The Vagrancy Act Falls, Awaab's Law Bites, and Cuckooing Gets Its Own Offence

This week: rough sleeping is decriminalised as the Vagrancy Act 1824 is repealed; the Housing Ombudsman confirms Awaab’s Law enforcement is now live in casework; and the Crime and Policing Act 2026 hands providers a new cuckooing offence and fresh duties. Plus new legal analysis on the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 and supported accommodation, and a Treasury consultation on zero-rate VAT for social housing land.

Part One — The Top 5 Roundup

1. Vagrancy Act 1824 Repealed as Rough Sleeping Decriminalised

The Government confirmed the Vagrancy Act 1824 was repealed on 29 June 2026, ending nearly 200 years of legislation under which rough sleeping and begging were criminal offences in England and Wales. Inside Housing called it a “watershed moment”; the CIH welcomed it as a “landmark” for housing and homelessness. Repeal forms part of the Government’s National Plan to End Homelessness, which includes a £159 million grant for supported housing and targets the 40 local areas with greatest need. For supported housing providers the change is material: a significant proportion of residents entering supported exempt accommodation have histories of rough sleeping, and criminalisation has long shaped referral pathways and how vulnerability is evidenced. The repeal removes a criminal sanction but confers no new housing rights; its interaction with the homelessness duty and exempt-accommodation eligibility will develop through local practice.

Source: gov.uk — Rough sleeping no longer a crime as Vagrancy Act repealed

2. Housing Ombudsman Signals Awaab’s Law Enforcement Is Now Live

The Housing Ombudsman published a new Learning from Severe Maladministration report on 1 July 2026 focused on roof leaks, explicitly citing early casework under Awaab’s Law as a central reference point. The report signals that Awaab’s Law — introduced under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, imposing strict timescales for hazard investigation and remedy — is now generating live casework and early precedents rather than remaining prospective. It lands the same week a Housing 2026 panel warned the sector is “a lot less educated” about the broader range of HHSRS hazards that Phase 2 of Awaab’s Law will cover. Supported housing providers, many operating older, converted or HMO-style stock housing health-vulnerable residents, face heightened exposure. Providers not yet embedding Awaab’s Law timescales into repairs and safeguarding workflows are urged to treat this as an urgent prompt.

Sources: Housing Ombudsman | Inside Housing

3. Devonshires Flags Crime and Policing Act 2026 Duties for Housing Providers

Leading social housing firm Devonshires published guidance on the Crime and Policing Act 2026 and its implications for social housing providers, alongside a companion “Behind the Bricks” guide on Suspicious Activity Reporting. The Act is expected to affect landlord obligations to cooperate with law enforcement, anti-social-behaviour-related possession grounds, and — of particular note for the supported sector — provisions addressing cuckooing, where vulnerable tenants’ homes are taken over for criminal activity. Supported exempt accommodation providers routinely house individuals with histories of offending, substance misuse, or exposure to county-lines exploitation, so new information-sharing duties and possession routes could materially reshape tenancy management and safeguarding practice. The parallel SAR guidance reflects continued National Crime Agency and DWP interest in financial-crime and Housing Benefit fraud risk in the exempt accommodation market.

Sources: Devonshires — Crime and Policing Act 2026 | Devonshires — Suspicious Activity Reporting

4. Renters’ Rights Act 2025: New Analysis on Supported Accommodation Carve-Outs

A legal analysis from HCR Law examines how the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 treats supported accommodation, noting the legislation recognises supported housing providers “need possession tools that reflect the realities of providing care, support and supervision.” With the abolition of assured shorthold tenancies and Section 21, providers relying on licences, periodic tenancies and move-on arrangements must understand which exemptions and possession grounds apply to their schemes. The piece lands against research reported by Inside Housing showing both tenants and landlords remain uncertain about, or lack confidence in, the RRA changes. For the supported sector — operating at the intersection of housing law, benefits regulation and care commissioning — the boundaries of the Act’s carve-outs remain a live area of practitioner uncertainty, and mis-application carries real compliance risk.

Sources: HCR Law | Inside Housing

5. Consultation Launches on Zero-Rate VAT for Social Housing Land

The Government has launched a consultation on introducing a new zero rate of VAT for land earmarked for social housing development, a Treasury/HMRC-led measure with potentially significant financial consequences for the sector. According to Devonshires’ commentary, the relief would be limited to entities registered with the relevant regulator — the Regulator of Social Housing in England, and the equivalent bodies in the devolved nations. VAT on land transactions has historically been a friction cost in supported housing development, where providers frequently acquire or convert small sites. Whether “social housing” is defined for this purpose in a way that captures supported or exempt accommodation — and whether the registration requirement excludes smaller specialist or unregistered providers — will determine how far the sector benefits. The consultation window and definitional scope will need close scrutiny.

Sources: Inside Housing | Devonshire

Part Two — Deep Dives

Three of this week’s developments turn on the sector’s core legal machinery rather than on policy sentiment, and each repays close analysis.

Deep Dive 1 — Two Definitions of “Support”: Why the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 Reopens the Exempt-Accommodation Fault Line

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 has done to the rented sectors what a generation of reformers demanded: it has abolished the assured shorthold tenancy and, with it, the Section 21 “no-fault” route to possession. HCR Law’s new analysis is a useful reminder that Parliament did not forget supported housing — the Act, in its framing, recognises that providers “need possession tools that reflect the realities of providing care, support and supervision.” But drafting a carve-out is not the same as making it cohere with the rest of the legal architecture, and for supported housing a deeper problem is now unavoidable: the sector is governed by at least two statutory conceptions of what “support” means, and they do not line up.

The first conception is the one practitioners have lived with for two decades. Housing Benefit “exempt accommodation” status derives from Schedule 3 paragraph 4(10) of the Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit (Consequential Provisions) Regulations 2006, which preserves the pre-2006 definition: accommodation provided by a housing association, registered charity or voluntary organisation where that body, or someone acting on its behalf, provides the claimant with “care, support or supervision.” That deceptively short phrase has been litigated relentlessly. The Turnbull line of Commissioners’ decisions — CH/150/2007, CH/4432/2006, CH/200/2009 and the reported R(H) 4/09 — established that the care, support or supervision must be “more than minimal,” genuinely provided, and connected to the accommodation rather than incidental to it. Bristol CC v AW crystallised the “real difference” test: the support must make a real difference to the claimant’s ability to occupy the accommodation, not merely exist on paper. Allerdale BC v JD [2019] UKUT 304 pressed further on the landlord-support nexus, scrutinising whether support was truly provided by, or on behalf of, the landlord.

The Renters’ Rights Act introduces a second conception, built for an entirely different purpose. Its supported-accommodation provisions are designed to preserve possession flexibility — to let providers manage move-through schemes and avoid being trapped by lifetime security of tenure where accommodation is transitional by design. The definition that triggers those provisions is drawn to serve possession policy, not benefit eligibility. Therein lies the fault line: a scheme can satisfy the Housing Benefit “care, support or supervision” test yet fall outside the RRA’s supported-accommodation gateway, or — more dangerously — the reverse.

Consider the provider whose model has, for years, rested on a licence to occupy rather than a tenancy. The licence device was always vulnerable to the reasoning in Street v Mountford: exclusive possession for a term at a rent creates a tenancy whatever the label, and many supported “licences” are licences in name only. Under the old regime the stakes were tolerable, because the AST offered a fallback and Section 21 offered an exit. The RRA removes both. A provider who wrongly believed its residents were licensees may now discover they hold assured tenancies with full security — unless the supported-accommodation carve-out applies. Whether it applies depends on the RRA definition, not the Housing Benefit one. A provider that has spent years assembling evidence of “more than minimal” support to protect its subsidy under Turnbull and Bristol CC v AW may find that evidence does not map cleanly onto the RRA gateway.

The tension is not academic. The Inside Housing research reported this week — that both landlords and tenants remain uncertain about the RRA changes — is precisely the environment in which mis-application flourishes. In general-needs housing, uncertainty produces delay. In supported housing it produces two compounding risks. First, a possession action brought on the assumption that a scheme is exempt supported accommodation, which then fails because the RRA definition is not met, exposes the provider to costs, delay, and a resident left in limbo. Second, and more insidiously, the evidential exercise required to establish RRA supported-accommodation status may prompt a local authority to revisit the parallel Housing Benefit exempt-accommodation claim. A benefit authority that sees a provider asserting, for possession purposes, that support is transitional and light-touch may ask whether the same support is genuinely “more than minimal” and makes a “real difference” for subsidy purposes. The two definitions can be turned against each other.

Three practical implications follow. First, providers should audit every scheme against both definitions simultaneously, mapping the support actually delivered against the Turnbull/Bristol CC v AW threshold and against the RRA gateway, and documenting the landlord-support connection in the manner Allerdale demands. A single evidence base that satisfies both is achievable, but only if built deliberately. Second, the licence-versus-tenancy question must be resolved now, not at the point of a possession dispute; providers relying on licences should assume a court will look through the label. Third, commissioning and eligibility frameworks — particularly for the rough-sleeper cohort now flowing into supported housing following the Vagrancy Act repeal — should be reviewed so referral documentation captures support needs in terms that serve both the benefit and the possession regime.

The Renters’ Rights Act was meant to simplify. For supported housing it has, in truth, sharpened a long-standing incoherence: “support” now does statutory work in at least two places, to two different standards, with two different consequences. Until the courts or the Government reconcile them, the safest course is to treat the exempt-accommodation jurisprudence — Schedule 3 paragraph 4(10), Turnbull, Bristol CC v AW and Allerdale — not as a benefits silo but as the interpretive backbone for the whole supported-housing legal position, RRA included.

Deep Dive 2 — Enforcer or Supporter? The Crime and Policing Act 2026 and the Exempt-Accommodation Dilemma

Devonshires’ decision to publish guidance on the Crime and Policing Act 2026 “for social housing providers,” reinforced by a companion note on Suspicious Activity Reporting, is a signal worth reading closely. Major housing law firms do not produce practitioner guidance on a new statute unless it changes what their clients must do. For supported and exempt accommodation providers the Act arrives at the most sensitive point in their operating model: the relationship between a landlord who is also a support provider and a resident whose vulnerability is the very thing that makes the accommodation “exempt.”

The Act’s headline features for housing — expanded anti-social-behaviour possession grounds, new duties to cooperate with and share information with the police, and a statutory response to cuckooing (the takeover of a vulnerable person’s home for drug dealing or other criminality) — are, on their face, protective. Cuckooing in particular has long been a scourge in supported housing, where residents with substance-misuse histories or learning disabilities are targeted precisely because their occupancy is insecure and their support networks thin. A dedicated offence and clearer information-sharing pathways are, in principle, exactly what the sector has asked for.

But the exempt-accommodation model does not sit comfortably with an enforcement role, and the reason is legal, not merely cultural. Housing Benefit exempt status under Schedule 3 paragraph 4(10) of the Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit (Consequential Provisions) Regulations 2006 depends on the landlord, or someone on its behalf, providing “care, support or supervision.” The Turnbull decisions (CH/150/2007, CH/4432/2006, CH/200/2009, R(H) 4/09) require that support to be “more than minimal” and genuine; Bristol CC v AW requires it to make a “real difference” to the resident’s ability to occupy; Allerdale BC v JD [2019] UKUT 304 requires it to be genuinely provided by or on behalf of the landlord. All of this presupposes a relationship of trust. The support worker who is also, by statute, an information conduit to the police occupies a structurally conflicted position. If residents come to see their support provider as an arm of law enforcement, disclosure — the raw material of effective support — dries up, and the “real difference” that support is supposed to make becomes harder to evidence.

Here the licence-based occupancy model, common across the exempt sector, cuts both ways. On one hand, licences and the new ASB possession grounds give providers faster routes to remove a resident whose accommodation has been cuckooed or who is perpetrating ASB. On the other, precipitate use of those routes can be self-defeating. A provider that evicts a cuckooing victim rather than supporting them through it is not providing “more than minimal” support; it is arguably providing none, which threatens the exempt status of the scheme and cuts across the RSH consumer standards. The Neighbourhood and Community Standard expects landlords to work with partners to prevent and tackle ASB, but the Safety and Quality Standard and the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard expect them to treat residents fairly and to support vulnerable tenants. The Crime and Policing Act does not repeal those expectations; it layers new duties on top of them, and it is the provider who must reconcile the two.

The Suspicious Activity Reporting dimension sharpens the point. The exempt-accommodation market has for years been dogged by rogue operators using supported housing structures to extract inflated Housing Benefit — the very abuse the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 was designed to curb through local licensing and national standards. Devonshires’ SAR guidance reflects continued National Crime Agency and DWP interest in financial-crime risk in the sector. Legitimate providers now face a dual compliance burden: they must both evidence genuine care, support or supervision to sustain their subsidy, and demonstrate anti-money-laundering vigilance to avoid being tarred with the rogue-operator brush. The two are not in conflict, but they demand investment in governance that smaller specialist providers may struggle to fund while development finance is constrained.

There is also an oversight dimension. SHROA 2023 places significant weight on local authority oversight of supported housing, including powers to introduce licensing regimes and enforce national standards. The Crime and Policing Act’s information-sharing architecture will interact with that local oversight: a local authority that is both the SHROA licensing body and a recipient of police intelligence about a provider’s residents holds a powerful, and potentially punitive, combination of levers. Providers should expect that ASB and cuckooing intelligence will feed into local judgements on whether a scheme is well run — and, by extension, whether it should retain its licence and its residents’ exempt-accommodation eligibility.

For practitioners, the response is threefold. First, providers should map the new duties against their support model and decide, in advance and in writing, how they will handle the tension between confidentiality and cooperation — a reactive, case-by-case approach invites both safeguarding failures and regulatory criticism. Second, cuckooing and ASB responses should be built around support-and-retain wherever possible, with possession as a genuine last resort, so that the provider’s conduct continues to demonstrate the “more than minimal,” “real difference” support that Turnbull, Bristol CC v AW and Allerdale require. Third, governance frameworks — SAR reporting lines, information-sharing protocols and record-keeping — should be documented to a standard that satisfies both the National Crime Agency’s expectations and the RSH consumer standards. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 does not force supported housing providers to choose between being supporters and enforcers. But it requires them to prove, more rigorously than before, that they can be both without ceasing to be the former.

Deep Dive 3 — Does Awaab’s Law Reach Exempt Accommodation? The Gap Between Timescales and Tenure

The Housing Ombudsman’s Learning from Severe Maladministration report on roof leaks, published this week and expressly drawing on early Awaab’s Law casework, marks a threshold moment: enforcement of the new hazard-response regime is no longer prospective. For mainstream registered providers the message is clear — the compliance clock is ticking, and the Ombudsman is generating precedents about the evidential and procedural standards it will apply. For supported and exempt accommodation providers the message is more complicated, because the prior question — whether Awaab’s Law reaches them at all — has never been squarely answered, and the answer is not the one many assume.

Awaab’s Law originates in the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023. Its central mechanism is the implication of a term into social housing tenancy agreements requiring landlords to investigate and remedy prescribed hazards within fixed statutory timescales. That mechanism is elegant for the general-needs sector, where the occupier almost always holds a tenancy. It is far less straightforward for exempt accommodation, where a large proportion of residents occupy under licences to occupy rather than tenancies. If the statutory duty operates by implying a term into a tenancy, a genuine licence — one that survives the Street v Mountford analysis because the resident lacks exclusive possession — may fall outside the implied-term mechanism altogether. The result is a potential gap: the residents most likely to be living in older, converted, HMO-style stock vulnerable to damp, mould and roof leaks are, in some schemes, the residents least clearly protected by the very law designed to address those hazards.

The gap widens when registration is considered. Awaab’s Law and the RSH consumer standards bite hardest on registered providers. But exempt-accommodation status under Schedule 3 paragraph 4(10) of the Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit (Consequential Provisions) Regulations 2006 does not require RSH registration. A voluntary organisation or registered charity providing “care, support or supervision” can attract exempt-accommodation Housing Benefit while sitting entirely outside the RSH’s registered sector — and therefore outside the direct reach of the consumer standards and much of the Awaab’s Law enforcement architecture. This is the structural anomaly the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 was designed to address: it equips local authorities with licensing and standards powers precisely because the national regulatory net does not catch every exempt provider. Until SHROA’s local regimes are fully operational, an unregistered exempt provider with poor stock may face neither the implied Awaab’s Law term (because its residents are licensees) nor RSH consumer-standards enforcement (because it is unregistered) — a double gap.

It would be a serious error, however, to treat that gap as a shield. Three bodies of law close it in practice. First, the RSH consumer standards — in particular the Safety and Quality Standard — apply to registered providers of supported housing regardless of tenure, and the RSH has shown in its recent cadence of adverse judgements that it will pursue supported-housing landlords whose stock condition fails residents. Second, and more fundamentally, the exempt-accommodation jurisprudence itself imports a quality dimension. The support that sustains exempt status must be “more than minimal” (Turnbull; CH/150/2007, CH/4432/2006, CH/200/2009, R(H) 4/09) and must make a “real difference” to the resident’s ability to occupy the accommodation (Bristol CC v AW). It is difficult to argue that support makes a “real difference” to a resident’s ability to live in a property rendered uninhabitable by damp, mould or a leaking roof. Allerdale BC v JD [2019] UKUT 304 reinforces that support must be genuinely connected to the accommodation and provided by or on behalf of the landlord; a landlord that neglects the fabric of the building while claiming to provide meaningful support invites scrutiny of whether the exempt-accommodation claim is sustainable at all. Disrepair, in the exempt sector, is not merely a housing-management failure — it is a potential threat to the benefit subsidy on which the whole model depends.

Third, ordinary landlord obligations survive regardless of the Awaab’s Law question. The implied repairing obligations, the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) framework and the Housing Health and Safety Rating System all apply according to their own tests, and the Ombudsman’s severe-maladministration findings draw on maladministration principles that do not depend on Awaab’s Law being formally in scope. A provider that assumes it is outside Awaab’s Law and does nothing remains exposed on multiple fronts.

The practical implications are stark. First, exempt providers should not attempt to litigate their way out of Awaab’s Law by relying on the licence label; they should adopt the Awaab’s Law timescales voluntarily as a floor, both because the label is fragile and because the RSH, the Ombudsman and local SHROA licensing authorities will judge them against those standards in substance. Second, stock-condition surveys and hazard-response workflows should be embedded now, with particular attention to the older and converted stock that dominates the exempt sector and is disproportionately exposed to the roof-leak and damp hazards the Ombudsman has highlighted. Third, providers should treat building condition as inseparable from their exempt-accommodation evidence base: a scheme that cannot demonstrate a habitable environment cannot credibly demonstrate that its support makes a “real difference,” and the Turnbull and Bristol CC v AW tests will bite. The comfortable assumption that Awaab’s Law is someone else’s problem is exactly the assumption the Ombudsman’s early casework should dispel. For the supported sector, the safer reading is that the law reaches further than the tenure label suggests — and that the exempt-accommodation framework itself already demands the standards Awaab’s Law codifies.

Supported Housing Briefing — Complex Law. Clear Intelligence. Issue #15, week ending 3 July 2026. Sources are linked inline; all developments should be verified against primary materials before action.