The Regulator of Social Housing has found that Kirklees Council held up to date information on the condition of its homes, including an assessment of hazards, for “around 25% of its homes”. The council owned 21,286 homes at June 2026. In a judgement published on 14 October, the regulator gave Kirklees a C3 consumer grade, meaning there are serious failings and significant improvement is needed. It also recorded that “approximately 2,500 fire remedial actions remain overdue”.
The council had already identified the problem. An internal assessment presented to its Growth and Regeneration Scrutiny Panel on 9 March, signed off on 25 February by David Shepherd, its executive director of Place, warned that weaknesses in the Safety and Quality Standard were “likely to be determinative of the Council’s overall consumer judgement, irrespective of stronger performance elsewhere”. Moses Crook, then deputy leader and cabinet member for transport and housing, was the responsible cabinet member. The assessment listed the “absence of validated stock condition data for the majority of homes”, “reliance on historic or assumed (cloned) stock condition data” and “HHSRS implementation not yet embedded”, referring to the Housing Health and Safety Rating System. The service graded itself C3 for safety and quality and C2 for the other three consumer standards, and aimed for “a consistently evidenced C2 across all Consumer Standards” before the inspection.
Seven months later, the regulator found that the council “has commenced an accelerated programme to survey the condition of its homes” but could not yet show it understood their condition. Potential hazards identified during repairs and damp and mould work were not feeding into the council’s knowledge of its homes.
The weaknesses go back further. In 2021, Kirklees commissioned Anthony Brown of Robust Management Consulting to carry out an independent safety and compliance review, which ran from February to May 2021 and produced 48 recommendations. They covered governance and oversight, data management, fire safety, asbestos, water hygiene and passenger lift safety.
In March 2024, after the council referred itself, the regulator found it was failing the consumer standards. At least 20,000 fire safety actions were overdue and more than 1,500 damp and mould repairs were unfinished. Fire risk assessments had been carried out for all relevant blocks; the failure was in completing the work they identified. On 12 March 2024 the Cabinet approved a revised fire safety management plan and policy, to take effect from July 2024. Crook, then cabinet member for housing, said: “We are already recruiting more staff to help increase the pace of delivery across fire safety improvements.”
The regulator now records significant progress since then. It found the council “is generally meeting health and safety requirements”, had “made significant improvements to the management of damp and mould”, and runs a repairs service that is “effective, efficient and timely”. It found “serious failings” in the handling of antisocial behaviour, including inconsistent case management and limited oversight of performance, with “limited evidence that the changes had been embedded”.
Since 15 July 2026, Kirklees has been run by a Reform UK minority administration led by Sarah Wood. Philip James, cabinet member for Housing and Physical Communities, now holds political responsibility for the response; Shepherd remains executive director of Place, and Phil Jones is Service Director for Homes and Neighbourhoods. In the council’s statement of 14 October, James said: “We know we need to go further and faster in some areas.” The council accepted the C3 grade and said an improvement plan setting out actions, timescales and governance would be published on its website once finalised. It gave no date.