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Kent councils retake control of housing stocks after ALMO wound up
Four councils in the South East have retaken control of housing management services and begun to wind up their jointly owned ALMO.
As of yesterday, services previously provided by East Kent Housing (EKH) and the vast majority of its staff have transferred to Canterbury, Dover, Thanet and Folkestone & Hythe councils.
EKH had managed a combined 17,000 homes on behalf of the local authorities since 2011 and was the only ALMO working for multiple town halls.
Councillors at the four local authorities agreed in February to scrap EKH and take back responsibility for managing their respective housing stocks after a consultation indicated resident support.
They had initially planned to transfer services and staff from EKH in April 2021, but subsequently decided to effect the handover six months earlier.
Major health and safety issues emerged at EKH last summer, and in September 2019 the four councils were issued notice that they had breached the Regulator of Social Housing’s Home Standard through the failings.
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The councils dismissed EKH’s board members and put their chief executives in control of the organisation in December after a report concluded it to be “fundamentally broken”.
An interim chief executive, Vivien Knibbs, was appointed in January following the departure of previous incumbent Deborah Upton.
Four EKH staff have been made redundant while the rest have been transferred to the various councils on the same terms and conditions, the councils said.
Seventy new frontline posts have been created across the four housing services.
The process of formally winding up EKH is expected to complete in March 2021.
In a joint statement, the councils’ four chief executives Colin Carmichael (Canterbury), Nadeem Aziz (Dover), Madeline Homer (Thanet) and Susan Priest (Folkestone & Hythe) said: “All four councils are determined to put the needs of tenants and leaseholders at the heart of the four housing services that have been established as evidenced by the creation of an extra 70 frontline posts.
“We want them to see real improvements to the service they receive and the way their homes are managed.
“We realise this is not a magic wand and it will not solve every problem overnight. This incredibly complex project is just the start of the journey and there is a lot of hard work ahead of us.
“We would like to thank EKH and council staff for putting in an enormous amount of work behind the scenes to make this process run as smoothly as possible.”
A report by a Thanet Council officer presented to councillors last month said the authority was budgeting £464,000 for one-off costs associated with bring EKH in house, plus another £131,000 for on-going costs.
In addition, it is spending another £108,000 on “additional security” at tower blocks with fire safety issues while also projecting coronavirus-related rent arrears losses to reach up to £622,000.
