Issue - meetings

The Assistant Director of Environmental and Housing Property Services presented the Housing Consumer Standards Report for the first quarter of the 2025/26 financial year. In considering the report, Members were asked to note that the title of the report would be changing in the future.  The new title would highlight the purpose of the report in monitoring the performance of Housing Services.

The report detailed the Council’s performance in relation to the Regulator of Social Housing’s tenant satisfaction measures.  These measures were monitored as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the service, alongside performance in relation to important health and safety actions, such as completion of gas inspections at Council properties.  The available data indicated that the Council’s performance in relation to these KPIs was improving, when compared to the same quarter in the 2024/25 financial year.  In addition, information available from the Power BI system that the Council was now using was enabling Officers to more accurately identify and assess issues when they occurred.

Following the presentation of the report, Members noted that the report had been pre-scrutinised at a meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee held on 1^st September 2025.  At this meeting, the issues raised and the Council’s response had been scrutinised in detail.  Comments had been made at this meeting that there had been some slippage in performance in recent years and questions were raised about whether this was supported by available evidence.  Officers clarified that there were difficulties in assessing the available data as the Council had moved from an archaic IT system to a modern system in 2022 and therefore the data would need to be reviewed carefully.  However, the focus of the Council remained on improving performance moving forward rather than on reflecting back to the past.

Members welcomed information contained in the report that indicated that overall performance was improving compared to the same quarter in 2024/25, although there remained areas for improvement.  The suggestion was made that once handheld Totalmobile devices were introduced for the use of frontline staff, performance, including records of performance, would improve.

RESOLVED that

the Council’s 2025/26 performance against the Tenant Satisfaction Measures (Landlord) be noted.