There is a structural tension running through social housing that most people in the sector feel but rarely name directly.

We talk about contractors constantly. We manage them, measure them, scrutinise their KPIs, renegotiate their rates, escalate their failures to our boards. We've invested heavily in procurement frameworks, performance dashboards, and governance processes designed to give us control over how services are delivered.

And yet, when things go wrong and they do go wrong , we are often surprised by how exposed we are.

The collapse of a large contractor leaves thousands of homes mid-programme with nowhere to go. A regulatory deadline arrives and the market can't flex fast enough to absorb it. Demand spikes after a bad winter and we're back in the same conversation about capacity that we had last year, and the year before that.

We haven't built a supply chain problem. We've built a supply chain architecture problem. And architecture problems don't get solved by better performance management.

They get solved by redesign.

A Regulatory Environment That Demands More, Not Less

The external pressure on delivery capacity isn't easing. It's compounding.

Awaab's Law came into force on 27 October 2025, requiring social landlords to address emergency hazards within 24 hours, with requirements expanding through 2026 and 2027 to cover the full range of HHSRS hazards. This is not incremental change. It's a phased transformation of the legal obligations sitting behind every repairs service in the country. If your contractor can't respond to an emergency hazard within the statutory timeframe, that isn't a performance conversation. It's a potential breach of tenancy agreement with recourse through the courts.

Awaab's Law also does something more subtle. It reframes the definition of an emergency around the vulnerability of the occupant rather than the severity of the defect alone, requiring landlords to consider the specific circumstances of who is living in the property, not just what's wrong with it.

The demand on your contractors is therefore not just about throughput. It's about responsiveness, local knowledge and the ability to prioritise dynamically. Scale alone does not deliver that. Presence does.

Meanwhile, the RSH's 2025 Sector Risk Profile signals a clear shift from setting expectations to enforcing them. EBITDA MRI interest cover has fallen to 91%, the lowest level since 2009. Housing associations are being asked to deliver more, faster, with more legal accountability, in a period of acute financial constraint. That is not a combination that leaves much margin for error in how delivery is structured.

The Concentration Trap

The rationalisation of social housing supply chains over the past decade was driven by logic that made sense at the time. Fewer contractors meant simpler governance. Larger contracts meant greater leverage. Standardised relationships meant predictability.

What it also meant, though rarely stated explicitly, was that essential services to hundreds of thousands of tenants became dependent on the financial health of a small number of private companies operating on thin margins in one of the most volatile sectors of the UK economy.

That's not governance. That's a bet.

And when those bets go wrong, it isn't the contractor's board that feels it first. It's the tenant waiting for a damp survey. The family in a property with failing heating. The housing association director who gets the call on a Friday afternoon that their main contractor has gone into administration.

Sector spend on repairs and maintenance is expected to reach £50bn over the next five years. The question worth asking is not just how that money will be spent — but through whom it flows, and what happens when those channels run dry.

The Hidden Asset in Every Region

Here is something that gets very little airtime in conversations about supply chain reform: there is substantial latent capacity sitting in regional and local SME contractors across England that housing providers are almost entirely failing to access.

These are firms that know their patch. Their operatives often live in the communities they serve. They have flexible subcontracting networks, short decision chains, and a direct commercial interest in their local reputation. They can mobilise quickly when demand spikes. They bring social value that national providers cannot replicate,local employment, apprenticeship pathways, money circulating in the communities where tenants actually live.

And they are almost invisible in most HA supply chains.

Not because they aren't capable. Ask most repairs directors and they'll tell you the quality of work from a well-run regional contractor can match what they get from the largest providers. The issue isn't output. It's infrastructure.

Engaging multiple smaller contractors at scale is administratively expensive under current models. Every SME reports differently. WIP trackers come in different formats, completion certificates in different layouts, KPI dashboards that can't be aggregated into a board-level report without significant manual work. The governance overhead of managing even five or six smaller contractors begins to approach that of managing one large one — without the commercial leverage. So the rational choice for most procurement teams is consolidation. Not because SMEs can't deliver. Because the cost of managing them, as currently structured, is too high.

This is the real barrier. Not quality. Not capacity. Infrastructure.

And infrastructure can be built.

The Reporting Gap Nobody Names

When you run a repairs service at a housing association, you probably have a clear picture of what your main contractor is delivering. Dashboards, SLAs, monthly reviews. The data flows.

When you try to engage a smaller contractor, even a very good one, that picture gets murky almost immediately. The WIP tracker doesn't map to your categories. The completion documentation doesn't capture what you need for your board report. The KPI data exists in their system, not yours, and extracting it takes three emails and a phone call.

None of this is incompetence. It's a consequence of the sector never having agreed what baseline reporting looks like for a contractor of any size delivering social housing work.

Large contractors solved this by building internal systems large enough to present data however the client needs it. Small contractors can't do that. They're trying to run a business and deliver the work, not build a data architecture function.

But if someone had done the hard work of designing the reporting standard, the WIP format, the completion documentation, the compliance folder structure and made it available to smaller contractors to adopt, the problem largely disappears. The contractor reports in the standard format. The HA receives what it needs. The overhead of managing the relationship drops to something manageable.

This is not a technology problem. It is a standardisation problem and standardisation problems don't require significant capital to solve.

What Needs to Happen

None of this requires a revolution. It requires some unglamorous, specific work that nobody has yet been motivated enough to do at scale.

The sector needs a standard. A defined baseline for what a smaller contractor needs to look like, report like, and document like to be a genuinely viable HA delivery partner. Not a framework, not a procurement vehicle, not a piece of technology. A standard. Compliance folder structure. WIP reporting format. KPI definitions. Mobilisation documentation. RAMS templates calibrated to HA expectations.

It needs enablement infrastructure. Something a network, a programme, a commercial service that helps smaller contractors achieve and maintain that standard. That bridges the gap between what they currently offer and what housing associations need to receive before they can take the governance risk of bringing them on.

That infrastructure doesn't build itself. But it doesn't require extraordinary resources. It requires clarity, credibility, and the willingness to do the slow work of raising standards in a sector that badly needs them raised.

A Final Thought

We are entering a period where obligations on social housing landlords are expanding faster than the capacity of the market to meet them. Awaab's Law, the Building Safety Act, the new consumer standards, the forthcoming Decent Homes Standard reform, each places new demands on delivery that the existing supply chain architecture is not designed to absorb.

The organisations that navigate this period best won't necessarily be the ones with the largest contracts. They will be the ones with the most adaptive supply chains. The ones that have diversified their delivery base, standardised how they engage smaller providers, and built the resilience that years of concentration risk have quietly eroded.

The question isn't whether to change the model.

It's whether to change it now, by design or later, in response to the next crisis that makes it unavoidable.

Because the crisis will come. It always does.

The choice is whether we meet it with architecture or with improvisation.

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