Council spending on lawyers and compensation for Council repairs double

The costs, which occur when a tenant has been waiting for a long time for a repair and decides to take their case to court, were expected to cost the council £2.6 million over the year. However, in a report to the Finance Sub-Committee on the 7th of November, the legal fees were expected to come in at £5.2 million, double the expected amount.

Lib Dem Councillor Sophie Thornton, who has been campaigning to improve the repair service, said “This amount of money being spent on legal fees and compensation is absolutely shocking, and speaks to a service which has been utterly mismanaged by Labour and the Greens. Every penny that’s spent on solicitors to defend a repair claim is money that could have been better spent on repairing the issues in the first place!

Many of the solicitors who offer “No Win, No Fee” repair claims are predatory, carpet-bombing estates with flyers and paying for advertising on Google. Once someone’s claiming through a solicitor, it limits how much the Council can communicate with them, including communicating to actually complete the repair. And once the claim is resolved, the solicitors often take huge amounts of the compensation awarded as their fee.

Rather than using taxpayer money to pay compensation to unscrupulous solicitors, the Council would get much better value for money by performing repairs before they get to court”.

The councils repair service has 14,038 logged repairs, of which 6,193 are overdue as of the 23rd of October. The longer a case is overdue, the more likely it is to progress to costly legal action.

Many of the Council’s outstanding repairs are related to damp and mould issues, which often require a ‘decant’ property to move a household into temporarily while repairs are carried out. The Council’s shortage of housing stock means that families can sometimes be waiting for over a year for a suitable decant property to become available, with the repair issue worsening the whole time.

This data comes at a time of increased concern over standards in social housing, after the tragic death of two year old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale, which the coroner found was due to mould in his family’s social rented flat.

In the wake of Rochdale’s failings, the Government’s housing secretary Michael Gove has written to every English council leader, including Sheffield leader Cllr Terry Fox, instructing them to take urgent action on damp and mould.

Jordanthorpe resident Natalie Tivley, who has had an outstanding repair in her block since 2020, said “The council needs to stop making excuses and passing the buck on repairs. Repairs need to be taken seriously if the council wants to stop overspending – it’s a better solution for everyone to fix the issue the first time around”.

Penny Baker, Deputy Chair of the Housing Policy Committee, said “There’s been every opportunity to tackle the repairs issue, which has grown and grown over several years.

Council tenants are being consistently let down, and are seeing their rent money spent on paying compensation and lawyers fees for failing to fix their house, rather than on performing the necessary improvements. It’s appalling value for money, and its dangerous for tenants who are living in unsafe housing.

We need to see a robust plan for how the repairs service is going to extract itself from this crisis and start performing properly again. The Liberal Democrats have been campaigning on this for years, and now the Housing Secretary has instructed Cllr Fox to start making improvements – it’s time to take action.”