How the Sector Risk Profile 2025 Can Help You to Become a Registered Social Housing Provider

The Regulator of Social Housing’s Sector Risk Profile 2025 sets out, in clear terms, where the most serious risks now sit for Registered Providers and local authority landlords in England. It provides a de facto checklist of what boards and councillors are expected to control, explain and evidence in the current inspection regime.

If your organisation is looking to become a registered provider of social housing, then the Sector Profile 2025 is a must-read. Understanding it and reflecting it in your business plan, governance and risk framework can make your case stronger and more credible.

What Is the Sector Risk Profile 2025?

The Sector Risk Profile 2025 is the Regulator of Social Housing’s annual publication describing how risk is evolving across the sector and how it interacts with the consumer and economic standards. It draws on regulatory returns, casework and wider market evidence.

It is primarily aimed at the boards and councillors responsible for all registered providers of social housing. This includes local authorities, not-for-profit housing organisations and profit-making organisations. It is intended to help them:

• Understand the strategic, financial and operational risks they face
• Put in place an effective risk management and internal controls framework
• Make informed trade-offs in a challenging operating environment

Although written with existing landlords in mind, the Sector Risk Profile 2025 is just as important for organisations looking to become registered social housing providers.

Key Themes in the Sector Risk Profile 2025

1. Governance and Data at the Centre

Governance is the thread that runs through the entire profile and is presented as the foundation for both financial resilience and better outcomes for tenants.

Regulatory casework continues to show recurring governance issues. These include:

• Lack of timely, reliable data to provide assurance
• Weak challenge on investment trade offs
• Insufficient oversight of subsidiary structures and joint ventures
• Limited grip on compliance and follow up when things go wrong

The RSH has reinforced this theme in public communications, stressing that strong governance and risk management are key to resilience against sector risks.

As a social housing provider, you should be able to demonstrate:

• A clear governance structure, with appropriate skills and independence
• A corporate risk register that aligns with the risks highlighted in Sector Risk Profile 2025
• Documented internal controls and assurance routes, including how the board will receive and challenge information

2. Providing Safe and Decent Homes from Day One

The report makes it clear that providing safe and decent homes is a landlord’s fundamental responsibility. Landlords must have rigorous systems and processes to identify, prevent and resolve risks to tenants, underpinned by reliable stock condition information based on physical inspections.

Your organisation should ask yourself:

• Do you have a clear approach to stock condition surveys and ongoing property data collection?
• Can you evidence that you will comply with the Safety and Quality Standard on stock quality, decency, health and safety, and repairs?

• Are you prepared for policy changes, including Awaab’s Law and new electrical safety regulations for new and existing tenancies, and the outcome of the Decent Homes Standard review and Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards?

Even if you are starting small, your operating model needs to show that you can meet these expectations as you grow.

3. Development and Supply of New Homes

Sector Risk Profile 2025 underlines government expectations on social landlords to increase the supply of new homes, with a renewed focus on development supported by grant funding and loan schemes. The sector is expected to invest heavily in existing stock, including building safety, remediation, damp and mould works and wider quality improvements.

The profile highlights:

• The need to balance investment in existing stock with new supply in business plans
• Ongoing housing market risks, including weaker price growth, lower transaction volumes and constrained mortgage affordability, which can create impairment and sales risk for homes developed for sale
• The importance of managing construction risks such as supply chain disruption, rising input costs, quality failures and contractor insolvency
• The growth of for-profit providers and joint ventures, which brings additional counterparty and governance risks

If your organisation will be involved in the development or acquisition of homes, especially for profit or for sale, your modelling and risk narrative need to show how you will manage these issues.

4. Business Management, Financial Viability and Headroom

The 2025 profile describes a sector operating with very limited financial headroom. Landlords are dealing with higher debt costs as fixed-term borrowing matures, cost inflation, labour shortages and a weaker housing market that reduces surpluses from sales.

A recent House of Commons report on the finances and sustainability of the social housing sector echoes these concerns, highlighting the combined impact of building safety costs, decarbonisation, rising repairs spend and higher interest costs. Specific financial risks include:

• Pressure on liquidity and covenant compliance
• Exposure to variable interest rates
• Reliance on asset sales or diversification income to balance the books
• Stress testing and recovery plans that may not fully reflect downside scenarios

In this context, boards are expected to understand the requirements of economic and consumer standards and assure themselves that they deliver the outcomes set by the RSH.

They must maintain up-to-date and comprehensive data on assets, liabilities, home quality, complaints and repairs, and use it to drive service delivery and improvement. Ensuring data integrity is also key, with appropriate systems, quality controls and audit trails in place.

If you’re considering becoming a registered social housing provider, you should have in place:

• A business plan that includes realistic assumptions on income, costs, interest rates and inflation, aligned with sector conditions
• Robust stress testing that shows how risks could flow through your organisation and affect financial viability over time
• Clear recovery plans that sit alongside your base case

5. For-Profit Providers and More Complex Structures

The Sector Risk Profile 2025 includes commentary on development for sale, joint ventures and for-profit providers. It notes that for profit registered providers expect to develop or acquire increasing numbers of homes over the five-year forecast period, which brings particular risks around market exposure, governance and alignment of commercial and social objectives.

If you are a for-profit applicant or operate through a more complex group structure, expect the RSH to look closely at:

• How your governance structure protects the registered provider’s social objectives
• How you manage counterparty risk, conflicts of interest and intra group arrangements
• Whether board skills and controls match the scale and complexity of your plans

This is where having both regulatory insight and commercial experience around funding, development and procurement can be particularly valuable.

Turning the Sector Risk Profile 2025 into a Checklist

If your organisation is looking to become a registered social housing provider, then the Sector Risk Profile has important lessons for you. Here are some practical steps on how you can use its findings to support the registration process.

1. Map risks to your documents

• Take each main section of the Sector Risk Profile and map it to your business plan, risk register, financial model, governance framework and key policies.
• Check that you can point to concrete evidence for how each risk is identified, monitored and managed.

• Ask board members to read the executive summary and relevant sections, then use a workshop to discuss how the themes apply to your organisation.
• Record decisions and planned actions to strengthen your registration case and create an audit trail of board engagement.

• Make sure your corporate risk register uses categories that clearly relate to the Sector Risk Profile, including safe and decent homes, development risk, financial viability, data integrity and reputational risk.
• Build stress tests around the external shocks and sector trends described in the report, rather than generic scenarios.

• The RSH is rolling out a proactive inspection programme, integrating economic and consumer standards for large landlords.
• Even if you will start with fewer than 1,000 homes, design your systems, data and reporting so that they could support this level of scrutiny as you grow.

• Treat registration as part of a bigger social housing strategy that also looks at funding, development, partnerships and long-term viability, not as a one-off compliance exercise.
• Social housing consultancy support from Thornton & Lowe can help you bring everything together into a coherent story.

How Thornton & Lowe Can Help

Thornton & Lowe works with organisations across the social housing sector that want to become registered providers, from community-based organisations to for-profit entrants. Our support includes:

• Structuring business plans and financial models that reflect Sector Risk Profile 2025 themes
• Designing governance and risk frameworks that align with RSH expectations
• Helping boards understand and respond to the risk landscape through workshops and training
• Drafting and reviewing registration applications and supporting documentation, including policies and procedures

You can explore the registration journey and support options in more depth in our guides on becoming a registered social housing provider and regulation in practice, or get in touch to talk through your organisation’s plans.