ISHA calls on the Government to take action on the building safety crisis

Reacting to today’s announcement by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) that ISHA (Islington and Shoreditch Housing Association) retains it G1 V2 status, its Chair, Mervyn Jones, said:

"The Board and Leadership Team have worked tirelessly to strength the governance and resilience of the organisation over the last two years. It’s pleasing that the RSH has recognised that work. We will continue to consolidate and grow what we’re doing in terms of governance and viability and in serving our existing and future residents better.

"The building safety crisis and the investment we’ll need to make to put right existing homes, means we’ll sadly be unable to build as many new ones as we had planned. But we remain committed to driving service improvement with residents and improving their satisfaction with us."

Ruth Davison, the Chief Executive of the 2,500 home landlord whose properties are largely concentrated in Islington, Hackney and Waltham Forest, said:

Governments and regulation have failed to ensure residents' homes are safe

"ISHA has been an ambitious builder for 20 years, developing 60% of its homes during that time. Unfortunately, it coincided with a race to the bottom in building standards and a failure of Governments to ensure regulation prevented that and ensure residents’ homes were safe.

"Our viability rating reflects the work we are doing and need to do, to put that right. Safety is our highest priority and we moved quickly to intrusively survey all our high-risk buildings and put mitigations in place – at our cost - until we could complete works.

"Some developers have worked well and honourably with us and we thank them for that. Others have not.

The Government must protect leaseholders and social landlords

"We call on the Government during the passage of the Building Safety Bill to ensure that not only leaseholders are protected, but that social landlords are too and that we can continue to deliver much needed social homes in the communities we exist to serve.

"As a minimum the Government needs to develop a strategy to deal with the issue that is blighting individual lives and organisations and ensure that criteria for buildings remediation funds and the high risk regime align."