It’s a rare week when we don’t get reports from Southwark council tenants on problems with someone’s council flat going unfixed for weeks and months at a time.
Rats scaring babies, leaks streaming down the ceiling, cracks forming in the walls, bed bugs biting children – we hear it all. Maybe that’s to be expected, given Southwark’s status as the largest social housing landlord in London, and the fourth-largest in the UK, with 55,000 homes to keep up.
We reported in this week’s paper on government plans to slap unlimited fines on social landlords like Southwark, as well as housing associations, if they are found not to be keeping homes in a proper state of repair. Could this affect Southwark Council? There are a number of important caveats to be made.
Councils could face unlimited fines for not carrying out repairs properly
First, despite the horror stories we regularly hear and often report on in the paper, Southwark’s own figures show that the number of repair requests made each year by residents dropped to 150,000 last year, down from nearly 220,000 a decade earlier. The council approved more than £59 million for housing repairs in its 2022/2023 budget and says it plans to spend £400 million on repairs by the end of the 2024/2025 financial year.
Second, while anything that protects renters of any tenure from the Dickensian conditions we often hear about is welcome, it’s pretty rich of the Conservative government to start threatening councils with fines for underperformance, given the enormous cuts made to local authority grants since the Tories first took control of Downing Street with the Liberal Democrats in 2010. This bill has the air of another Conservative attack on Labour councils, which tend to build more social housing.
Third, the social housing regulation bill that would give government these powers was only introduced in the House of Lords earlier this month, and still needs to go through another reading in June before it even gets to the Commons – so it is still a long way from being passed into law.