Social Housing Update - Summer 2022

Welcome to our summer 2022 Social Housing Update.

We start this newsletter with the announcement from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities that for many leaseholders legal protection comes into force on 28 June 2022 protecting them from service charge demands to make their homes safe as measures in the Building Safety Act 2022 become effective.?

The measures which come into force include making those responsible for historical safety defects and those who own buildings fund essential repairs.

Stronger measures in the act include new powers for the Secretary of State to restrict irresponsible developers’ ability to build new homes, an extension of the Building Safety levy worth an estimated ￡3 billion, and improving building owners’ rights to launch legal action against developers.

In this edition:

• James Smith provides a summary of the key elements of the Building Safety Act , which received Royal Assent on 28 April 2022.
• Sarah Burwood looks at the importance of settlement correspondence when offering fixed costs. Charlotte Wormstone provides a case report on the disputed differences in the valuation of a property and the implications this can have.
• Ike Diru provides an insight in to the problem of a claim being issued against the wrong defendant , not an uncommon problem for Registered Providers being sued for disrepair.
• Stathis Kosteletos presents two case studies looking into two very common issues in housing disputes in Khan v Mehmood [2022] ?and Parker v Bashir [2022] .
• Naomi Baker provides an update on the renters reform bill and Hannah Stammers provides clarification on the myth of the ‘virtual freehold’ .?
• We also look at the extension to the Right to Buy scheme and what this means for Housing Associations.

Finally, the Birketts Social Housing team are delighted to have been appointed to the legal panel of Clarion Housing , the UK’s largest housing association, owning and managing 125,000 homes, occupied by an estimated 350,000 people. After a raft of appointments in the last 12 months including Sovereign Housing Association, Places for People and Platform Housing Group, and an impressive ranking of Band 1 in East Anglia in the Chambers Guide 2021 and the Legal 500, Birketts’ Social Housing Team is swiftly becoming the one-stop shop for social housing clients across the UK. The appointment to Clarion’s legal panel in particular highlights the size of the matters Birketts’ lawyers are capable of handling.