RSH says accountability matters for social housing

At the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool on Tuesday 9 September 2026, Regulator of Social Housing chief executive Jonathan Walters gave the sector a plain warning: the years ahead look uncertain, the pressure on budgets is real, and improving existing homes comes with a serious cost. If you only read that as insider housing language, it is easy to miss why it matters. This is really about everyday questions for tenants and communities: are homes being kept safe, are repairs being funded properly, and can new social homes still be built when the money is tight?

According to the Regulator of Social Housing, the financial strain is already showing. Walters said more than two thirds of landlords now have a V2 viability grading, with some of the hardest problems in London and other large cities where fire safety remediation costs are higher. **What this means:** many providers are still operating, but with less room for error. When large sums have to go into safety works and existing homes, boards have to make tougher choices about what can be done now, what must wait, and how much risk they can carry.

Walters also made clear that the argument about new homes has not gone away. Social landlords, he said, still have a dual ambition: to improve the homes they already own and to deliver more good-quality social housing. That is not a small claim. The RSH said the sector has been delivering around 50,000 homes year after year, adding up to half a million over the past decade. For readers trying to make sense of the housing crisis, that is the central tension: how do you keep building at scale when costs are rising and the economic picture is changing?

This is where governance enters the story. It can sound like a dry boardroom term, but in practice governance is about who makes decisions, what evidence they use, how risks are checked, and whether anyone can properly challenge them afterwards. Walters said the sector needs a strong focus on good governance because these trade-offs are not going away. If a landlord chooses to put more money into safety works, delays a development scheme, or changes spending plans, that choice affects tenants, waiting lists and local communities. Good governance does not remove hard choices; it makes them visible and answerable.

The RSH’s line, Walters said, is that this is about accountability, not control. In other words, the regulator is not trying to run landlords from inside the boardroom. Boards are still expected to make difficult calls themselves. But that freedom comes with a test. Registered providers, Walters argued, must be able to explain why they made a decision, what priorities sat behind it, and why other options were not chosen. You will not please everyone in social housing, and he acknowledged that directly. Still, if decisions cannot be explained clearly, trust starts to thin out very quickly.

Walters pointed to the RSH discussion document More and better social homes, which argues that the sector and the way it is regulated may both need to change if England is to build more social homes in the years ahead. He also stressed that being a registered provider is not simply a title or badge; it brings weighty responsibilities to tenants and to the public. **What it means:** accountability here is not an abstract rule for housing professionals. It is about whether tenants get decent services, whether new homes are delivered honestly rather than promised loosely, and whether local communities can see who is responsible when priorities clash. That is the real lesson from this speech: better housing depends not only on funding, but on decisions that are open enough to be tested.