Issue - meetings

Cabinet discussed the housing performance report and they noted that the Quarter 1 performance showed stability within the team. Mears’ performance continued to show positive improvement, where customer satisfaction with the service had increased from 90.6% in quarter 4 2021/2022 to 95.4% in quarter 1. This was a sign of the good contract management that was now in place and the service improvement plan that had been implemented.

Arrears recovery had also continued to show a positive trend, although the team was concerned about what the future would bring for the council tenants. To try and mitigate the risk of the rising cost of living, the team changed the process of how referrals were made to the Financial Wellbeing Team. This was to enable officers to help more tenants more quickly, with the intention to prevent the build up of debt.

One area the team had worked on was void performance, which had been steadily improving. Focus was kept on this area to ensure this trend continued and void turnaround time met the target. An area where performance had not improved as much as was hoped was in electrical safety. The performance had only increased by 1% since Q4, which was disappointing for the team.

The reason why improvement had slowed was due to resources and therefore an additional contractor was going to be procured to accelerate the completion of electrical safety tests. This arrangement was expected to be in place during Q3. Mears were also looking to take on more sub-contractors to cope with the volumes of work required.

Councillor Everitt spoke under Council Procedure Rule 20.1.

Councillor Jill Bayford proposed, Councillor David Saunders seconded and Cabinet agreed to note the report.