On the tree-lined north London street where I live, scaffolders arrived seven years ago. Metal poles were erected around a housing association property next door to me, owned by the social housing provider Peabody, to allow for external refurbishment work to be carried out. But today, that scaffolding still stands – and those repair works have never been carried out.

“This is yet another example of Peabody’s casual neglect of their residents. They do not respond to emails from me or senior council officers and have also ignored an enforcement notice served on them by planning officers,” the chair of Islington council’s planning committee, Martin Klute, recently told the Islington Tribune.

Peabody owns more than 5% of Islington’s nearly 112,000 properties. And it has well below average performance on every key indicator of landlord services. Inaction on dealing with hazardous cladding, damp, rodent infestation or broken-down lifts, and failure to tackle neighbour nuisance or other forms of antisocial behaviour, are typical of the concerns that Peabody tenants raise regularly.

And Peabody, while it is one of the worst offenders, is not unique. Ask any councillor or Citizens Advice worker in any of our largest cities about their housing caseload, and they will tell you the same story. Yet locally elected representatives are often powerless to act.

Before 2010, the Audit Commission, of which I was chief executive, routinely inspected housing associations. But for the Regulator of Social Housing, created by the Tories, the main........

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