Housework heads home

‘I don’t mind, as long as I stay a Slough Council tenant until the day I die.’ This was one elderly resident’s straightforward response when she was asked to support the local authority’s decision to set up an arm’s-length management organisation, People 1st Slough, in 2005.

This lady would be happy to know that the local authority is about to suck up its ALMO, returning housing management to the council, says Barbara Goldstein, chair of the Berkshire town’s Federation of Tenants and Residents.

Ms Goldstein (see box: What Slough’s tenants think) and her 7,500 fellow council tenants and leaseholders have known their People 1st Slough’s days are numbered since January, when the council’s cabinet decided not to renew the ALMOs five-year contract. But nobody knew how quickly the management of their homes would be swallowed back in-house.

Last week, the People 1st Slough board decided to terminate its management agreement with the council six months early. It was meant to finish in December but, as of 30 June, the ALMO will be no more.

‘Once you get to the end of the decent homes dimension, there’s an inevitable question of how to go forward,’ explains Kevin Lowry, who’s been interim chief executive of People 1st Slough since October. This year marks the end of the government’s nine-year decent homes programme to improve the condition of the UK’s social homes. And Slough Council, like all local authorities with ALMOs, had to weigh up its options and figure out what to do next, Mr Lowry says.

The vast majority have not been so hasty though. There are 69 ALMOs in England, but so far only Slough and the west London borough of Hillingdon, just seven miles away, have made the decision to hoover up housing management. Meanwhile Ealing, another west London borough, is also dissolving its ALMO Ealing Homes — but it’s going to outsource housing management to private sector companies which will bid for contracts.

‘It costs money to run a separate company,’ states Neil Stubbings, Hillingdon’s deputy director of adult social care, health and housing. Up until last week, Hillingdon Council expected to be the first local authority to dissolve its ALMO and take back responsibility for managing its stock, in October. ‘Running an organisation of 350 people is a bit of a luxury we can’t sustain,’ he adds.

Hillingdon Council reckons it will save a minimum of £300,000 a year by taking its ALMO back in-house, but Alison Inman, chair of the National Federation of ALMOs argues that such a decision should not be ‘just about the money’. ‘It’s about residents taking control of where they live,’ she says.

ALMOs, which usually have an equal number of tenants, councillors and independent members on their boards, have improved tenant empowerment. The Slough tenants Inside Housing spoke to may support the move back to the council, but most residents ‘won’t let go easily’, insists Ms Inman. ‘The ALMO sector is too successful to just throw away.’

Indeed, out of the 62 ALMOs which had inspection reports published by last month, 21 had been awarded three stars from the Audit Commission. Only four housing associations and no councils which directly manage their stock have received such high approval since 2002. When auditor Baker Tilley conducted a survey of 37 ALMOs in February, there was an overwhelming feeling that ALMOs themselves would not welcome a move back in-house (see box overleaf: The expert’s view). None of those questioned chose it as their preferred option when asked which direction they would like their organisation to take.

‘Few councils are looking at taking their ALMOs back in-house,’ argues Ms Inman, who puts this down to the success of the ALMO model.
The Communities and Local Government department will not comment on how many other councils with ALMOs have signalled their intention to take housing management back in-house. The Homes and Communities Agency, however, stated that no others had expressed an interest in hoovering up their ALMOs.

Job done

For Slough Council though, the work of the ALMO had been done, and it was time for the local authority to take control again. In January members of the council’s cabinet were presented with 10 options for housing management once People 1st’s contract ends in December. Stock transfer and retaining the ALMO but expanding its responsibilities, were two of them - but a return to the council was members’ ‘clear preference’.

Once the decision was made, there was no point in hanging around. In order to reduce ‘uncertainty for staff’, People 1st decided to agree to the end its contract early, says Mr Lowry. On 1 July, People 1st’s 106 employees will become part of Slough Council. ‘It’s a complete lift and shift,’ says Neil Aves, assistant director of housing and strategy renewal at Slough Council. Big decision out of the way, the local authority will then go about tweaking its housing services.

‘It’s not that we don’t like ALMOs from a dogmatic point-of-view,’ explains Mr Aves. Housing estates in Slough are multi-tenure, so delivering all housing services from one place makes sense. ‘We don’t have the same types of housing as inner-London — buildings that are apart from everything else. Most of Slough Council’s homes are street properties, and because of right to buy they blend in,’ he says.

People 1st received nearly £40 million in decent homes funding after receiving two stars from the Audit Commission in 2008. At the start of its decent homes programme 63 per cent of its properties were classed as non-decent, with inadequate kitchens and bathrooms. The programme is still not complete — around 9 per cent of homes are still not up to the required standard. Slough Council is committed to carrying on where its ALMO left off and continue the programme until 2012.

‘It [the ALMO] was only ever about improvement,’ says Mr Lowry. Now that decent homes funding is no longer available, the ALMO has become too expensive to run. In leaflets that have gone out to tenants, the council states that scrapping the ALMO will save £200,000 per year. ‘A chief executive and his PA’s salaries add up to a figure that comes up towards that,’ says Mr Aves, who admits that further ‘savings and efficiencies’ will be made, but won’t go into detail. Mr Lowry confirms that his contract was only ever going to run until December.

Regardless of the swift wholesale move to the council, staff members have mixed feelings about a change of employer. ‘It’s a big change. Myself and others are uncertain about our futures — I’ve never worked for Slough Council, but for the staff who came from there it isn’t a big deal,’ says Guneet Bhatti, a senior business officer in the repairs team. ‘We’ve improved services, and hopefully these will be incorporated into the council.’

When Slough Council formed People 1st at the end of 2005, 91 per cent of the tenants that took part in a ballot voted in favour. This time round, there hasn’t been a ballot. ‘Effectively, we would have run out of time [to conduct a vote],’ says Mr Aves.

In reality, he argues, the local authority couldn’t have started it until the general and local elections had taken place. Then, during the summer months residents would be on holiday, taking the ballot into autumn, and with People 1st’s management agreement ending in December this would have been cutting it too fine, he explains.

‘Only 48 per cent voted when there were kitchens and bathrooms were on offer. In a ballot to come back in — we might have been less than 10 per cent response,’ he adds.

Instead, the council contacted more than 2,600 people via questionnaires, emails and telephone interviews.

Forty nine per cent of the 1,600 tenants and leaseholders who completed questionnaires said they were strongly in favour of housing management returning to the council. Meanwhile, 21 per cent were slightly in favour and 24 per cent did not mind either way. ‘That gave us a clear mandate,’ argues Mr Aves.

It seems that tenants in both Slough and Hillingdon want to be council tenants because they believe that it means their landlord is more democratically accountable. ‘I think it will be a good move. It will give people more pride,’ says Jenny Merton, who has been a Hillingdon Council tenant for 24 years. Before ALMO Hillingdon Homes was formed in 2003 ‘the estates were looking tired and the staff were as well,’ recalls Ms Merton. ‘When [housing management] went over to the ALMO, repairs were done more efficiently, but I think people are fired up about going back to the council. They’ve learned different ideas over the past few years.’

The NFA’s Ms Inman points out that ALMOs are even more accountable than councils, with both tenants on their boards and councillors. Slough Council ‘acknowledges all of the good things to come out of the ALMO,’ assures Mr Aves, adding that tenants will be involved in designing the council’s housing service.

One group that is very happy about housing management returning to Slough and Hillingdon councils is Defend Council Housing. ‘It’s completely logical for councils to bring ALMOs back in-house,’ says its chair, Eileen Short. ‘Decent homes has been done. It’s time for councils with ALMOs to join the national campaign to win adequate funding for all councils,’ she says.

A west London thing

As taking ALMOs back in-house seems to be a west London phenomenon (Slough creeping towards the capital’s boundaries), Inside Housing approached Hounslow Homes, another management organisation in the area to see if it had any plans to follow its neighbours’ lead.

‘The London Borough of Hounslow’s current management agreement with Hounslow Homes comes to an end on 31 March 2012, and following local council elections, we will be evaluating all the options for the future management of the stock in the context of the proposals for the housing revenue account reform,’ says a spokesperson. ‘A decision on the future will need to be taken by the new council administration by March 2011.’
Would it have been wiser for Slough to have waited to discover the outcome of this month’s general election and for decisions to be made about councils self-financing through HRA reforms to be finalised before it made the decision to handle housing management itself?

‘We were getting to the end of the management agreement,’ says Mr Aves. ‘Plus People 1st was due an inspection at the end of this year. It’s very difficult to say you’ve got purpose and drive to take services forward when the clock’s ticking. We took the decision straight away rather than fudge the issue,’ he concludes.

Slough tenants seem happy about the decision. ‘They’re very loyal [to the council]’, says Ms Goldstein. ‘The ALMO’s job is done and now we’re going home.’

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