A pattern has become difficult to miss in our development work over the past couple of months: firms approaching us to build or overhaul housing disrepair case types, frequently having built their volume work around personal injury claims. This is not an isolated trend confined to one or two clients. It is a shift visible directly in the nature of the instructions we receive.

The legal and economic backdrop

Housing disrepair claims sit on well-established legal footing. A landlord’s repairing obligations arise principally from the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 – most commonly section 11, which requires landlords to keep the structure and exterior of a property in repair, and section 9A, which implies a term that the property be fit for human habitation throughout the tenancy.

Alongside this, section 4 of the Defective Premises Act 1972 imposes a duty of care on landlords to take reasonable steps to keep tenants and others reasonably safe from injury or damage caused by a defect the landlord is obliged to repair. Claims may also arise from the express or implied terms of a tenancy agreement itself, or from common law nuisance and negligence.

None of this is new law. What has changed is the volume and profile of claims being brought under it, and the reasons for that shift are largely structural:

• Personal Injury economics have been compressed. Whiplash reforms and the fixed recoverable costs regime introduced for most claims from October 2023 have reduced the predictable margin firms could rely on from PI work, at a time when competition for that caseload has remained high.
• Housing disrepair claims were excluded from that regime. That left disrepair as one of the few substantial claim types where costs recovery is not capped by a fixed schedule, which matters considerably to a firm deciding where fee earner time delivers the best return.
• Failure to carry out necessary repairs affects both social and private tenancies, and claim volumes have grown sharply across both. Where a landlord, social housing or private landlords alike, fails to keep a property safe and habitable despite being notified of disrepair itself and special damages for any consequential loss, such as damaged belongings or, where relevant, a personal injury claim arising from the same defect.
• The claims process itself is now well defined. Housing disrepair cases in England follow the Pre-action Protocol for Housing Conditions Claims, made under the Civil Procedure Rules, which sets out clear expectations: a formal letter of claim, a landlord response within 20 working days, arrangements for expert inspection, and an expectation that litigation is a last resort. A comparable protocol applies in Wales. That structure gives firms a predictable claims process to build a workflow around, a significant advantage compared to less standardised areas of litigation.
• Increased scrutiny of claims management companies operating in this space has also pushed some claimants and referrers toward solicitors’ firms directly, rather than through intermediaries, adding a further source of instructed work for firms with the capacity to take it on.

What this looks like operationally

Firms coming to us for this work are rarely starting from nothing. Most already handle some housing disrepair claims, often as an offshoot of general litigation or possession work, using processes that were never designed to carry serious volume. The trigger for a proper rebuild is usually one of two things: existing caseload has outgrown the process handling it, or a firm has made a deliberate decision to build disrepair into a genuine department and needs the system to support that ambition.

The requests we receive are rarely for a simple intake form. They typically involve automating the pre-action protocol steps in sequence, tracking the landlord’s 20-working-day response deadline without manual chasing, providing a clear route for expert evidence to sit inside the case record, and giving practice managers visibility over caseload health rather than requiring them to check in on individual files.

There is also a costs dimension that firms are increasingly building into the workflow from the outset. Because housing disrepair claims sit outside the fixed recoverable costs regime, the way a firm records and evidences its time – and the basis on which general and special damages are calculated and supported – has a direct bearing on what is ultimately recoverable. A case management system that captures this properly as the case progresses, rather than reconstructing it at the point of settlement or assessment, tends to produce materially better costs outcomes across a caseload.

The firms getting ahead of the shift.

The firms performing well out of this trend are not necessarily those with the longest history in housing disrepair; they are the ones treating the case type as a genuine operational build rather than a relabelled personal injury workflow. Housing disrepair claims carry their own procedural rhythm: protocol-driven correspondence, landlord notification evidence, expert reports, and a growing set of statutory obligations on the social housing side as regulation in this area tightens further. A case type built around that rhythm from the outset scales considerably better than one adapted piecemeal as volume increases.

We have built and refined this case type for a number of clients now, and the pattern holds consistently: firms that invest in getting the workflow right early spend far less time firefighting later, and are better placed to absorb the next wave of enquiries when it arrives.

About Legal Practice Support

Legal Practice Support (LPS) works with SME law firms across the UK to develop the case management systems behind their day-to-day practice, with a particular focus on Proclaim development and customisation.

We build workflows around how a firm actually operates rather than adapting a firm’s process to fit a generic system, and we have supported a number of firms in building and scaling housing disrepair capability – from pre-action protocol automation to expert evidence handling and deadline tracking. We work on a retainer basis, giving firms ongoing access to development support as their caseload grows.

If you’re weighing up whether your current systems can support a growing housing disrepair caseload, get in touch to discuss your requirements.