Leader says he's "proud" of Ipswich housing service despite several targets missed
"Where we are red, we know why and we are improving”
Last updated 5th Feb 2024
An Ipswich leader says he is proud of the borough’s housing service despite several targets having been missed.
Cllr Alasdair Ross, Ipswich’s portfolio holder for housing, presented a report last week to members of the council’s strategic overview and scrutiny committee on the borough’s housing performance.
He told members they should be proud of the council’s housing provision despite many of the report’s targets having been missed.
These included, for instance, the 1,785 repairs in progress at any one time, initially targeted at 850.
"An honest report"
Cllr Ross said: “I would be very concerned if I saw a report that was all green. It’s not that I’m happy seeing red, but I think that’s much more of an honest report. Where we are red, we know why and we are improving.”
The high number of works, he said, was due to an exponential increase in demand since the pandemic, and cost-of-living making it harder to address them, but also confirmed more resources had now been allocated to deal with the hike.
The report also revealed a total of 55 homes were void at any given time, with the turnaround for those properties being 37 days, leading to only 76 per cent of these being let on time. All figures were above the council’s own targets.
Performance relating to void houses worsened significantly through the pandemic, making it one of the council’s toughest housing-related issues to get back on track.
Tenant satisfaction
The council’s struggle to meet many of its targets has also led to tenant satisfaction being lower than it hoped for, despite an overall increase in the latter half of the financial year. Despite this, Cllr Ross said the council would not be changing its targets and remained committed to addressing the issues.
Cllr Ross added: “We set ourselves very challenging targets and some we won’t achieve. We set out ourselves ambitious targets because that’s the way we want to go.
“We are having to deal with things that are suddenly thrown at us by the government — in comparison to the sector as a whole, our performance is good.”