London Borough of Brent (00AE) - Regulatory Judgement: 28 May 2025
Published 28 May 2025
Applies to England
漏 Crown copyright 2025
This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected].
Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.
This publication is available at /government/publications/london-borough-of-brent/london-borough-of-brent-00ae-regulatory-judgement-28-may-2025
Our Judgement
| Grade/Judgement | Change | Date of assessment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer | C3 Our judgement is that there are serious failings in the landlord delivering the outcomes of the consumer standards and significant improvement is needed. |
First grading | May 2025 |
Reason for publication
We are publishing a regulatory judgement for London Borough of Brent (LB Brent) to confirm a consumer grading of C3. This is the result of responsive engagement completed in May 2025, following a self-referral from LB Brent that focused on the Safety and Quality Standard. This is the first time we have issued a consumer grade in relation to this landlord.
Summary of the decision
From the evidence and assurance gained as part of the responsive engagement it is our judgement that there are serious failings in how LB Brent is delivering the outcomes of the Safety and Quality Standard, and significant improvement is needed. Based on our assessment, we have concluded a C3 grade for LB Brent.
How we reached our judgement
We began our responsive engagement with LB Brent following a self-referral in April 2025 concerning the quality and accuracy of its fire safety data. Our responsive engagement focused on the Safety and Quality Standard and included reviewing documents and information provided to us by LB Brent, along with follow up meetings and discussions. Our judgement is based on a review of all the relevant information we obtained during the responsive engagement process, including LB Brent鈥檚 self-referral.
Summary of findings聽
Consumer 鈥� C3 鈥� May 2025聽
The Safety and Quality Standard requires landlords to identify and meet all legal requirements that relate to the health and safety of tenants in their homes and communal areas, and to ensure that all required actions arising from legally required health and safety assessments are completed within appropriate timescales. The standard also requires landlords to have an accurate, up to date and evidenced understanding of the condition of their homes that reliably informs the provision of good quality, well maintained and safe homes for tenants, and to ensure that their tenants鈥� homes meet the requirements of the Decent Homes Standard.
Through our responsive engagement with LB Brent, we have found serious failings in its ability to meet these requirements and that these failings have negatively affected service outcomes for tenants.
The self-referral received from LB Brent highlighted that within the last year, around 12,500 actions arising from fire risk assessments had been closed. Following a spot check, LB Brent identified that where actions had been closed, evidence of the completion of the actions was not available in all instances and that some actions had not been completed at all. Most actions are of a high and medium risk and are currently being treated as overdue until evidence to confirm their completion can be obtained.
A key component of effective health and safety management is data integrity. Our engagement with LB Brent has highlighted that the data for fire safety, smoke and carbon monoxide safety, asbestos management and water safety cannot be reconciled, and LB Brent is not able to determine which legally required checks and assessments have been completed. We also have concerns about the data validation process that took place prior to LB Brent implementing its new asset management system and will be reviewing its efficacy as part of our ongoing engagement.
In relation to the quality of homes, although LB Brent is reporting that it has 95% of its stock condition data, our engagement with LB Brent has highlighted that almost half of its homes have not had a recorded survey. As a result, it is unclear how LB Brent is assured of the condition of its homes. We will be exploring this further with LB Brent.
LB Brent has engaged positively with us since making its self-referral and has plans in place to understand the wider impact of its current position. Those actions include work to understand the root causes of the presenting issues, reviewing the completion of all closed fire safety remedial actions through a risk-based approach and working to develop a suitable action plan to resolve the issues.
We will continue to engage with LB Brent as it seeks to address the issues that have led to this judgement. This includes evidencing that it is taking reasonable steps to mitigate risks to tenants as it creates and delivers its improvement plan. We are not proposing to use our enforcement powers at this stage but will keep this under review as LB Brent seeks to resolve these issues.
Background to the judgement
About the landlord
LB Brent owns and manages around 8,800 homes in London. Most homes are under direct management by LB Brent and there are an additional 4,000 leasehold homes in blocks owned by LB Brent.
Our role and regulatory approach
We regulate for a viable, efficient, and well governed social housing sector able to deliver quality homes and services for current and future tenants.
We regulate at the landlord level to drive improvement in how landlords operate. By landlord we mean a registered provider of social housing. These can either be local authorities, or private registered providers (other organisations registered with us such as non-profit housing associations, co-operatives, or profit-making organisations).
We set standards which state outcomes that landlords must deliver. The outcomes of our standards include both the required outcomes and specific expectations we set. Where we find there are significant failures in landlords which we consider to be material to the landlord鈥檚 delivery of those outcomes, we hold them to account. Ultimately this provides protection for tenants鈥� homes and services and achieves better outcomes for current and future tenants. It also contributes to a sustainable sector which can attract strong investment.
We have a different role for regulating local authorities than for other landlords. This is because we have a narrower role for local authorities and the Governance and Financial Viability Standard, and Value for Money Standard do not apply. Further detail on which standards apply to different landlords can be found on our standards page.
We assess the performance of landlords through inspections and by reviewing data that landlords are required to submit to us. In Depth Assessments (IDAs) were one of our previous assessment processes, which are now replaced by our new inspections programme from 1 April 2024. We also respond where there is an issue or a potential issue that may be material to a landlord鈥檚 delivery of the outcomes of our standards. We publish regulatory judgements that describe our view of landlords鈥� performance with our standards. We also publish grades for landlords with more than 1,000 social housing homes.
The Housing Ombudsman deals with individual complaints. When individual complaints are referred to us, we investigate if we consider that the issue may be material to a landlord鈥檚 delivery of the outcomes of our standards.
For more information about our approach to regulation, please see Regulating the standards.