Decent Home Standard

The Decent Home Standard is a technical standard for Housing Associations. It is important that the Decent Home Standard is achieved, and home condition surveys completed to check compliance against the standard.

Our maintenance and repair service helps ensure the standard is met or exceeded across our homes. The standard is a minimum and we will seek to improve further using the information we collect against your home which helps inform improvement areas.

Below is a summary of the requirements of the Decent Home Standard.

Ensuring your home is in a reasonable state of repair

Building components include the home’s structure, other external elements such as the roof, chimneys, windows and doors and internal services and amenities, such as kitchens, bathrooms and heating systems.

We will ensure these components are kept in a reasonable state of repair, free from hazards and either repair or replace these components so they do not fail based on their age and condition.

Having a reasonable modern facilities and services

This requires homes which lack three of more of the following criteria to fail:

a reasonably modern kitchen (20 years old or less)
a kitchen with adequate space and layout
a reasonably modern bathroom (30 years old or less)
an appropriately located bathroom and WC
adequate insulation against external noise (where external noise is a problem)
adequate size and layout of common areas for blocks of flats.

Providing a reasonable degree of thermal comfort

Your home needs to have efficient heating and effective insulation to meet this criteria. Efficient heating is defined as:

any gas or oil programmable central heating
electric storage heaters
warm air systems
underfloor systems
programmable LPG/solid fuel central heating
similarly efficient heating systems which are developed in the future

As the efficiency of oil or gas heating differs from other forms of heating, the level of insulation required also differs.

For oil or gas, cavity wall insulation or at least 50mm loft insulation is required. For electric storage heaters or solid fuel programmable heating, this is increased to 200mm for loft insulation.

A more detailed definition of the Decent Home Standard can be found in the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-decent-home-definition-and-guidance