Self-referral to the Regulator of Social Housing

We specifically asked the Regulator to examine whether we are providing decent homes, running an efficient repairs service, and completing fire safety actions within acceptable timescales.

The Regulator has now reached its conclusions and published a Regulatory Notice, where it confirms our concerns and details its findings, along with recommendations for which areas are most urgent to address.

We accept the Housing Regulator’s findings and acknowledge our underperformance and ongoing challenges in some areas of the service.

We have already made progress in some areas, which the Regulator recognises in its notice. We will continue working with the Regulator until we have satisfied their concerns and achieved full compliance for our residents. The regulator is not taking statutory action at this stage.

The context

In October 2023, Lewisham Council took over responsibility for managing and maintaining more than 13,500 social rent homes across the borough, following the transfer of staff and services from Lewisham Homes. This means that services like repairs, caretaking and housing management are now the direct responsibility of the Council.

The aim of bringing the management of housing back into the Council is to improve it for residents by providing a more joined-up service, linking housing and other Council services that residents rely on.

We want to start this new era with openness and transparency so that our residents are aware of our challenges and what we are doing to overcome them.

Having reviewed housing services, we established that although many of the homes we manage are in good condition, some are not. We are also aware that our repairs service is too often difficult to access, and many of our residents are not satisfied with the level of service they receive.

We are determined to make improvements and tackle these issues, and as part of this process we decided to self-refer to the Regulator of Social Housing.

What happens next

We will continue working with the Regulator who will assess our efforts on an ongoing basis.

We will continue to implement our improvement programme, which includes commissioning a stock condition survey, addressing non-decency, closer monitoring of progress against all Fire Risk Assessment remedial actions and the creation of transformation plans focussed on repairs and complaints.

We are committed to this process, we welcome an external perspective on what the urgent priorities are, and believe this transparency will help us improve this vital service. We will keep residents updated and share our improvement plans in due course.

Investment and improvement action plans

Since taking over from Lewisham Homes in October 2023, the Council has already taken steps to improve services. There have been persistent issues with some of our buildings. Many of our homes were built over 50 years ago and need substantial investment at a time when local councils – and other housing providers – are facing serious financial challenges. Our capital programme commits to £321m of investment in the stock over five years. Alongside this, we are making major investments to modernise our systems for managing and storing information.

• Repairs: We have reduced the backlog of repairs from more than 18,000 to fewer than 9,000. In the same period, we have improved how many routine and emergency repairs we are completing on time, from 57% and 33% in April 2024 to 67% and 58% in June. We will continue reducing the backlog to put us in a better position to plan ahead and know what resources we need, so we can further improve our turn-around times.
• Damp and mould: We are carrying out a condition survey of all of our homes. As of July 2024, we had surveyed 7,500 properties, over 50% of the total. This is already enabling us to identify buildings prone to damp and mould, even where it hasn’t been reported, and plan refurbishment. We have recruited additional specialist damp and mould surveyors to work towards a target of performing a mould wash within 24 hours of it being reported by a resident.
  
• Customer service: We have reduced the call waiting time at our repairs booking contact centre from an average of 46 minutes last year to 6 minutes in June 2024. We have improved our response times for repairs complaints: For Stage 1 complaints we met the ten-day target for 83% of complaints in June 2024, against 63% in April. For Stage 2 (20 days) we improved to 72% from 45% in the same period. We have begun a comprehensive training programme for staff who respond to complaints to make sure our residents always get fair, clear and polite responses.
  
• Upgrading our systems: We are upgrading the central computer program and database our staff use to manage the Housing Service. This will help us to make sure we don’t lose track of our resident’s requests and we get ahead of problems before they cause an inconvenience, and giving our residents easier online access to our services.