Birmingham council is to take £7.3m from its decent homes and clearance budgets in an effort to clear its huge repairs backlog.
The council will cut £5.7m from its already pressurised £40m decent homes budget for 2003/04 and allocate it to its repairs backlog of 45,000 jobs.

It will also reallocate £1.6m from its clearance programme, which was to have been used to demolish up to 1300 homes by next April.

Some of the work due to take place on the decent homes standard will now be delayed until next April at the earliest, when funding for the next financial year becomes available.

This is despite the council's estimate earlier this year that up to eight in 10 of its 80,000 homes were below the decency standard.

The move has caused concern among some local councillors. Tory councillor John Lines, the shadow housing spokesman, said: "We are very worried about this. There is a time limit on reaching the decency standard and if you steal the money from one year you are building up problems for later."

The council has committed itself to clearing its repairs backlog by the end of March, following a damning Audit Commission report and its second zero-star rating for housing services in two years.

Senior housing manager David Hucker was brought in after the report to improve performance on repairs. He said: "The council takes the view that the repairs are the priority. Decent homes have to be delivered by 2010 – it's a longer timescale and deferring for a matter of weeks is not too significant."

Birmingham's decision brings the amount of extra money it has spent on repairs this year to £11.7m. Its repairs budget has risen to £23.7m for 2003/04.

The Audit Commission said it would take an extra £13m to clear the repairs backlog, but Hucker said the task is now achievable. "The money is there now, the repairs programme is in place – and we will be monitored very closely on how we perform."

Source

Housing Today