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Council with in-house housing service and ALMO plans new ‘combined hybrid service’
A council which currently operates both an ALMO and an internal housing service is planning to move towards what it has described as a “best of both worlds” hybrid approach.
Since being formed through a merger between three local authorities in April 2019, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council has continued to run an ALMO, Poole Housing Partnership (PHP), and an in-house housing service simultaneously.
PHP currently owns around 4,500 rented homes in Poole, while the council owns another 5,000 homes in Bournemouth. Christchurch Council underwent a stock transfer of its homes some years ago.
At a meeting on Wednesday, BCP’s cabinet unanimously agreed to a review of its housing management model, with a “combined hybrid service” as its preferred option.
That would involve closing PHP and setting up a new housing service within the council overseen by an “advisory board”, chaired by the council’s portfolio holder for housing and made up of council, resident and independent expert members.
An officers’ report to the meeting said that aligning housing management services “is necessary to meet the council’s overarching alignment agenda and emerging transformation strategy, with the outcome of delivering excellent services for our council housing tenants and leaseholders”.
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Referring to the move towards a proactive consumer regulation system for social housing, plus the Building Safety Bill, the Decent Homes review and decarbonisation, it added that the council’s housing service “clearly needs to embrace these agendas more proactively and innovatively”.
Other councils are also in the process of setting up advisory boards for their housing services, including Gateshead and Kirklees, which recently closed ALMOs.
BCP also hopes that a hybrid approach would help it achieve efficiency savings to be reinvested back into the service, but has not yet come up with a figure.
Council housing and the local plan are the two key areas not yet aligned within the Conservative-run council, two years on from its formation.
It currently operates two separate neighbourhood accounts within its Housing Revenue Account (HRA) for Bournemouth and Poole, with differences in some processes and policies between the two areas.
The officers’ report noted the council is at potential “risk of challenge” over fairness if its services remain unaligned.
Last week’s cabinet decision follows an independent review into aligning the service completed in summer 2020 which proposed four options: collapsing PHP into the Bournemouth service, collapsing the Bournemouth service into a renamed ALMO, closing both services and setting up a new housing company, or the hybrid option.
A cross-party councillor working group convened in February dismissed the first two options amid concerns of them being seen as a “takeover” and preferred the hybrid approach because it offered the council a greater degree of control over its stock without the overhead costs of a separate company.
Cabinet members approved a proposal to start a 12-week consultation with residents, staff and housing register applicants beginning this month.
Discussions around the new housing management model “are contentious and sensitive and need to be handled very carefully with engagement of all parties” while the presence of the ALMO “makes the governance and communications for this project complex”, the report said.
A new staff sounding board has also been proposed to help shape the implementation of the new service.
The council has agreed a set of 20 core objectives for its new housing model, including to develop affordable housing, maintain and manage homes to deliver the best outcomes for residents and to promote resident involvement
It will now work through the financial details of the plan to determine potential savings and set-up costs.
BCP’s HRA has a rent roll of £43.2m for the current financial year with £16.5m of planning borrowing, rising to more than £23.1m next year.
PHP survived the threat of closure in 2018 following a review, before Poole Council merged with Bournemouth and Christchurch.
There are currently 27 ALMOs in England – a number that has declined steadily since 2010 – with around 165 stock-retaining councils in total.
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