Sharpe Pritchard’s thoughts on the Grenfell Inquiry Phase 2 report

• New legislation will be introduced to require social landlords to carry out regular electrical safety checks at least every 5 years.
• New regulations to implement Awaab’s Law in the social rented sector with a phased approach from October 2025.
• A new consultation on the introduction of a new Decent Homes Standard and minimum energy efficiency standards.
• Implementing a ‘Hillsborough Law’ which will place a legal duty on public servants and authorities to ensure that the truth is disclosed and prevent any cover ups.
• The Regulator of Social Housing’s new Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard, introduced in April 2024, will in the future create specific expectations to ensure social housing residents will have a greater voice with their landlord. The Government will extend the Four Million Homes resident training programme and will take forward the Make Things Right communications campaign, to help support residents to better understand their rights. In addition, the Social Housing Resident Panel will be extended with the intent that residents will have a greater  influence on policies to improve social housing. Further information is expected as part of the Government’s long-term housing strategy expected later this year.
• Review overall arrangements for the oversight of delegated management organisations, including Tenant Management Organisations (TMOs), to ensure effective oversight and accountability is in place. This will include extending the Freedom of Information Act to cover TMOs.

Sharpe Pritchard’s thoughts

The detail about implementation of long-awaited measures to improve sector performance and deliver key elements of the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 is welcome. These come at a critical time when the sector is focusing resources on improving quality and safety of homes at a time of acute housing need and a desire to create more social housing. The Government consulted last year on social housing rent setting policy, amid calls from the sector for a refreshed approach in order to meet these challenges including access to grant funding for cladding remediation.

• Investigations into a number of organisations criticised by the Grenfell Inquiry, using new debarment powers in the Procurement Act 2023, to establish whether professional misconduct has taken place.

Sharpe Pritchard’s thoughts

The Procurement Act 2023 creates a new debarment list on which suppliers can be named, for up to five years, following a Government led investigation into mandatory or discretionary exclusion grounds.

If a supplier is placed on the debarment list owing to the application of a mandatory exclusion ground, contracting authorities must not allow the supplier to bid for public contracts in response to competitive processes.  Whereas if the debarment relates to a discretionary exclusion ground, the supplier may be permitted to participate if the contracting authority has good reasons for allowing them to do so.

This announcement highlights the importance the Government is placing on the new debarment list. The outcome of these investigations will help to set a benchmark for the sector to be able to understand how the new mandatory and discretionary grounds are to be interpreted. What is clear is that there is a drive to hold entities to account. It will also be interesting to see if licences issued under the licensing scheme proposed for principal contractors will be automatically revoked for organisations that are subsequently added to the debarment list or deny any license at all.

We assume that the introduction of a licensing scheme for principal contractors may see the requirement for contracting authorities to assess competency as part of their procurement processes fall away.

Implementation is to be completed in phases being:

Phase 1 – 2025-2026: The Government’s focus during 2025 and 2026 is delivering on its current programme of reform and change related to improvements with building safety. This includes driving forward the Remediation Acceleration Plan together with any associated legislation to enable this.

Phase 2 – 2026-2028: Further development and legislation to enable and deliver on the wider reforms and recommendations set out in its response including those reforms relating to the construction products sector and the single new construction regulator.

Phase 3 – 2028 onwards: Implementation of the reforms and continuous review of the new systems in place to measure effectiveness and ensure that building safety is maintained.