If you are a council tenant or leaseholder, you will have recently received a letter about the housing audit, and you can find a copy of the letter here and further information on this webpage.
We have put together some frequently asked questions, to help you:
1. If my home is safe, why did you write to me?
We wrote to every council tenant or leaseholder advising you of our general position regarding compliance. We will continue to check your property on a regular basis. In the meantime, if you have any concerns, please let us know.
2. I have received a letter about the council’s housing audit, what do I do?
You do not need to take any action, we wanted to keep you informed of our news and will continue to update you regularly with the actions we are taking, both on this webpage and via our regular newsletter.
3. Does it affect me, as I don’t live in a block.
Yes, as we will need to check other attributes of the property such as electrical safety, gas safety and to check if asbestos is present.
4. Can you tell me if my home is safe?
Your safety and wellbeing is our key priority, and we are currently working on a detailed survey of all our homes so that we have more detail about the issues raised in the audit report. If we need to inspect your home further, we will be in direct contact with you.
5. Why did you feel the need to commission an audit?
As a responsible social housing landlord, we routinely carry out inspections and repairs of our homes.
As part of our commitment to maintaining and updating our homes, we commissioned the independent audit to understand how we can improve our policies and processes to give us and you the assurance that we are meeting our legal obligations and best practice.
6. What is in the audit report?
It was carried out by an independent organisation and thoroughly reviewed everything to do with building safety and compliance. We have developed a comprehensive action plan to address these issues, which focuses on:
- Inspections and compliance of key facilities, gas, electric, water, asbestos, lifts, fire, and building safety
- Record keeping and monitoring of follow-up work
- The data that we hold and record keeping
- Our communication with you
7. What are you doing about with the findings in the report?
We have developed a comprehensive action plan to address all the issues raised in the report, we have put in place a new governance framework to support us in carrying out all of the work. Our councillors will be scrutinising and monitoring our progress. We have referred ourselves to the Regulator of Social Housing, who will oversee our work and ensure it meets the required “Homes Standard”.
8. Why are you not publishing now?
The regulator is the independent public body that will investigate and decide what actions the council needs to take.
They will publish their own findings, which will be publicly available.
We are not publishing the audit report now in case the Regulator’s finding are different, as this would cause confusion.
9. Can I see the Action plan?
Our working Action Plan contains the names of key staff and others who are involved in its delivery. We have provided a version of this plan which you can see on our website and will update this each month following our regular monitoring meeting. Compliance and building safety updates.
10. Will I need to leave my home?
You will not need to move out of your home. If an item in your home does need checking, or we need to make any specific improvement, we will be in touch with you directly to organise this.
11. What if I have an outstanding request for repairs?
Carrying out our regular maintenance and repair work is still really important to us and this will not change, please use our website to request a general council housing repair.
12. How long does this go on for?
We will continue to work with the Regulator to improve our service to you until they make the decision to end the Notice when they are satisfied that we have fully met all parts of the Homes Standard.
13. Will my rent be reduced during this period?
No, your rent goes towards paying for the upkeep of your home and for the services that you receive. If you do not keep up with your rent payments, you could risk losing your home.
14. I am a council leaseholder; will I have to pay more for these works?
You won’t need to pay more than you do already for the routine general servicing and maintenance. You may be required to contribute to additional works required to the communal areas of the building where you lease a property. This will be dependent on the nature of the works and statutory consultation will be undertaken in advance in this case.
Don’t forget that if you want to make any alterations to your home, you must first ask our permission to do so. You can do this by completing an online form Tenant home improvements and DIY or calling 01926 456129 Option 1