| Date | February – October 2007 |
| Location | England and Wales |
| Caused by | Fragmented regulation of social housing following large-scale stock transfers from local authorities to registered social landlords |
| Resulted in | Publication of Every Tenant Matters (June 2007); establishment of the Tenant Services Authority under the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 |
| Parties | Department for Communities and Local Government · Housing Corporation · National Housing Federation · Tenant Services Authority |
| Lead figures | Martin Cave, Ruth Kelly, Grant Shapps (shadow housing minister) |
The Cave Review of Social Housing was a government-commissioned policy review conducted between February and October 2007 in England and Wales. Initiated by the Department for Communities and Local Government under Secretary of State Ruth Kelly, the review examined the regulatory framework governing social housing providers and resulted in the establishment of the Tenant Services Authority, a new independent regulator, replacing the oversight functions previously held by the Housing Corporation.
By the mid-2000s, the social housing sector in England had grown substantially in complexity. The transfer of council housing stock to registered social landlords — a process accelerated by the Large Scale Voluntary Transfer programme of the 1990s — had created a fragmented regulatory environment in which oversight responsibilities were divided between the Housing Corporation, local authorities, and the Audit Commission. A 2005 report by the National Audit Office, *Improving Social Housing through Transfer* (HC 496, Session 2004–05), identified inconsistencies in tenant redress mechanisms and called for a consolidated regulatory body.
In January 2007, the Department for Communities and Local Government commissioned Martin Cave, a professor of economics at Brunel University, to lead an independent review of the regulation of social housing. Cave had previously advised Ofcom on competition in the telecommunications sector and was considered a specialist in independent regulatory design. His appointment was announced in a Written Ministerial Statement on 22 January 2007.
Cave and his secretariat, based at the DCLG offices in Eland House, Westminster, conducted consultations with over 340 registered social landlords, nine local authority housing departments, tenant representative bodies including the National Tenants' Organisation, and academic researchers at the London School of Economics Housing Research Group. The review also drew on comparative analysis of housing regulation in Scotland, where Communities Scotland had operated a unified landlord registration system since 2005 under the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001.
### Key Findings
The review's interim findings, circulated to stakeholders in May 2007, identified three principal regulatory failures: the absence of a single authoritative register of social landlords; the lack of enforceable minimum standards for tenant services; and the inadequacy of existing mechanisms for landlord intervention in cases of serious mismanagement. Cave described the existing system as "regulatory layering without regulatory accountability" in a passage widely quoted in subsequent parliamentary debate.
### Recommendations
The final report, *Every Tenant Matters: A Review of Social Housing Regulation*, was published on 21 June 2007. It contained 54 recommendations, of which the central proposal was the creation of a new, independent body — the Tenant Services Authority — with powers to set consumer standards, conduct periodic reviews of registered providers, and intervene in failing landlords. Secondary recommendations addressed the merging of the Housing Corporation's investment and regulatory functions and the introduction of a statutory right for tenants to trigger inspections of their landlord.
The report was received broadly positively by the National Housing Federation, which described Cave's recommendation for a dedicated regulatory body as "long overdue" in a press statement issued 22 June 2007. The Chartered Institute of Housing welcomed the consumer standards framework but noted that the proposed inspection trigger mechanism would require primary legislation. The Local Government Association expressed concern that the review underweighted the role of local authorities as housing enablers, a position it set out formally in a submission to the DCLG Select Committee in September 2007.
Critics in the academic literature noted that the review had been completed without publishing its underlying tenant satisfaction data, a gap identified by researchers at the Centre for Housing Policy, University of York, in a commentary published in *Housing Studies* (Vol. 23, No. 1, 2008). The DCLG declined to release the data under Freedom of Information, citing ongoing policy development.
The Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 gave statutory effect to the Cave Review's principal recommendations. The Tenant Services Authority was formally established on 1 December 2008 and assumed its full regulatory functions on 1 April 2010, at which point the Housing Corporation was dissolved. The TSA itself was subsequently abolished by the Public Bodies Act 2011 and its consumer regulation functions transferred to the Homes and Communities Agency, later renamed Homes England.
The Cave Review is cited in the explanatory notes to the [Housing and Regeneration Act 2008](/wiki/housing-and-regeneration-act-2008) as the primary evidence base for Part 2 of that Act, which established the framework for social housing regulation. It is also referenced in the Law Commission's 2011 consultation on rented housing as a precedent for evidence-based regulatory reform in the housing sector.
The Cave Review has not acquired a significant presence in popular culture. It was, however, referenced in the BBC Radio 4 programme *File on 4* (broadcast 14 October 2008) in an episode examining the early performance of the Tenant Services Authority. A case study drawn from the review's consultation findings — concerning a registered social landlord in the East Midlands with a documented backlog of 1,247 unresolved repair requests — was cited by the presenter as evidence that Cave's warnings about regulatory failure had been "neither exaggerated nor heeded."