Nearly two years have passed since a senior member of a west London council strikingly observed to a gathering in Finchley that there isn’t a good housing repairs service anywhere. So frustrated had he become by the position in his own borough that he’d got its public health director to talk its housing team about the need to improve its performance, stressing the link between the condition of peoples’ homes and their physical and mental wellbeing.
The recollection makes recent watchdog verdicts on major providers of low-cost housing in the capital even more troubling.
The latest comes from the Housing Ombudsman in the form of a special investigation of the Hyde housing association, which has around 45,000 homes, most of them in London. The ombudsman’s job is to make the final decision on disputes between residents and landlords. The office also has the power to consider if “a systemic failure” is occurring within a particular organisation.
In the case of Hyde, the ombudsman’s probe was prompted by its “high maladministration rate” of 82 per cent overall, which rose to 94 per cent for effecting repairs to properties and 100 per cent when dealing with cases of damp and mould.
The report records many “unreasonable delays” with repair cases, mainly due to Hyde’s failure to keep on top of what its contractors were doing, with appointments missed and “poor knowledge exchange”. This had been particularly bad during the pandemic.
There are distressing case studies in the report, such as a lone mother of two children who, in December 2020, reported water getting into her second floor flat then spent months chasing Hyde to fix the problem, which grew worse and worse. She had to turn off her electricity supply. Buckets were needed to catch water. Her lounge ceiling began to cave in. The leak wasn’t mended until August 2021 and by the end of the year the internal damage had still not been put right.
Hyde’s handling of complaints was found to reflect a skewing of policy towards its choice and control, rather than those of residents. The ombudsman’s office had intervened in 25 out of 44 cases brought to its attention to get Hyde to “accept or progress the complaint”.
Much of this is said to result from “historical under resourcing” of the association’s complaints team, with “poor systems and knowledge and information management” also contributing. There were examples of inadequate redress, including “poorly handled apologies”. On top of this, queries about service charges have typically not been responded to for five or six months and sometimes for up to a year.
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The Housing Ombudsman’s report on Hyde follows one published last week about Camden Council‘s landlord services, in which it found “evidence of a defensive complaints culture” characterised by “dismissive” tones when dealing with residents’ concerns.
There is a grim story in it of a man with breathing difficulties and arthritis who needed assistance from a support dog and depended on a lift that had been out of order for more than half of the 1051 days he had lived in his Camden property. So exhausted by having to climb 94 steps to get to his flat, he moved into what is described as “a wooden shack” with no heating or hot water instead.
The report concluded that Camden, the landlord of 31,858 homes, has “a severely flawed approach to complaint handling”, little changed by recent attempts to improve it. “The continued pattern of lengthy delays to complaints being recorded and repair work completed indicates there remains a problem with the landlord’s complaint handling culture,” the report says. “To ensure a real change the landlord needs to invest time, resources and energy to grip these issues and transform its attitude and approach.”
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Camden isn’t the only borough to be officially found wanting in recent days. Reports on the performances of two other London councils as housing landlords were published last week too. They are the work of the government’s Regulator of Social Housing, whose job, in its words, is to foster “a viable, efficient and well governed social housing sector able to deliver quality homes and services for current and future tenants”.
A “regulatory judgement” has been passed on each of neighbouring Lambeth and Southwark. The former has more to feel good about. The latter has already said sorry.
The regulator scores landlords – housing associations as well as local authorities – on a scale from C1 (very good) to C4 (very bad). Southwark gets C3, so could be worse. Even so, the regulator found “serious failings” there and said “significant improvement is needed”.
The judgement says that more than half of Southwark’s 36,800 homes had not had their “electrical condition” tested for more than five years and that the same proportion had no smoke alarm. On top of this, over 2,000 fire safety “remedial actions”, nearly 100 of them categorised by the council itself as “high risk”, were overdue.
The regulator’s safety and quality standard requires landlords to have “an accurate, up to date and evidenced understanding the condition of their homes” so that their tenants can be sure these meet the Decent Homes Standard. But it emerged that Southwark doesn’t have such information about most of its homes. The council has conducted no stock condition survey since 2010, and that one was based on a representative sample. The council itself told the regulator that around 30 per cent of its stock doesn’t qualify as “decent”.
More encouragingly, Southwark was judged to be delivering an effective repairs service, but scope was found for improving “consistency in repairs completion times”. This was a matter of concern for tenants, who were also considered let down by the council’s approach to allocating homes. The judgement says the existing allocations strategy has not been updated since 2013 and that an “annual lettings plan” brought in last year has “led to a lack of transparency in the allocation of empty homes”. This is described as “a serious failure”.
Amid the criticisms, it is almost touching to read that the regulator’s team “observed a respectful approach to tenants during our inspection” and thought the council “understands the diverse needs of its tenants, with information collected through a robust tenancy audit process”. Southwark had self-referred its failure to meet electrical safety requirements and now has a programme for checking and fitting smoke alarms.
The judgement says the council has “developed a specification for a full stock condition survey”. There is praise for its handling of anti-social behaviour and hate incidents. Despite these shafts of light, though, Southwark leader Kieron Williams has apologised to “tenants who have been let down” and acknowledged that “there is much more to do”.
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Lambeth has been quite perky about scoring a C2 – top half of the scoreboard, after all. In its case, the judgement is that there are “some weaknesses” in how it manages its 23,628 social rented homes, and 9,290 leasehold properties. These relate to two of the regulator’s four consumer standards criteria, one being safety and quality, the other being transparency, influence and accountability.
On safety and quality the judgement says that “action is needed to ensure that Lambeth Council is delivering an effective, efficient and timely repairs, maintenance and planned improvements service for the homes and communal areas it is responsible for,” but noted efforts being made in that direction. It also records that Lambeth has been reducing its number of “non-decent” homes.
On transparency, influence and accountability, the regulator found weaknesses in “addressing complaints in a fair, effective and prompt manner” but also “some improvement” since the Housing Ombudsman’s review of this in 2022. It was complimentary about the engagement and scrutiny mechanisms the council provides. Against other measures, such as deterring antisocial behaviour and hate incidents and its “choice based letting system”, Lambeth came out well.
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Are things moving in the right direction? “Southwark Council has been engaging constructively with us,” the regulator says. “It has an understanding of the issues it needs to address and is taking action to rectify the failures identified.” A similar readiness to engage and comparable evidence of efforts to provide a better service were recorded in all four of these reports, as was the case with those on Southern Housing by both watchdog bodies produced earlier this year.
The backdrop, though, is ominous. Housing associations are under fearful financial pressures. At Monday’s winter reception of the All-Party Parliamentary Group of London, Lambeth’s leader, Claire Holland, speaking in her capacity as chair of the cross-party London Councils, warned of “a real risk that councils across London will start to go bankrupt” unless a through a joint effort with the national government boroughs’ pressing budget problems are addressed.
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One major cause of the deterioration of social housing services is the government removal of accountability via the Audit Commission, which left tenants and their associations without the ultimate threat of that organisation’s intervention.
It was a necessary and effective stick, much more so than the Housing Ombudsman service.
The existence of this stick empowered tenants’ associations enough to get their HA landlord to change policies and practices that led to bad services, e.g. repairs.
My HA landlord has gone through several mergers, with many changes of many staff. It has ended up much larger, with higher management that makes the right noises but no more. It does not carry through changes that would improve services and repairs. Without the strong regional residents’ associations groups, that were discontinued during the mergers, and without any real ‘stick’, there is no-one to hold it to account any more. Media attention seems not to have worked.
The negative, unhelpful and unwilling culture is not found throughout the organisation, but is still present. But of course it is not just in social housing that this is a problem. It is found in private housing management companies, and in many other businesses and organisations too.
This is so ubiquitous now that it contributes to the uneasy feeling that many people have that the country is starting to collapse, in some way. It is as if fewer and fewer people want to be bothered with doing their job properly. Are they all to tired and too underpaid?
Thank you for those very interesting thoughts.