Agenda and minutes
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PDF 140 KBVenue: The Jubilee Garden Room, Saffron Walden
Contact: Democratic Services Email: committee@uttlesford.gov.uk
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Apologies for Absence and Declarations of Interest To receive any apologies for absence and declarations of interest. Minutes: Apologies for absence were received from Councillors Dean and Merifield.
There were no declarations of interest.
Councillor Lemon declared a personal interest as he was a private landlord.
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Minutes of the Previous Meeting To consider the minutes of the previous meeting. Minutes: The minutes of the meeting held on 14 June 2022 were approved as accurate.
Councillor Reeve asked whether the next meeting of the Housing Board would include the allocation policy for rural exception sites on the agenda. The Leader of the Council agreed that this was correct.
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Update on management of council housing repairs and maintenance To receive an update on the on the management of council housing repairs and maintenance. Additional documents:
Minutes: The Chair said that he had been very concerned about the partnership with Uttlesford NORSE and wanted to work with them to improve things. He said that he hoped the Chief Executive could help improve the partnership and noted the work that he had undertaken within the last few months and the subsequent recommendations that the Council had now carried out.
The Chief Executive introduced the Interim Director of Housing, Health and Communities who will be joining the Council on 3 October 2022 and the Deputy Interim Director of Housing, Health and Communities who he said would provide extra capacity as housing experts. He said that the internal audit report had examined how as a landlord the Council managed the function and that he had wanted to see what reporting the Council had in place to fulfil their duty as landlord and what other health and safety checks were in place. He said that he had identified that: · Residents said that the Council were a good landlord, who had established trust and confidence over many years · There were not regular indicators served up in a comprehensible manner around health and safety
Councillor Foley joined the meeting.
· There were six key health and safety factors, and he needed to ensure that UNSL were using the right denominators and numerators for each of the categories of compliance, so that he could be sure the performance being reported was always accurate. · When it comes to compliance, the standards required were100%. There may be one or two out of compliance at any one time but when this is the case Members should be questioning what actions are being taken to achieve 100%. · The system was slightly complicated with numbers fluctuating through purchase and sale of properties. · The reporting had not been exactly what it needed to be and it has been taking this time to get to a point where the numbers could be relied on to demonstrate exactly what was being achieved.
The Chief Executive acknowledged that shortly after staff transferred to the Newport depot in April 2020 the whole world changed due to the pandemic, which made access to homes very difficult to achieve.
He said that there were currently eight Councils that had self-referred and eight who had been put in special measures. A lot more Councils were self-referring as a direct response to the inability to access homes during the pandemic.
He said that there had been some handover issues arising from the transfer from in-house service to partnership service new computer systems, which had resulted in corruption of data and temporary loss of documentation. Some had now been recovered, but there were in the region of 70,000 unscanned documents.
He said that since he wrote the letter of self-referral:
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