Agenda item

2021/22 Housing Scorecard Quarter 3. The report provided an update on the housing performance through key performance measures and financial information for the second quarter of 21/22 (October to December 21)

During discussion of this item the following points/questions were raised;

(summarised)

·       The wording on the Lettings and Voids indicator, second bullet point needed to be reworded. At present this read (Providing decorating packs for able-bodied tenants, rather than undertaking full redecorating to let the property quicker) was there a way to reword this as it was quite offensive to read if you were not an able bodied person; Apologies for the clumsiness in the wording this was not our intention to offend anyone. We would look at more appropriate wording for any future reports. It was important to keep making us aware of these lapses in wording in our reports;

·       Were decorating pack offered to disabled people as it was my understanding that a lot of the decorating would be done for them due to their disability;

·       Concerns that the performance indicators were very misleading. Officers need to come back to the group with real vast amounts of feedback from people otherwise these indicators were not worth mentioning to the group; This was a discussion that we had internally. We do not want to report nothing to the group, but if this is the feedback from the group, I would support this decision internally. It should be noted that any feedback is good, whether good or bad. The Chair stated that he would like Officers to carry on collecting this data and recommended that Officers sought to improve how this data was collected.

·       Information on the new Tenant satisfaction survey for lettable standard information on the total number of new tenants for that quarter would be helpful; This information would be brought to you at the next meeting;

·       Concerns that you were only concentrating on getting your information from the internet. You were excluding a huge number of tenants as some elderly tenants were not on the internet or internet savvy; This was something that we were looking at in the next paper. We were aware of this for some of our elderly Tenants. Officers would look at the technical document for the tenant satisfaction measures to see what they suggest from the regulator;

·       How were you covering the extra cost of labour, materials and interest payments. Were you covering these out of the money saved in the budget or were you borrowing more money ? In terms of interest payments on borrowing, we cover those costs from the revenue budgets. In terms of capital programme we had a number of different sources of finance for that in terms of major and improvements we covered a majority of that spend from what we had got from the Major Funds Reserve, so when we depreciate our assets every financial year, we are then able as part of the HRA account move that depreciated cost and hold in a separate reserve to then use that money over here to fund a capital programme and the major and improvement cost each financial year. There was no borrowing or interest paid;

The group noted the content of the housing score card for quarter 3 (October-December) 2021.