Urgent action underway to improve council housing

Councillors are discussing the plans in place to improve council housing in the city following the critical report from the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) at next week’s Cabinet meeting.

The RSH review of our role as a landlord for social housing in the city is the first under their new enhanced consumer regulation process, introduced on 1 April 2024.

Following a period of engagement, the RSH report identified a number of serious failings in safety and quality compliance around certain areas of health and safety and the backlog of routine repairs backlog.

The cabinet report outlines the plans in place and the progress that’s been made to address the challenges.

There are a range of programmes underway as part of our commitment to provide safe, good quality homes and meet the new national regulations.

These include:

• Investing more than £15 million in making rapid and necessary improvements to our existing housing supply in direct response to issues raised in the report.
• We have achieved 100% compliance in Fire Risk Assessments (FRAs) for all of our 68 high-risk residential buildings, which are assessed every year. We’ve bought in additional contractors to work alongside our in-house teams to carry out fire safety actions.
• Prioritising electrical checks on homes to ensure all wiring and installations are safe. We’ve introduced a 5 year testing cycle and our latest figures show we’ve completed electrical safety checks in more than 55% of homes within that cycle.
• A programme of record checks and installations of smoke detection to make sure all homes which need them have working smoke detectors. We’ve now completed more than 86% of homes.
• Carrying out water assessments in homes which have been identified as being at risk of potential problems with their water supply. We’re bringing in additional contractors to support our work on water safety risk assessments and actions.
• Appointing external contractors to support our in-house repairs service in clearing the historic backlog of repairs and reducing response times for new requests. This has helped reduce the number of repairs open for more than 28 days from 9,650 in June to 7,250 in July.
• Carrying out a range of ongoing surveys to make sure we have the most up-to-date information on the condition, health and safety of our homes. This is in order to identify priority issues and inform our remediation programmes and investment priorities to ensure the quality and safety of our housing.

Ensuring resident safety

Councillor Gill Williams, Cabinet member for Housing and New Homes, said: “We have been working closely with the Regulator of Social Housing over the past year and we fully accept the extremely serious findings of the review. We are very sorry for not meeting the standards both we and our residents expect.

“Like many councils with a largely ageing housing stock, we do face challenges in modernising our homes.

“We have introduced a raft of urgent measures to build on the positive work carried out on building, fire and other health and safety measures in council homes over the last 12 months.

“We’re doing this to ensure we are fully compliant with building safety and quality standards under the Building Safety Act and Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 as soon as possible.

“Our key priority is the safety of our residents and we are fully committed to meeting these regulatory requirements. We are working very hard to get to a better place as soon as we possibly can.” 

More information

• Read the full ‘Improving Housing Services: Responding to the Regulator for Social Housing’s Judgement’ report to the 26 September Cabinet (agenda item 63)

You can also read the full Regulator of Social Housing report, updates on the actions we’re taking and further advice on our dedicated Regulator of Social Housing webpages.