The regulator of social housing has found that repairs for council homes in Reading are ‘slow and inefficient’.
The Regulator of Social Housing, founded in 2018, is in charge of regulating registered social housing providers.
Reading Borough Council manages approximately 5,833 council homes, including temporary accommodation.
The regulator inspected the council’s housing service in February.
At the time, there were approximately 1,600 outstanding repairs. Since then, the number has actually gone up, with 1,791 overdue repairs as of May 31.
The findings have been seized on by Rob White, the leader of the opposition, who asked the Labour administration for an update on the repairs at a recent council meeting.
Cllr White (Green, Park) said: “The Regulator of Social Housing has found the Council’s council house repair service to be both slow and ineffective. At the time of the regulator’s investigation, there were a whopping 1,600 overdue repairs.
“This is down from the peak, but still too high. Green councillors have been raising this for some time.
“Can I get an update on progress carrying out repairs to council houses including the current number of overdue repairs?”
Matt Yeo (Labour, Caversham), lead councillor for housing, replied: “While we are obviously disappointed with our inspection outcome, its findings were largely in line with the council’s own Improvement Plan and the areas we had already identified for attention, in particular the need to improve the responsiveness of our housing repairs service.”
He then explained that the council’s housing service has been put under the regulator’s Provider Improvement Regime to tackle failings.
Since the end of April, 91.2 per cent of emergency repairs were completed within three hours, 48.6 per cent of urgent repairs were completed within two working days, and 91.3% of routine repairs were completed within 15 working days
Cllr Yeo said: “The service has been working hard to make improvements with a task force established in February 2024, which was in place, focusing on rapid improvement.
“This has now evolved into a Repairs and Property Services continuous improvement plan.”
It was at this point that cllr Yeo admitted there were 1,791 overdue repairs at the end of May.
He said: “Can I just be clear though, that a benchmark on this would be for our type of authority would be around 1,000 repairs.
“So you would expect, within our service of around 6,000 properties, that there would be repairs that are not complete because a job has been logged.
“So a tenant contacting us starts the process, but a repair can take a long time to complete, especially when the tradesperson goes to start the job and it turns into not just a plumbing problem but an electric problem or something more complicated than that.”
The exchange took place at the council’s policy committee meeting on Monday, June 9.
