ao link
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In

You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles

Stoke’s repairs and maintenance revolution

Stoke Council’s decision to launch its own repairs and maintenance company could herald a new dawn in housing management. Martin Hilditch finds out why

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Sharelines

We take a look at Stoke Council's new repairs and maintenance company Unitas #ukhousing

Stoke Council’s decision to launch its own repairs and maintenance company could herald a new dawn in housing management. @MartinHilditch finds out why #ukhousing

A Unitas team repairs a property in Stoke

If it wasn’t for one crucial detail, the story of Unitas would read like any number of tales in the repairs and maintenance world over the past few years.

You know how it goes – a council wanting more control over the upkeep of its homes moves away from outsourced provision.

In this case, earlier this year, Stoke-on-Trent City Council set up a wholly owned repairs and maintenance company, Unitas, to look after its 18,000 council homes, following the end of a 10-year joint venture with Kier Group in which the council owned a 20% share.

What makes this different, though, is that Unitas could soon be responsible for fixing more than leaky taps and broken windows. In fact, there’s a good chance it could take charge of housing management, homelessness, allocations and even building new homes.

In other words, today Unitas is a repairs and maintenance company, tomorrow it could be more like a social landlord in its own right. And that would see it take the lead on one of the most ambitious council housebuilding programmes in the country.


READ MORE

Dispatches from Community Housing Cymru’s annual conferenceDispatches from Community Housing Cymru’s annual conference
Is shared ownership moving into the mainstream?Is shared ownership moving into the mainstream?
Market forces: the social landlords building homes for market rentMarket forces: the social landlords building homes for market rent
The Uber of R&M? How a tech company wants to spark a repairs revolutionThe Uber of R&M? How a tech company wants to spark a repairs revolution

The council was on the verge of ploughing ahead with this revolution just months after Unitas was created. However, this summer a council paper recommended pausing to let the repairs service prove itself before it took on other functions.

Inside Housing is in Stoke to find out more about this repairs service with big ambitions. We want to discover the thinking behind such an unusual approach.

And with so much apparently hanging on the performance of the service in its first year, we will learn whether taking direct control is delivering the success the council had hoped for.

First stop is Carl Brazier, director of housing and customer services at the council, and Randolph Conteh, the council’s cabinet member for housing and a larger-than-life character whose enthusiasm is set at level 10 throughout. “I’m a passionate person,” he states, summing up his approach to the project. “Normally, when I introduce myself, it’s ‘Councillor Conteh, pronounced Councillor Charisma, but it should be Councillor Passion’.”

Early discussions had talked about transferring further services over to the company this year, but those plans were put on hold for a year following consultation

Such enthusiasm might explain why the council mentioned expanding Unitas before it had even launched. Early discussions had talked about transferring further services over to the company this year, but those plans were put on hold for a year following consultation with tenants, trade unions and political groups on Stoke Council.

Broadly speaking, the respondents thought the plans should be delayed to allow the company to prove itself and for a review to be carried out into the services proposed for transfer.

There were also concerns about the governance structure of the organisation. The board is made up of two council members, the council’s director of housing and customer services, two independents, and its own operations director.

Respondents suggested there should be three councillors on the board and that the operations director should report to the board rather than sit as a voting director (and the council is moving to adopt this).

Mr Conteh admits that with hindsight, the original planned pace of change was too fast.

“I think we probably got carried away with the moment in a way, because we were that excited,” he states. “It was a massive success story repairs-wise, moving over to Unitas. Sometimes, it’s about taking a breath, isn’t it, which I don’t normally do.”

With any changes on hold, attention is now firmly focused on the performance of the repairs and maintenance service. This has to be thriving for any further transfer to be considered. Clearly, Mr Conteh thinks it is, but what do the statistics suggest?

When plans were first drawn up to set up Unitas, there were several key issues the council wanted to address. One was the length of time homes were left standing empty after becoming vacant; this hit 54 days under the Kier-Stoke joint venture.

The council was also keen to increase its financial return and the amount of subcontracting work won by local companies.

Let’s start with that void turnaround figure. Huge progress has been made in this area since the launch of Unitas, with the turnaround period down to just 25 days.

Unitas was set up by Stoke Council as a repairs and maintenance company, but its role could soon by expanded

“We have now saved more than £600,000 a year on voids because we are quicker,” Mr Brazier states. “We have got fewer properties empty. So, I think now, where we were running at nearly 300 properties empty, we are down to nearly half that now (there were 284 voids in June 2017 versus 192 in June 2018). So that helps our waiting list.”

The council says this equates to a £600,000 increase in rental income.

"The council is gaining from a better service and a financial return," Carl Brazier

The return it makes from the service has also jumped from an average of £150,000 to a projected £5m.

“That’s £5m that comes back into the council,” Mr Brazier adds. “Some of it could come back into housing. Some could go elsewhere, like children’s services or adult social care. So the council is gaining from a better service and a financial return. Everyone’s a winner. And that’s year one.”

Mr Brazier says that in the first six months, the cost of repairs per property dropped from £1,171 to £870.

The company will take a long-term view when it comes to pensions. New employees will be signed up to the same terms and conditions on the Local Government Pension Scheme as existing employees. This is a continuation of practice under the joint venture, but the council’s reasoning for not changing terms is interesting.

“That may seem unusual in today’s climate because people say, ‘That’s a cost,’” Mr Brazier concedes.

Randolph Conteh pic

Randolph Conteh, cabinet member for housing, Stoke-on-Trent City Council

“Sometimes people don’t see the long-term picture. These people, when they retire, will have a good pension and if you have a good pension, you are less of a strain on a local authority’s frontline services, such as adult social care. So, actually, we took a long-term decision.”

On the face of it, Unitas looks like a hit, then. That would appear to be the first major hurdle cleared for expanding the service. Nonetheless, all that does is open the door to the next set of questions.

Broadly speaking, these stem from the fact that expanding a repairs and maintenance service to take on the functions of a social landlord is a pretty unusual step. For Mr Conteh, there are two key issues that now need to be addressed.

“With any transformation, what you have to do first is justify it and then prove that there won’t be any detrimental effects to those individual services,” he states.

Despite the decision to put things on hold, the council still seems pretty enthusiastic about moving across additional housing services to Unitas, as evidenced by a report from Mr Conteh to the council’s cabinet in August.

Although it recommends putting things on hold to allow Unitas to prove itself, the report states that: “The potential expansion of Unitas Stoke-on-Trent to incorporate additional housing services will further enhance the council’s ability to make towns and communities great places to live through improvements to private sector housing, development and regeneration of housing in the city and development of new housing growth opportunities in the city.”

Carl Brazier pic

Carl Brazier, director of housing and customer services, Stoke-on-Trent City Council

Today, both Mr Conteh and Mr Brazier are more muted about the prospects – and the party line is that no decisions have been made and any moves to transfer individual services will be judged on their own merits.

Clearly, however, the council is still pretty keen on the idea.

“The reality is we will come back in 12 months’ time and we will prove how fantastic we are as a company. We can then start considering transferring some of the other services over,” Mr Conteh states.

If the housing development and regeneration team is transferred over, which the council has said it is considering, this means Unitas could swiftly become one of the most significant builders of council housing in England.

Stoke was one of the key players in pushing for the government to scrap Housing Revenue Account (HRA) borrowing caps over the past couple of years. And it already has some pretty ambitious building plans that it thinks puts other councils and housing associations to shame.

It is currently planning to build about 800 homes over the next three years – 400 council homes and 400 through its market rent and market sale wholly owned company Fortior Homes.

However, the HRA freedoms will enable it to up this number by about 300, Mr Brazier reckons. About 200 of these are likely to be council homes and “100 perhaps for other forms of tenure, so we get a mixed estate”, Mr Brazier states. We’re speaking just weeks after prime minister Theresa May announced the scrapping of the caps, so this is early days in terms of what happens next.

Random illustration

Mr Brazier is keen to get moving, but he reckons that Stoke’s plans puts many other social landlords to shame.

“You show me a housing association our size that is developing potentially 300 homes a year, as well as everything else we are doing,” he says. “I would be surprised.”

Mr Brazier, who also sits on the board of housing association First Choice Homes Oldham, says he thinks other landlords could be doing more to tackle the housing crisis.

“I think there is a bit of a challenge to other councils [from Stoke’s building activity]. I think there is also a challenge to housing associations. Because I think many of them could do more than they do. I think they talk the talk – and there are some of them that do a very good job, they are not all bad – but I think they could go beyond what they do. They often use the excuse of ‘grant’s not high enough’, ‘I don’t get free land to develop’, or ‘the planners are holding us up’. There is always something. That has not slowed us up. We have cracked on. So, yes, there is a challenge.”

For now, however, Unitas as a developer is still a twinkle in the council’s eye. Nothing further will progress until the middle of next year at the earliest.

“What you don’t want to do is run before you can walk,” Mr Conteh states.

Nonetheless, the desire for further change is pretty clear. One way or another, Unitas is an organisation you are likely to hear a lot more about in 2019.

Homes 2018

Homes 2018

Homes 2018 is the premier event experience for those working at a high level in residential development, strategic asset management and procurement.

As well as Kit Malthouse, housing minister, as the closing keynote speech, there will be conference sessions on the world’s tallest modular towers, micro-living and the UK’s largest self and custom build community.

Plus, find the latest product innovation and meet over 120 exhibitors, while networking with 4,000+ industry peers.

Homes 2018 will take place at Olympia, west London on November 28 and 29.

Click here to book now

 

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Add New Comment
You must be logged in to comment.