A landlord receives a C3. The published judgement runs to a few hundred words of narrative. Nowhere in the Regulator's guidance sits a rule explaining what turns a C2 into a C3. The seven components of the inspection model are published. The four grade descriptors are published. The marking scheme is not.
The Regulator publishes what it looks at, never what it scores
RSH set out its inspection approach in February 2024: seven components, each with the evidence sought listed underneath. It is a real methodology, and anyone claiming the Regulator publishes nothing is wrong. What follows the evidence gathering is one sentence: the Regulator looks at and triangulates the different sources of evidence to determine the level of assurance they give. No scores. No thresholds. No aggregation rule.
The guidance on assessing regulatory issues disclaims fixed weighting outright, stating the weight attached to each factor varies according to the facts of each case. The Consumer Standards Code of Practice puts it plainly: "This does not indicate the relative importance of different elements of the standards."
Ofsted does the opposite. Its schools inspection toolkit publishes bullet-level criteria for each of five grades, phrased as "likely to be graded 'urgent improvement' when any of the following apply". A head teacher reads the toolkit and knows roughly where the school sits before an inspector arrives. A housing chief executive learns only which topics come up.
Eighteen aliases, hand-maintained, in the Ombudsman's website code
The Housing Ombudsman has published 17,767 decisions. Each one is an HTML page. There is no API, no bulk download, and no landlord identifier on the record. The landlord name string is the only join key on offer.
The names do not hold. Orbit appears in the decisions index as Orbit Group Limited with 131 decisions and as Orbit Housing Association Limited with 83. Optivo appears as "Optivo (now Southern Housing)". The landlord autocomplete list carries 1,642 names, 23 of them exact duplicates of another entry. To hold this together the Ombudsman ships a hand-maintained alias table inside its search page JavaScript, eighteen pairs long, including one entry mapping Stoke-on-Trent City Council to Stoke on Trent City Council and a second mapping it back again.
Then set the Ombudsman's own two publications for 2024-25 side by side. Of the 277 landlords in the performance tables, 34 are named differently in the published decisions. Camden Council against London Borough of Camden Council. Places for People Homes Limited against Places for People Group Limited. Neither publication carries an RSH registration number, so no reliable join to the Regulator's own data exists. On the determinations themselves the Ombudsman is candid, in its own guidance on outcomes: "there is no tick box or matrix to assist us in our decision making."
The one quantitative number it does produce is the maladministration rate, used to rank landlords and to trigger letters to everyone above 75%. Housing associations took the methodology to the Office for Statistics Regulation. The ONS confirmed as much in a freedom of information response in December 2023, while refusing to name the complainants. Housing Today reported six concerns reaching the regulator within three weeks of the October 2023 annual review, and reported the rate falling outside its remit as something other than an official statistic. A measure ranking 277 landlords sits beyond the regime governing official statistics, and the pushback changed nothing. The quarterly landlord statistics are still published as chart images.
Two thousand downloads and one certified adopter
HACT's UK Housing Data Standards reached version 3.5 with ten modules, free to download. The adoption metric on the page is a download count: the standards "have been downloaded over 2,000 times". Downloads are not implementations.
MHCLG's own research is blunter. Its housing data interventions study found the standards "have to date had limited traction" despite being designed with over 100 housing providers, and warned siloed attempts to create standards "get limited adoption". A certification scheme does exist. Lincolnshire Housing Partnership took it in January 2025, for the assets and repairs module alone. Nineteen months on there is no second certified organisation on the public record and no public registry of conforming systems. Against 1,579 registered providers, one.
MHCLG has since co-developed the Awaab's Law repairs module with HACT. Read this as the proof rather than the rebuttal. A voluntary standard sat still for a decade and moved only once a statutory duty appeared behind it.
Energy performance already solved this
Now the compliance disciplines. Gas Safety regulation 36 prescribes nine particulars of a landlord's record. LOLER Schedule 1 prescribes eleven categories of content for a thorough examination report. Both prescribe content in prose and neither prescribes a form. Fire, water, asbestos and damp and mould prescribe no template at all, and fire risk assessors register with four competing voluntary schemes or with none. No certifying body holds a queryable store of issued certificates. The landlord is the system of record in every discipline.
Except one. MHCLG runs the energy performance register on a single prescribed methodology, publishes bulk certificate data, and exposes a developer API. Same sector, same properties, same landlords. One department decided a certificate was data.
The NHS made the same decision at organisation level. Its Organisation Data Service answers an unauthenticated request with a stable code, a status, an operational history and a UPRN. Do not overread it. Only 30% of NHS providers running an electronic patient record achieve integrated bi-directional data flows, and NHS England's June 2026 review of its own clinical risk standards called its compliance mechanisms insufficient. The NHS is not finished. It agreed what an organisation is called and gave the answer a machine-readable address.
Our Data Maturity Model describes a common profile: reporting at 3.3 sitting on architecture at 1.5, an organisation producing confident figures it has no route to trace. English social housing has built the same profile nationally. Grades without a rubric, determinations without an identifier, standards without adopters, certificates without schemas. Boards are being asked to give assurance on a picture the sector has no agreed method of drawing.
Sources: RSH inspection and consumer standards guidance, Ofsted's schools inspection toolkit, Housing Ombudsman published guidance and decisions, ONS, Housing Today, HACT, MHCLG and NHS England publications, current at 18 August 2026. The decision counts, landlord name duplication and alias table were derived by the author directly from the Housing Ombudsman's published decisions index and its 2024-25 landlord performance tables; that endpoint is undocumented and the figures should be re-verified before reuse.