Agenda item

To receive an update from the Independent Chair of the Housing Improvement Board on the work of the Board.

Councillor Fleur Donnelly-Jackson (as Cabinet Member for Housing) introduced the report, providing an overview of the work of the Housing Management Advisory Board which was set up to embed tenant voice into the work of housing. She introduced the Independent Chair of the Housing Management Advisory Board, Dawn Martin, who would be responding to the Committee’s questions.

In presenting the report, Dawn Martin highlighted the following key points:

• The Board had been set up in April 2025 as a critical friend to hold Housing Management accountable.
• She had worked in housing for 23 years and therefore brought a breadth of experience and expertise to the Board as Independent Chair.
• Alongside the Independent Chair, there were three independent members of the Board, three tenants, three staff members from outside of the housing service, the Cabinet Member for Housing, and Councillor Robert Johnson.
• The Board met bimonthly and had met 4 times. The first meeting had been a welcome session and set the Terms of Reference for the Board. She had been clear that she wanted the Board to be visible and for tenants to know it existed.
• One of the meetings had been an estate walkabout where she advised the Committee she had been disappointed with what she saw. She described fly tipping, fire safety issues and disrepair amongst some of the concerns, highlighting that residents living on the estates should be living in a certain standard which she felt was not being met.
• The findings from the estate walkabout had been brought to the following meeting where Board members took the opportunity to ask questions of Housing Management colleagues about the issues and why certain actions had not been done. In response to the scrutiny, she advised that Housing Management had been very honest, open and transparent, and Tom Cattermole (Corporate Director of Residents and Housing Services, Brent Council) had visited the estates to see the issues for himself. Upon raising the issues on the estate walkabout, housing officers had taken swift action and made calls to the relevant contractors, and one of the tenant members of the Board who happened to live on the estate had informed the Board that the actions had now been carried out.
• The most recent meeting had looked at performance, with the report to the Regulator presented to each Board meeting to see progress, as well as all other housing management data such as rent collection and tenant satisfaction.
• She advised that, from her perspective, tenants did not have confidence in Housing Management currently and that trust and confidence needed to be rebuilt.
• She recognised that the current Housing Management Senior Leadership Team had inherited the issues identified and were trying to address them and there were positive conversations taking place with all stakeholders involved with everyone sharing the same aims and goals for the service. She added that the issues were not something that could be addressed overnight but would take time to embed, and there was a need to be realistic in what could be done and how quickly.

The Chair thanked the presenters for their introductions and invited the Committee to ask questions of the officers, with the following points raised:

In noting that the Board had met 4 times over the last 6 months, the Committee asked what recommendations, if any, it had made, and whether they had been acted on. Dawn Martin confirmed that the Board had made recommendations, including operational issues that needed addressing following the estate walkabout in relation to Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB), fly tipping, and monitoring of the caretaking service which the Board had asked for further information on. At the second meeting, the Board had asked for an improvement plan so it could measure how Housing Management was performing, which would be provided at the next meeting on 15 December 2025.

The Committee asked how the Board would ensure that its focus would go beyond operational fixes and lead to long-term culture changes within Housing Management. Dawn Martin advised that her experience of working in housing across 23 years meant she understood the service right across the board, and she would therefore know what evidence to request in order to monitor whether the improvement plan was being implemented. For example, the Board had already requested evidence in relation to the care taking service. The Board would also hold contractors to account and would ask Mears and Wates to attend to answer questions about the repairs service to address tenant complaints.

The Committee asked the Independent Chair what good looked like to her and how she would ensure Housing Management achieved it. In response, Dawn Martin highlighted that people sometimes had a perception that those in social housing should not have a good standard, but she did not believe that and felt that social housing should be safe, warm, clean and good quality. In terms of the current stock, she felt some blocks needed modernisation and improvement, and the stock condition surveys were needed to establish that programme of work, but she acknowledged that, with any planned maintenance, a budget allocation was also required. In order to get to good, she felt that tenants needed to be happy and satisfied. The Board would hold Housing Management accountable in order to achieve that through analysing their performance and listening to the voice of tenants.

Considering that success looked like tenant satisfaction to the Independent Chair, the Committee asked how the Board would understand if tenants were satisfied. Spencer Randolph advised that, under the new Housing Regulations, the Council was required to undertake Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) every year which allowed them to compare and benchmark across the sector and to previous years to see whether improvements were being made. He added that the questions on the TSMs were prescribed by the Regulator, but the Council was also able to ask additional supplementary questions to gather a qualitative understanding of someone’s answer, such as what a safe home meant to them.

Noting that the estate walkabout the Board had undertaken had found ASB issues, including drug taking in communal areas and car parks, the Committee asked how the Board could help to ensure those issues were moved on permanently. Councillor Donnelly-Jackson advised that tackling these issues sat across several teams, so where housing officers found these issues on a day-to-day basis, they had lines of escalation to raise those issues. Housing Management worked closely with the Community Safety Team on ASB issues as well as the police, Rough Sleeping Service, VIA New Beginnings and the Drug and Alcohol Outreach service to take a multi-agency approach to ASB and drug taking. More practically, Spencer Randolph added that reinforcing doors was also done so that groups and individuals could not gain access to those areas to take drugs. 

The Committee stressed the importance of the Board being independent, and queried how the Cabinet Member for Housing could scrutinise herself as a member of the Board. Councillor Donnelly-Jackson advised that she attended meetings in a listening capacity to hear directly from tenants, but took the point that about the need to have a non-Cabinet member councillor representative. Concerns were also raised in relation to the appointment process, with the Committee noting that staff representatives had been appointed by mutual agreement between the Corporate Director of Residents and Housing Services and the Director of Housing Services. Tom Cattermole advised that none of the staff members appointed worked in the housing department and they were thoroughly independent, with two of them living in the borough. The Board recruitment process had asked for expressions of interest from staff so that representatives would want to be involved and proactively engage with the Board. Dawn Martin added that one of the representatives worked in the Finance department which was an asset to the Board when looking at rental income and other figures. In terms of the independence of the recruitment process, Tom Cattermole advised that the Terms of Reference were reviewed on an annual basis, and these points could be incorporated into future refreshes.

The Chair drew the item to a close and invited members to make recommendations with the following RESOLVED:

i)               Housing Management Advisory Board to utilise all possible sources of data to inform its work, including member casework.

ii)              Housing Management Advisory Bord to review the current structure of the Board and process of appointment at the next revision of the Terms of Reference.

iii)             For future iterations of the report, for officers to model the template on the independent safeguarding annual reports received by the Committee, incorporating data, KPIs, priorities, activity of the Board, areas for improvement, areas working well, and case studies in an easy to understand digestible format.

iv)             Housing Management Advisory Board to publish a clear roadmap of achievements the Board wanted to see in relation to Housing Management KPIs, with accompanying timelines.

v)              Housing Management Improvement Board to strengthen and structuralise the tenant voice, including the creation of a resident association in every Council estate in the borough.