Agenda item

Director of Housing and Communities update report

The Director of Housing and Communities, James Barrah along with Simon Lewis (Assistant Director, Housing and Communities), Chris Brown (Assistant Director, Redevelopment and Regeneration) and Ian Candlish (Assistant Director of, Housing properties) updated the Tenants Strategic Group on key issues across the Housing and Communities Directorate since the last meeting and in particular to reflect on the Directorate response to the Corona virus pandemic. The report also raises some key issues forming the work plan of the Directorate over the coming weeks and months.

Comments made by board members included; (responses in italic)

·       Regarding the reviewing of anti-social behaviour policies, what sort of urgency are you looking into this as I have an existing problem that has been made worse than it needs to by existing policies? We are looking into these policies right now, we need to make sure that our internal processes are efficient, we have a number of tools that we can use and probably need to be a bit quicker than we have done in the past. We need to make sure that when we have cases we need to have clear evidence to ascertain who is at fault. The policy will be updated over the next month;

·       Can you tell me when the emergency call line for repairs will be switched off? This issue has been picked today so we will rectify this;

·       If there is another flare up in the South West of Covid 19, will be have to renew our processes or are we ready for another local flare up? The situation in the South West is something that all parties have been watching quite carefully, you saw the reports of people hitting the beaches in high numbers which was not ideal in the circumstances and then just last week an illegal rave in Bath. Our location has meant that firstly our incident rate has been low compared to the National picture, also our location means that we will see an increasing number of people looking to travel to the area for a break, holiday or recreational purposes and second homes is another feature. The surveillance that is underway is keeping a careful eye on that. Our R rate was slow in coming down. The response to any local incident is driven by the County Councillors as a public health responsibility and all partners contribute to that, there is a local outbreak control plan in place it really depends on what happens, what the outbreak might be, what premises are involved and the impact on Somerset West and Taunton Council and depends on the local flare up or outbreak. A lot of these arrangements will be tested when there are local incidents. Information sharing nationally on outbreaks is continuous where we get information fed back to us from Government agencies and responsibility has now been handed to Localities to better manage local outbreaks which is a good thing as local mechanisms are closer to those communities so can respond quicker. We need to remain vigilant and adhere to our own processes in protection for our own staff and just remain a vigilant as possible;

·       I do not believe that buy backs are a good use of our funds, so I am happy that we are not buying back so many this year. Will the 365 new properties that we will be building in the future will these consist of new or redevelopment or is this purely new properties?

The Council has a strong commitment to building its own stock so you will see at least 95% of those 364 units over the next 7 years will be Council new build Council led homes so that is a very positive statement.  Previously we have had to gear up for a development programme and this takes time so those 364 units will be over 7 sites. The use of buy backs and acquisitions have been a very useful filler because whilst we haven’t had a development programme of the scale that we have now and that will increase further we still have Right to Buy receipts coming in that we have had to use and if we don’t use them we either offer them as grants to Housing Associations or we give that money back to Government so the use of buy backs and acquisitions has been a necessary strategy to enable money to go out of the door but going forward we are trying to spend as much as 100% as possible of the Right to Buy receipts on new build Council homes. The only buy back that we are likely to buy are the odd properties to help development progress and ex Council flats will be beneficial from a management point of view. 

We are working very closely with Engie at North Taunton. This week we are signing a PCSA agreement which is a pre contract agreement for them to development all their ideas in detail, so money is invested up front to make sure that we get a clear picture of what Engie are promising. We will work very closely with Engie to develop a full contract to be signed in November. We have a lot of lessons to learn, our Zero Carbon project, Seawood Way project, these will all bring forward challenges. Somerset West and Taunton Council is not the most experienced Council when it comes to new development but there are some Officers within the team who have got a lot of experience and we need to make sure that experience is shared amongst the team as we have a large programme ahead of us;

·       Are the homes that Engie are building energy efficient? We will be having discussions with Engie on low carbon homes. our specifications were quite good since they were written down for the tender, this is one area that we have asked Engie refine the bid to make a better proposal to make the properties more energy efficient on phase A, B through to E will be a better standard;

·       Do we sign post customers to other agencies to deal with Anti-Social Behaviour issues? We have a team who deal with these issues if it is more serious and we do use mediation to try to resolve tenant minor issues. We can use other tools if it gets more serious. We use MIND for Mental Health needs ;

·       Is there a refurbishment programme for the replacement of windows? We performed some procurement work during the lock down period and windows was one of those. We have got down to two different suppliers that we are doing bench marking and costings against. Due to the lockdown we were unable engage with these suppliers as they were shut down so that slowed engagement with them. This is on our active procurement works at the moment. No start date at present but we are eager to get this work done this financial year;

·       When will the Deane House be open to tenants? We are in the process of looking at our reception re-opening by appointment. With the Police in the building there has been more activity in the building. A more structured response will be given to you with regards to time scales. As for staff, this will take longer as we need to be confident that we can protect our team in the building; 

·       Although we are building new homes we need to keep our eye on the ball with our existing stock, have you plans to bring our existing stock up to standard? There are challenges in making sure that we have investment for both parts. In the business plan review we spoke about new objectives, one of those objectives was investing in our existing homes and neighbourhoods alongside new homes to make sure that it was a key strategic objective for us. We also did a refresh of our stock data that give us our 30 year projections of investment cost for the replacement costs for bathrooms and Kitchens etc. We also need to make sure that we have sufficient budgets to undergo our repairs. We are always looking to improve our data and at present we are conducting surveys to look at the energy performance of our stock and Carbon neutral homes;

Resolved that the Tenants Strategic Group note the report.