of flats and mixed-use buildings, have received increasing attention. These concerns underpin recent commonhold and leasehold reform, which seeks to promote and expand resident-led models of building governance, writes Yu-Tung Wu […]
Migrant workers’ housing matters for systemic resilience during crises
Housing insecurity among migrant essential workers is a missing link in maintaining systemic resilience – our study finds By Dr Anna Gawlewicz, Senior Lecturer (University of Glasgow), Dr Aneta Piekut, Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Social Sciences (University of Sheffield), Dr Molly Gilmour, Research Associate (Newcastle University) and Prof. Sharon Wright, Professor of Social Policy […]
Inside the C1 club: How social housing’s top performers made the grade
While more and more housing providers are joining the regulator’s exclusive C1 club, it can be hard to understand the reasons why from the short and succinct judgement reports. As part of HQN’s wider inspection work, we asked Keith Cooper to get under the bonnet of some of the top performing landlords. This is what […]
Fire safety trumps accessibility: New research highlights a key paradox
Professors Kim McKee and Vikki McCall, University of Stirling Fire safety has, quite rightly, received significant media and political attention following the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, in which 72 residents of a high-rise block in North Kensington, London lost their lives. It was one of the worst fires in the […]
Andy Roe interview: ‘There’s still a job to be done’
As former commissioner of the London Fire Brigade and now as chair of the Building Safety Regulator, Lord Andy Roe is continuing a personal mission to make the country’s built environment as safe as possible. As incident commander on the night of the Grenfell Tower fire, he witnessed first hand the devastating impact that years […]
Home lost, lives shattered: The Windrush housing scandal
Kehinde Adeogun, Director of Legal Services and Policy at the Black Equity Organisation The Black Equity Organisation is a Black-led civil rights charity that launched in 2022, as the UK’s first national, independent civil rights organisation. Our mission is to promote economic, legal, social and political equity for Black communities in Britain in order to […]
No more excuses: Rural affordable housing can be a story of renewal
David Barrowcliff, Head of Communications and Technology, English Rural The affordable rural housing crisis in England is often described as intractable. It isn’t. It’s serious, but it’s also solvable. In villages across the country, the right homes in the right places are already helping people stay close to family, work and support networks, while keeping […]
Temporary accommodation in the archives: What can we learn?
Dr Jessica Field is an independent researcher and Research Affiliate with the University of Manchester Temporary accommodation has hit headlines a lot recently, for all the wrong reasons: terrible conditions, prolonged stays, child deaths. People are calling this a ‘crisis’. Yet, the emergency framing suggests there was a past ‘norm’ of decent temporary accommodation (TA) […]
