Agenda item

Deborah Upton, CEx of East Kent Housing introduced the item and highlighted the following:

·  Universal Credit and Income: Performance started to recover in January 2018;

·  In Thanet there were 350 cases of individuals on Universal Credit. There were challenges in processing claims for individuals on Universal Credit as they had to go without payments for the first 45 days of being moved to the Universal Credit system;

·  This delay could extend by another six weeks and this may affect tenants ability to pay rent. However EKH has not evicted any tenants affected by the delays caused by switching to Universal Credit;

·  To cut down on delays EKH assigned additional staff to support the processing of Universal Credit claims as it takes longer to process such applications than processing housing benefits claims;

·  Some study has indicated that it takes about six months for an individual who has moved to Universal Credit to get back from arrears and be up to date with their rent payments;

·  There are similar experiences in neighbouring councils;

·  Garage arrears have gone down 40% where resources have been increased to support that revenue collection service;

·  The performance regarding management of voids is strong;

Contributing to the same discussion, Mark Anderson, Director of Property Services (EKH) added the following comments:

·  Capital Programme: There was a 23.69% underspend in the capital programme budget. The original approved council budget was £4.2 million and just over £1 million had so been spent by 31 December 2017. If commitments were added to these figures, then the spend would be £1.6million;

·  By financial year end the spend would be circa £2.5-£2.6million. This was because there were still a number of large projects to be undertaken.

·  The largest of these projects being Royal Crescent which had an allocation of about £1million on its own;

·  There was a need to carry out a feasibility study to determine whether it was appropriate to spend a huge sum of money on this one property;

·  As a result this would have to be deferred to 2018/19 financial year;

·  Over the past three years, there had been a decrease in percentage of residents responding to the tenants’ survey;

·  As a result EKH were developing a more effective survey to test tenants’ views on the service provided by EKH and services providers contracted by EKH;

·  The new survey structure has been piloted in the last three months. This will be reviewed in the coming quarter to determine its effectiveness;

·  Gas Servicing: Less than 20% of tenants who receive a service from P&R respond to their survey. EKH had been receiving an increasing number of complaints about the P&R service. EKH were looking into that issue.

Responding to the officer presentations Members made comments and asked questions as follows:

·  Can tenants on Universal Credit get direct payments to the landlord?

·  Was there a budget for disabled facilities adaptations?

·  What was the performance of the disabled facilities modifications?

·  Was the performance on track or not?

Ms Upton and Mr Anderson responded as follows:

·  Disabled facilities adaptations were demand driven. Residents could refer themselves or were referred by EKH to occupational therapy who would categorise referrals as either requiring minor or major adaptations;

·  Minor adaptations would be dealt with fairly quickly;

·  Major adaptations were those that would cost over £1,000 and could take longer to complete because of the long lead time to order equipment;

·  EKH funded facilities if they were attached to the building and KCC would be expected to fund the mobile specialist equipment;

·  However budget cuts have led to reluctance to provide support for mobile specialist equipment;

·  Currently there was a waiting list in Thanet;

·  There is a budget for this service and the allocation was historical; There has been an increase in demand for this service;

·  In 2017/18 financial year, the service a £300,000 budget. The committed spend was £192,300 as at 31 December 2017.

Members noted the report.