Housing regulator finds Midlands council in breach of Home Standard
Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council has breached the Home Standard with the potential as a result for serious detriment to tenants, the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has found.
The RSH’s findings were contained in a regulatory notice published yesterday (27 April) and followed a self-referral by the local authority in March.
In the notice the Regulator said that Dudley did not meet a range of health and safety requirements in thousands of its tenants’ homes.
The council failed to carry out more than 8,000 remedial fire safety actions, as well as around 500 annual asbestos safety inspections. In addition, it reported that around 4,000 homes had not had an electrical inspection within the past 10 years, and over 300 homes had overdue gas safety inspections. The council did not have full or accurate data on compliance with the Decent Homes Standard, the Regulator said.
Dudley has put a programme in place to rectify the issues, including a condition survey of all its homes over the next 12 months.
The RSH said it was “monitoring it closely as it delivers this work”.
Kate Dodsworth, Director of Consumer Regulation at the Regulatory of Social Housing, said: “Dudley Council has failed to meet health and safety requirements and has put its tenants at potential risk. The council referred itself to us when it identified these issues, and we are monitoring it closely as it takes urgent action to put things right.”
In response to the notice, Dudley said it was taking action to improve the quality of data it holds on its housing stock after an internal review found it was "not consistently accurate or up to date".
The council revealed that it had been unable to evidence previously reported figures in a number of areas, including health and safety undertakings in some properties.
Dudley added that it immediately drew up a 12-month action plan “to ensure not only is the data accurate, current and provides assurance that it meets regulatory standards and statutory requirements, but all actions and associated work, which may be outstanding, are completed and evidenced”.
A programme of stock condition surveys on all 21,123 council properties, which had begun to be commissioned last autumn, has been broadened to include compliance checks on gas and electric systems, energy performance certificates (EPCs), smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and asbestos reports. A full data validation exercise is also underway.
Balvinder Heran, deputy chief executive at Dudley Council, said: “We want to reassure tenants we are working to address this issue as quickly as we can. We referred ourselves to the Regulator of Social Housing after our internal review found compliance data on our properties was not consistently accurate or up to date and they have today confirmed our findings.
“Our tenants deserve the best and as soon as the discovery was made on our historic data, we took immediate action. We have drawn up a 12-month action plan to address issues to improve and maintain good, up to date records on all our properties. I am grateful to all our tenants and colleagues for their support during this process.”
Kathryn Jones, director of housing and communities at Dudley Council, said: “We take residents’ safety extremely seriously, so once we became aware of the historical data quality issue we referred ourselves to the regulator and started to implement an action plan to validate the information we hold.
“This doesn’t mean the checks haven’t happened in the past, it’s that the council doesn’t have full records in one place to be sure the information it has is right. We had already commissioned a 12-month programme of stock condition surveys. This started this month and will now include the checks on those compliance areas identified to ensure data is up to date and work is carried out where required.
“We realise this may cause concern to residents, but we want to assure them we are taking swift action to carry out compliance checks and address any work needed.”
