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Council delays plan to transfer housing services to new company
A Midlands council will delay its plan to transfer all its housing services to a subsidiary for at least a year following concerns about the new company’s governance structure.
Stoke-on-Trent City Council established Unitas to handle repairs and maintenance of its 18,200 homes, with the company taking over from Kier Stoke – a joint venture between the council and Kier Group – in February.
The authority’s Conservative-Independent coalition cabinet also voted in January to expand Unitas’ responsibilities to encompass all housing functions, including allocations, homelessness services and development.
The move would see 260 council staff transferred to the new company, on top of the 500 maintenance workers already set to switch from the council’s existing repairs arrangement.
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Initially, Unitas was intended to take on the additional responsibilities from “mid-2018”.
However, an officer’s report due to go before the council’s cabinet today recommends holding off on the expansion for a minimum of one year, subject to a review of the company’s performance, a review of the services proposed for transferral and further consultation with tenants, staff and unions.
The cabinet will make a final decision on whether to hand over the other services to Unitas once the reviews and consultations have been completed.
According to the officer’s report, a three-month consultation already completed found that “the main concern” from all groups was the length of time Unitas has been operating.
It was felt the company “does not have a proven track record of delivery and that it needs to be a successful organisation delivering an improved service prior to taking on the delivery of additional service areas”.
And councillors, staff and unions expressed misgivings with Unitas’ governance structure. The firm’s board is currently made up of two council cabinet members, the council’s director of housing and customer services, two independent non-executive directors and its own operations director.
Respondents to the consultation suggested there should be three councillors on the Unitas board and that the operations director should report to the board rather than sitting as a voting director.
Of 595 responses to the consultation – 62% of which came from council tenants – around 165 said they had “no objection” to the expansion of Unitas, while a further 160 had no opinion.
Around 90 felt the move was “a good idea”, while just over 100 said it was “not a good idea”.
Councillor Randolph Conteh, Stoke-on-Trent City Council cabinet member for housing, communities and safer city, said: “To be really clear, there are no governance issues with how Unitas is run. What we are looking at doing is creating a further place on the board for an elected member in place of an officer, and this is being done through the full and open democratic process. We’re proud of the fact that we have very clear channels for reporting openly the monitoring and scrutiny of the company, and the arrangements over its governance were clearly spelt out in the legal documentation in forming the company – all of which had been scrutinised."
Update: 05/09/18 at 4.40pm. Story was updated to include quote from the cabinet member for housing.
