Adur District Council to tackle housing issues following breach of regulatory standards

Released: Wednesday, 10 May 2023

Adur District Council is to work with the national social housing regulator to tackle health and safety issues with our homes.

We contacted the Regulator of Social Housing in February after carrying out a review that identified health and safety issues in some of our properties.

The review highlighted that not all of our homes had up-to-date fire, electrical and asbestos safety checks, and that some did not have smoke alarms. We also did not have the data to confirm our properties met the Decent Homes Standard.

We referred ourselves to the regulator and suggested that because of these issues, we could be in breach of the national Home Standard.

The regulator has now written to us to confirm that we are indeed in breach of the Home Standard.

We understand the work we need to do and have created a new programme of health and safety checks and property surveys. Staff from the regulator will now work with our teams as we tackle the identified problems.

The regulator has today published a notice on its engagement with us, as happens with all such cases of this kind.

Cllr Carson Albury, Adur's Cabinet Member for Adur Homes and Customer Services, said:

“Everyone living in our properties deserves to have a good, safe and secure home and we are committed to working with the regulator and our residents to make this a reality.

“I'm grateful to the regulator for the speed with which it has reviewed our referral and we welcome its scrutiny as we work to resolve our issues.

“We have been, and will continue to be, open and transparent with the regulator about the challenges that have developed in our social housing.”

Much of the housing managed by us was built more than 50 years ago and needs a lot of investment to bring it up to standard. However, rent restrictions imposed by a series of governments over many years means there has been, and continues to be, insufficient funding to pay for the work required in Adur.

We accept that this has meant we have not invested and improved our homes in the way we should have done for a number of years.

We will continue to carry out repairs and improvement work on our properties, focusing on prioritising health and safety issues. We have written to all of our tenants and leaseholders explaining the situation, apologising for not having always provided a good service and committing to working hard to do better.