Promise to tackle Brighton and Hove housing problems by Christmas
City councillors have been reacting to a highly critical report
Most of the “significant failings” in Brighton and Hove City Council’s housing will be dealt with by December, a leading councillor said.
Labour councillor Gill Williams, the cabinet member for housing and new homes, made the claim during discussions about the damning report published last month by the Regulator for Social Housing.
At the council’s cabinet meeting on Thursday (26 September), she said that council housing had suffered from years of underinvestment as finances were “cut to the bone”.
Many of the council-owned homes were ageing, out of date and in desperate need of modernisation, she added.
Councillor Williams said: “When we took over this administration, we undertook investigations into the conditions of our stock.
“It wasn’t a pretty picture to be quite honest with you and we knew that we were going to face enormous challenges.
“In the context of that, we now have this new regulatory regime that has been introduced, and quite rightly too, given some of the tragedies such as Grenfell.”
Councillor Williams said that lessons from the Grenfell Tower fire had informed the new regulatory regime – and it was proving to be a challenge to meet the standards under that regime.
She said: “We are not where we ought to be. What this judgment outlines is where we are not compliant – and we ought to be 100 per cent compliant and nothing else will be good enough.
“Where we are not compliant, what we need to do is get to that point of compliance and quite correctly so.
“We talk to the regulator often. We are guided by the regulator where we need to get to and what we need to do to get there.”
The council is spending £15 million from the Housing Revenue Account (HRA), which is funded by council tenants’ rents, to deal with the various issues raised by the regulator.
Shortcomings included
electrical safety
provision of smoke detectors
water safety
fire safety
The regulator said that 3,600 council homes out of about 12,100 did not have an electrical condition report.
And more than 600 homes required a water risk assessment while 500 were at least three months overdue for water safety repairs and improvements.
The “significant backlog” of 8,000 low-risk and low-priority repairs was also highlighted.
Councillor Williams said that most of the work would be completed by December, including the repairs backlog being addressed by employing more contractors.
The council’s scrutiny committees are also expected to monitor progress.
The Labour council leader Bella Sankey said that the council was taking the regulator’s findings very seriously.
Councillor Sankey said: “I know officers have been working incredibly hard to address the findings of the regulator.
“We now receive weekly briefings against all the key metrics to ensure we are making steady progress towards getting ourselves to a place that will be acceptable to the regulator and getting on top of those backlog of repairs that was inherited.”