Viewpoint on Housing Repairs - Cllr Sophie Thornton

"Four years on from when I first brought the issue of council house repairs to Sheffield City Council, the Regulator of Social Housing has judged our city to be failing. Along with three other councils, Sheffield has been deemed to have serious failings to deliver long-term improvements for tenants, with overdue gas safety checks, 14,000 overdue repairs, an inaccurate record of council homes and more than 90% of repairs overdue. Unfortunately, I am not surprised.

I’m taken back to Sally Mitchell in Lowedges, who contacted me as she had toilet water leaking into her kitchen for over two years. The service had failed to listen to her concerns and resolve it. She lives with her partner and young son, who has additional needs. She had lost her job with the stress this was all putting her under. It was completely appalling. When her house was finally repaired, she told me that I had been “the voice she had been waiting for”. Ultimately, it shouldn’t have taken someone to kick up a fuss in the press for her case to be heard.

At Sheffield City Council meetings, I was told not to talk the city down, that council house repairs were not an issue and that the service was dealing with it. At one point, a senior Labour councillor commented on a press article, saying I was being populist and comparing me to Donald Trump.

One of the worst moments though was when council tenants came to the Council. They wanted to ask questions about when their repairs would be fixed. Public questions were cut down, and they were told they were only allowed to ask a fraction of what they had submitted. Instead of listening and trying to rectify the problem for tenants, the Council at the time thought it best to try and gag them.

This was the attitude only four years ago – to shut down council tenants’ concerns, to try and discredit campaigners like me, and to brush the issue under the rug.  So, am I surprised that this has happened a few years later? Sadly, no.

From then on, I don’t believe we have seen any accountability when it comes to housing disrepair. It has been Covid-19, winter pressures, recruitment difficulties, inflation, the weather, the list of excuses grows long and thin. Whilst as local councillors, we can raise the individual cases where people come to us for help, the overall problem is still there. Neither the former Labour cabinet member for Housing, nor the successive Green Party chair of Housing Policy Committee have tackled this problem head on. When we are one of only 4 local authorities failing, it is obvious that other councils have dealt with this issue far better than Sheffield City Council.

We have pushed for the right for tenants to directly employ an approved contractor if repairs are not carried out in time, for waiting times to be reduced, and for the council to bring empty council homes back into use faster. The hundreds of empty homes have left the service with a huge gap in rental income that could be spent on our repairs service. And this is not least in a housing crisis, when thousands of people are waiting for a home on the council house register.

The people of this city deserve a safe, warm, secure place to live. We should be pioneers of good quality, energy efficient and well-maintained homes. No one should be living on the streets or sofa surfing when we have homes lying empty. Yet the approach of our Council has been to shut down those that speak up, and then seemingly hope the problem will go away. With 14,000 outstanding repairs on the table, I hope this will be the wakeup call for some serious action."