Overview of the Act
The Social Housing (Regulation) Act (the Act) facilitates a new, proactive approach to regulating social housing landlords on consumer issues such as safety, transparency, standards and conduct of staff and tenant engagement, with new enforcement powers to tackle failing landlords. The intent of this Act is to reform the regulatory regime to drive significant change in landlord behaviour to focus on the needs of their tenants and ensure landlords are held to account for their performance.
	The Act has three core objectives:
To facilitate a new, proactive consumer regulation regime;
To refine the existing economic regulatory regime; and
To strengthen the Regulator of Social Housing’s (the regulator) powers to enforce the consumer and economic regimes.
	The Act also strengthens the powers of the Housing Ombudsman and enables requirements to be set for social landlords to address hazards such as damp and mould within a fixed time period.