The English Indices of Deprivation 2025 show that 73.3% of neighbourhoods in Kensington and Chelsea fall within the most deprived 10% nationally on the Living Environment domain, which measures the quality of both the outdoor and indoor environment.
The outdoor indicators include air quality, noise pollution and road-traffic accidents, while the indoor sub-domain assesses housing conditions, energy efficiency and access to private outdoor space.
It comes as the Regulator for Social Housing said Kensington and Chelsea Council need to improve the number of their homes that meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standards in August.
Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC) secretary Suzanne Muna: “You can’t talk to anybody who doesn’t know someone who is having a housing problem.
“This isn’t a crisis – a crisis is usually something that you think of as being fairly short-lived, something that has temporary causes, something that goes out of kilter.
“What we’ve got here are very deep, long term structural problems and if it’s not seen in that light it’s affecting everywhere.”
The ‘housing in poor condition’ measure reflects the proportion of social and private homes that fail to meet three components of the Decent Homes standard.
In August, the Regulator for Social Housing gave Kensington and Chelsea Council a C3 rating, meaning there are some parts of the service that need to be improved.
The two areas the council said they need to improve were the number of their homes that meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standards (DHS) and their knowledge of the homes they manage by completing a stock condition survey.
The regulator found that about 30% of the homes that the council manage don’t meet all of the Decent Homes Standards – representing about 2,000 of the roughly 7,000 tenanted homes.
Leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, Councillor Elizabeth Campbell said: “We need to better understand the condition of all our housing and bring all our residents’ homes up to the housing regulator’s standard for decent homes, with things like improved kitchens and bathrooms.
“We expect to have surveyed the condition of all our housing stock next year, and we will be 100 per cent compliant in the decent homes standard by 2030.”
In April, Labour MP Joe Powell launched his ‘Safe and Healthy Homes’ campaign which calls on landlords to commit to faster repairs, better communication, and focus on damp and mould issues.
Muna said: “Joe Powell is doing some really good work highlighting the issues and really trying to genuinely empower the people themselves and empower those communities.
“We could really do with seeing an awful lot more of that from other MPs and I hope he continues what he’s doing.”
Powell said: “Over half the residents who contact my office report issues like damp, mould, disrepair, and poor communication from social housing landlords.
“These aren’t isolated cases – they reflect systemic failures that are damaging lives.
“My hope is that this part of West London – home to Grenfell, and the birthplace of many of the UK’s social housing landlords – can become a test bed for change.
“If we can get it right here, we can set the standard for London and the rest of the country.”
Featured image credit: @ethanrysanek via Unsplash
