Issue - meetings

The report updated the Leader of the Council on the need for an additional £6.851mto fund the increasing cost of managing legal disrepair cases and housing disrepair work, and to meet the revenue cost of the EICR inspection programme.

It was noted that the number of disrepair cases continued to rise and on 9^th November 2023, the Leader had approved a variation to the contracts for all three law firms to a value not to exceed a cumulative total of £2.3M, accordingly, the maximum contract values were subsequently increased.

On approval of the virement the maximum cumulative contract value for the Council’s external law firms for the period 2023/25 would be £4.7m (£2.3m + £2.4m). In addition, the responsive repairs service did not have sufficient capacity to undertake the work required, £2m was required to appoint 4 contractors to work on historic disrepair cases. This would address the following: to complete housing disrepair cases in a timely manner, to mitigate against further legal costs.

The Leader asked how the service intended to address the issue of increasing cost of managing legal disrepair going forward and what the plan of action was.  The Operational Director for Housing & Building Safety advised the Leader that new processes and procedures would be in place. This included a new team based in housing to take forward initial contact on new housing disrepair cases and a new legal team focusing on housing disrepair cases. The Deputy Monitoring Officer advised that the new temporary team in Legal Service would have 8 senior legal assistant posts which were being recruited to and a locum senior lawyer appointed to manage them. This team would have the capacity to deal with up to 500 cases. However, there were an estimated 900 outsourced legal cases concerning disrepair and the virement would support the funding and spend of external lawyers on the outsourced cases. It was hoped that with the new Housing and Legal teams, that the full amount of projected spend for the law firms working on housing disrepair would not be needed over the coming financial year.  

The Operational Director for Housing & Building Safety advised the Leader that the total additional spend requirement for Housing disrepair cases and EICRs was £6.9m, which was made up of:

·         Contractors to complete legal disrepair work            £2m

·         Tenant / lessee legal costs                                           £1.1m

·         Compensation payment for tenants                           £700k

·         Cost of external law firms                                             £2.4m

·         Contractor to complete programme of EICRs           £651k

·         Total                                                                                £6.9m

The Cabinet Member for Housing, Private Renters and Planning commented that she was assured that there was a robust plan in place to tackle the increasing disrepair cases, but this would take time to have an impact.

Further to considering the exempt information at item 12,

The Leader of the Council RESOLVED:

a.    To note that of the £6.9m required, £3.4m will be funded from sources highlighted in the report 4.2.1.

b.    To approve a virement of £2.8m from the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) reserves for the provision of  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6