Housing statement

Haringey Council Leader, Cllr Peray Ahmet and Chief Executive Andy Donald have issued a statement after the Regulator of Social Housing published a notice over our housing conditions.

Every single family and individual living in Haringey should expect to live in a warm, safe and well-maintained home. We owe it to everyone to provide the highest quality service we can to ensure we can achieve this.
 
That is why we took the decision to bring our housing management back under the direct control of the council back in June 2022 and that was strongly supported by our tenants.  
 
Accountability is key to this, and we wanted to take immediate action over the housing issues that are affecting our residents by commissioning two independent reviews.  These reports revealed a number of areas where the housing service being provided to our tenants and leaseholders was well below our expected standard. This is why we took the decision to refer ourselves to the Regulator of Social Housing.  We felt this was an important way of bringing independent oversight and transparency to the process of improving our services.   
 
Today, the Regulator has published their Regulatory Notice.  It confirms what we had expected – that there are some serious shortcomings in our current services in key areas of compliance including electrical safety and fire risk assessments.  They have also highlighted that we have a significant number of homes which do not meet the Decent Homes standard.    
 
We fully understand that a well-maintained home is a foundation that every person living in this borough should be able to expect.  We are very sorry that our residents have not been receiving the quality of service that they should have done.   What is important now is that we move quickly to change this.    
 
Our tenants and leaseholders are experts about their homes, estates and communities and we want to benefit from their views and experiences as we look to improve the way we work.   
 
The council has taken a series of actions to ensure the number of overdue actions starts to rapidly come down since we initially reported the figures to the Regulator in December.

 

Fire Risk Assessment 

• All blocks in the borough that had a backlog of overdue FRA assessments have been cleared.

Fire Risk Actions 

• Reduced the number of high-risk overdue actions by 1,274.

Domestic Electrical Installation Condition Report

• We have reduced the number of domestic homes without a confirmed EICR in the last 10 years by 2,000 with the remaining homes prioritised to be completed by May 2023. 

Decent Homes

• Investing over £400m in our Housing Stock over a 5-year period
• Procuring new partnering framework contracts with construction companies that will enable us to speed up our programme of major works and increase the number of our homes which meet the Decent Homes Standard.   

 
In addition, we have taken a series of actions that we believe are necessary to deliver significant improvements more broadly.  These include: 

• The establishment of a new cross party Housing Improvement Board which is be chaired by the Chief Executive and met for the first time in February.
• Alongside this there will be a new tenant forum where residents can have their voices heard.
• The development of Housing Improvement Plan which will be brought for approval to a public meeting of our Cabinet in April.     
• The development of a new damp and mould policy and a robust action plan to identify cases of damp and mould in our homes and deal with them quickly and effectively.      

 

We know that we need to build trust with our tenants, build trust with our leaseholders and we will only be able to do this when they see real progress on these issues.  
 
We will be transparent about how we are doing this and will provide regular updates.  But more than that we want to work with our residents so that they are able to shape and influence how our housing services work in the future – in line with the Haringey Deal.   
 
We are grateful to the Regulator of Social Housing for their expertise and advice and will work positively with them over the months to come.