Lib Dem Councillors condemn scrapping of plans for 710 Council Homes due to Repair service overspend

Liberal Democrat councillors have condemned the continuing overspend in the Council Housing Repairs service, which has partly led to the reduction of the Council’s target for new social housing.

Since being insourced in 2017, the Council’s repair service has significantly underperformed and overspent. Over the financial year, the service blew past its budget by £9.4m, and the Council has also paid out £2.6m more than expected on legal fees to fight disrepair claims from unhappy tenants.

Due to this increase in cost and the huge backlog of over 16,000 repairs, the service has been offered an additional £6.7m/yr in the draft Housing budget, which is due to come to the Housing Policy Committee for approval this Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Council’s target for the construction of new social homes has been scaled back, from 3,100 new homes to 2,310, in part due to the £12m overspend on the repairs service.

Liberal Democrat Councillor Penny Baker, deputy chair of the Housing Committee, said:

“I’m incredibly disappointed to see the reductions to the Council’s Stock Increase target. Building more social housing is incredibly important to tackling Sheffield’s affordable housing crisis.

The reality of the situation is that the target of 3,100 homes, which was set before COVID, was always going to be under serious threat from the high inflation we’re now experiencing. The predicted costs of reaching the target have gone up by £204m since it was originally set.

However, faced with this overwhelming inflationary challenge, we need to ask if plans for some of these homes could have been saved, and for that we need to look at the overspend in Housing Repairs.

The sorry state of the repair service is an issue that we’ve been working very hard to challenge. The most pressing concern is the dreadful state it’s left many of our tenants in, with mould posing a danger to their health, fire safety repairs going uncompleted for years, and last weeks revelation that the Council left hundreds of gas checks uncompleted for years. However, it’s also having an impact on the Council’s ability to deliver badly needed new houses.

The increase of £6.7m in the budget for Housing Repairs would not be necessary if it wasn’t for Labour’s past mishandling of the service, and over five years, this money could have been spent on hundreds more homes.”