Agenda item

Presented by Velvet Dibley, Senior Strategy Officer.

Velvet Dibley, Senior Strategy Officer, presented the update on the Housing Strategy.

In response to questions the Officers explained:

The officer confirmed that the updated report would be circulated to the panel as a slide was missing.

·       Currently, the Resident’s Charter was only formally adopted by Housing. Corporately, there was an effort to adopt something similar or a Charter on customer service more broadly to improve the culture and people strategy. The officer advised that they would return to the panel with an update on the matter of adopting the Charter throughout the council.

·       Housing services had employed a Customer Services Manager to primarily focus on clearing the backlog of repair complaints. This was supported by a team and newly established systems to prevent backlogs from emerging in the future.

·       Mayor Perry was interested in modular housing; he previously visited a site in Southwark ran by Centrepoint. Dave Baptiste, the Regeneration lead, was interested in speaking with Southwark and Centrepoint about the development of modular homes and off-site construction, where appropriate.

·       The Census data included housing associations. 17% of socially rented homes within Croydon had a split of 9.7% owned by Croydon Council and 8.2% owned by other registered providers which included larger and smaller housing associations.

·       Croylease was a part of the homelessness prevention and rough sleeping strategy and wider procurement of private sector accommodation. Separate to the issues with Croylease on voids, the private sector rent offer in Croydon compared to other local authorities was not competitive. The incentive for private sector landlords to give properties to the council for allocation to those on the housing register was not sufficiently competitive, but this would be reviewed as part of the wider review on procuring private renters accommodation.

·       In terms of rough sleeping, Croydon performed well in that there were low rates of people sleeping rough for a second night. However, homelessness prevention and relief were not as good. Benchmarking informed the aim to shift the proportion of prevention and relief duties offered so more people could access services at the prevention stage. Presently, 30% of duties offered were for prevention whilst 70% of duties were offered for relief. In other London Boroughs an inverse relationship may be present, so ratios needed improving. However, per head, considering the homelessness applications received, homelessness services were standard, but the relationship with the public should be changed so that people seek resources before crisis point.

·       There had not been a Housing strategy since 2013. The Housing directorate was new and prior to 2021, Housing was not a discreet entity. Housing Association engagement sessions had not been held yet and there was no established relationship with Housing Associations. However, resources were dedicated to working on the relationship. The officer offered to provide an update on how the session went.

·       Councillors may share the online service consultation with any of their networks; physical copies of the consultation were in some libraries. There was consideration to extend the deadline for engagement by another week to boost the number of participants. The officer confirmed that they would send the consultation’s link to all councillors.

Leslie Parry made a note about the Tenants Charter. This was meant to be applied across the Council as presented to Katherine Kerswell, CEO, the Interim Director of Housing, Alison Knight, and Labour Cabinet member, Patricia Hay-Justice. It was made clear at the meeting that the Charter would apply across the borough. This was accepted but not acted upon until June 2022 when the policy was adopted by the Mayor, its cabinet and formally later that year. Leslie Parry and Yaw Boateng will be meeting with the Executive Mayor, Jason Perry, on the 3rd of August on this issue.