Beautifully restored

In January, Leicester council announced that it would spend £99m over the next five years to bring its 22,500 homes up to the decent homes standard.

This followed a ballot of tenants in which 92% of respondents, on a 22% turnout, opted to keep the council as their landlord.

As a result, Leicester became the largest council to declare its intention of meeting the standard without accessing funds through stock transfer to a housing association, the creation of an arm’s-length management organisation or the private finance initiative.

So, what’s been the secret of Leicester’s success? Mike Forrester, the council’s director of housing, attributes it to the authority’s repairs service, which was given an “excellent” three-star rating by the Audit Commission in September 2002. One of the key elements of the service is a call centre, which logs issues raised by tenants and categorises them into emergency repairs, standard repairs and non-urgent repairs.

Forrester says the service has been key to maintaining the support of tenants. “Tenants know where they stand with regard to getting the work done,” he says.

The foundations of Leicester’s repairs service were laid in 1996 when, to save money, the council was forced to scrap its window-painting programme.

Two years later, in a further effort to cut costs, the council set up its own window factory.

“We decided to manufacture our own double-glazed windows and embarked on a programme of doing the whole stock,” Forrester says. The council has now been manufacturing windows for seven years, and more than 100,000 have been installed. “We have a ‘worst first’ policy which means that, providing we intend to keep the stock, we do the worst repairs first,” says Forrester. Furthermore, if the council has a home in very bad condition, defined as one needing more that £10,000 worth of repairs, it disposes of it. “We’ll sell it in an auction or transfer it to an association,” Forrester says.

The council has disposed of 2000 properties in this way. “All those homes would have created a heavy backlog of repairs – we’ve got rid of that liability and at no cost.”

Forrester admits that Leicester’s approach to the disposal of stock has been aided by low demand. “In the past, we were able to demolish tower blocks because they were hard to let – it would be harder for us to do it now because demand is much more buoyant.”

Such effective management has enabled the council to lay down ambitious plans for its stock.

In addition to the £99m, it aims to spend an extra £59.2m by 2011 in order to upgrade its stock to meet its own self-imposed standard. Of the total £158.2m budgeted, £87.2m will come from major repairs allowance; £38.8m will be sourced from supported housing revenue account borrowing; £18m will be generated by additional prudential borrowing; £10.7m will be generated by direct revenue financing; and £3.5m will come from useable capital receipts.

Another of the council’s main objectives is to reduce the number of empty homes in Leicester.

There are about 4500 empty homes in the city and, in an effort to bring more of them into use, the council set up an empty homes team in April 2004. Its primary targets are the owners of homes that have been empty for more than 18 months. The team writes to the owner to find out what plans they have for the home, and, if the owner refuses to give a satisfactory response, the council offers them several choices, which include selling the property, either privately or to a housing association. If the owner is uncooperative, the council will apply for a compulsory purchase order. Some 112 empty homes have been brought back into use. Forrester says: “If you can reduce the number of empty properties, it saves you having to build so many new ones.”