Guest post by Jacob Poole, housing operations coordinator at Manchester firm Pabla & Pabla
Poole: Substantial rise in claims
When I take the bus into Manchester city centre, there is a huge billboard advertising something that wouldn’t have been so prevalent years before: housing disrepair claims.
There is a picture of a mouldy wall, with contact numbers and emails in bold lettering. “Are you a council tenant?” it reads. “You can make a claim today.”
Even away from my work, this is one of the many signs that point towards an ever-changing legal landscape. The hypothesis is clear: housing disrepair claims are on the rise.
What data is available on housing disrepair claims?
There is the widely reported Housing Ombudsman survey from last year which highlighted a 474% increase in repair complaints from tenants about their social landlords.
But what about claims made on their behalf by solicitors? I’ve been busy making use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to find out.
In my first FOIA request, the Ministry of Justice couldn’t provide any data on issued housing disrepair claims. This is because “the case records requested are held in the custody of the court for the purposes of the court only”.
I then asked English and Welsh councils and housing associations how many letters of claim they had received from claimant solicitors.
Housing associations were not obligated to respond, as they bluntly pointed out. However, that will change in 2027, when the Social Tenant Access to Information Requirements come into force.
This is a particularly frustrating, as many councils transferred their social housing stock to housing associations in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But councils were obliged to provide answers to my questions. As a result, I received over 70 full responses from across England and Wales.
The data revealed a remarkable upturn in claims filed by solicitors since the pandemic. From 2020/21 to 2024/25, Leicester City Council saw a 10-fold increase in letters of claim, while it was four-fold for both the London Borough of Lewisham and Blackpool Borough Council.
From this snippet of the dataset, it is abundantly clear that housing disrepair claims are rising to meet the rights of tenants.
What are council perceptions of claimant solicitors?
In my FOIA requests, I also speculatively invited the councils to provide their insights into housing disrepair claims.
Most of them responded as you would expect, citing that they couldn’t provide subjective opinion under the FOIA. However, over 20 councils did, with a variety of opinions on what it all means.
The London Borough of Islington decided to focus on rent caps. It said: “The previous government’s decision to cap social rents below indexation has led to increased financial pressure in terms of maintaining stock leading to the increase in revenue spending….
“We have successfully managed the increase in housing disrepair claims by reviewing our policies and procedures.”
Other councils were not so pragmatic. Brighton & Hove City Council suggested that solicitors had a “greater focus on building costs by unnecessary correspondence, rather than in remedying disrepair”, while Basildon Borough Council stated that “in our opinion, claims firms are using the financial vulnerability of our residents for profit”.
Many other councils, such as Wigan City Council, advocated for fixed recoverable costs to be introduced into housing disrepair claims.
There was no consensus, however, on what a utopian system of redress would look like.
Can councils deal with the rise in housing disrepair claims?
One thing is clear: housing disrepair claims have risen substantially since 2020.
Social housing providers are under a severe amount of financial pressure, in both maintaining their current properties and procuring new ones.
Councils and housing associations alike are under pressure to improve their service delivery and have thus increased their maintenance spending by 55% from 2020 to 2024, to a combined record of £8.8bn.
At a unique point in the history of UK housing delivery, the Labour government has committed to what it describes as a social housing “revolution”. In this, it will commit 60% of the £39bn, 10-year social and affordable homes programme to social rent.
Will this funding be enough to help councils to mitigate for an increasing number of claims? It remains to be seen.
The full findings, with data from every council respondent, is available here.
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