The Government has now published the Direction on the Regulatory Standards (Competence and Conduct) 2025. This introduces a new regulatory requirement for all registered providers: to ensure that staff, contractors, and agents possess the necessary skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours to deliver quality services, and to demonstrate how this is managed and monitored.
What Providers Must Do
The Government sets out that providers must:- Ensure staff competence, including the necessary skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours.
- Have a written policy setting out how they manage competence, support learning and review performance.
- Adopt and embed a code of conduct, which is kept up to date and made accessible to tenants.
- Give tenants meaningful opportunities to shape and scrutinise both the competence policy and code of conduct.
- Apply the standard to contractors, taking steps to ensure staff employed by service providers also meet requirements.
What this Means For Landlords
Moving forward, this means that:- Smaller landlords face the challenge of introducing proportionate frameworks with limited resources. The standard still applies in full, but approaches can be scaled.
- Larger landlords will need robust systems to track competence across multiple services, contracts and geographies.
- For all providers, the focus will be on culture, accountability and transparency; not just compliance.
How Acuity Can Help
Acuity can assist members with the following:- Benchmarking how your approach compares with peers of a similar size and type.
- Providing analysis and insight on how the standard interacts with other requirements, such as TSMs.
- Supporting tenant engagement by showing how others are involving tenants and sharing practical examples.
- Offering practical tools and peer learning so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Final Thoughts
This new standard is about strengthening trust: ensuring everyone working in housing not only knows what to do, but also demonstrates the right behaviours in doing it. For smaller landlords in particular, it’s about finding practical and proportionate ways to meet the requirements and demonstrate accountability.
Acuity will continue to focus on helping you make sense of the data, learn from peers, and demonstrate to tenants and boards that you are meeting both the spirit and the letter of the new standard.
You can read the full consultation outcome here. Please also feel free to contact us if you would like to discuss how we can help.