The Decent Homes Standard

The Decent Homes Standard (DHS) is a quality standard set by Government that all social housing rented properties must meet.

BCH spend in excess of £7,000,000 annually to ensure that our properties remain decent. This includes responsive repairs, works on empty homes, but more importantly planned maintenance work that is programmed in to periodically replace components such as kitchens, bathrooms, windows, heating systems and roof/roofline works.

The government is currently reviewing the DHS, but the current guidelines can be found in the related links section of this webpage. 

In summary, the Decent Homes Standard states:

This means that your home should not have any hazards that are a serious and immediate risk to a person’s health and safety (these are referred to by law as ‘category 1 hazards’), and if it does, we should be taking action to fix these.

The housing health and safety rating system is a tool to assess potential risks to the health and safety of occupants in residential properties.

It focuses on the most likely potential hazards in houses and tackles them to make homes healthier and safer.

Further information and downloadable documents about the housing health and safety rating system is available from the Department for Communities and Local Government.

The guidelines say that your home is not in a reasonable state of repair in the following two scenarios:

• When one or more ‘key building components’ (parts of a building that if they are not working could cause severe damage to the rest of the building, such as roofs, outside walls and heating systems) are old and because of their condition need replacing or major repair.
• When two or more ‘other building components’ (parts of a building that don’t impact the rest of the building to the same extent, such as individual kitchens and bathrooms) are old and because of their condition need replacing or major repair.

The guidelines say that your home does not meet the standard if it does not have three or more of the following:

• A kitchen that is 20 years old or less
• A kitchen with adequate space and layout
• A bathroom that is 30 years old or less
• An appropriately located bathroom and toilet (for example, these must both be indoors)
• Adequate insulation from outside noise
• Adequate size and layout of shared entrance area for blocks of flats

This means that your home should have efficient heating and effective insulation that protects you from excess cold.

Efficient heating can include any gas, oil, LPG or solid fuel programmable central heating, electric storage heaters or underfloor heating systems.

BCH follow the detailed government guidelines when checking the condition of homes and deciding what work they might need to meet the necessary standards.

We carry out a rolling programme of stock condition surveys and utilise this information to plan future improvement works. These surveys include a Housing Health & Safety Rating System (HHSRS) inspection as referenced above, to identify any immediate category 1 hazards in the property.

All of this information is stored on BCH’s stock database that is updated on a daily basis

Inspections of shared communal spaces are also undertaken by BCH’s Neighbourhoods Team.

If you think that your home doesn’t meet the Decent Homes Standard, and we have not already contacted you regarding future works to your property, then please contact BCH’s Assets department at assets@bch.co.uk.

Webpage published 3rd July 2024