Agenda item

V Cunningham gave the update on flexible tenancies and asked Committee for questions.

Cllr Pringle advised she had been reading about the fixed term, it seemed that there was unintended consequences and was a little bit concerned although you are proposing to remove the shorter term and extending it to a fixed term, she is concerned about the criteria if the household had more than £16,000 saving, or a combined income of over £60,000 then they would be required to move on, would that still apply with these longer term tenancies when they came to be reviewed.  Cllr Pringle was concerned that families grow up and quite often young adults remain at home because they are saving up for somewhere to move to or to go to University and there could be a perverse incentive that if people have this information, have saved over £16,000 or that their combined income is over £60,000 they maybe they won’t save to go to University or improve their life or maybe Mum won’t take a promotion at work because their teenage child has started to have an income and they want to keep their income low.  It incentivises people not to actually aspire to improving their income.  Cllr Pringle asked what complex analysis could be done because for example we talked earlier about complex problems of homelessness, the peak age for developing mental illness is 23 and young adulthood actually a very vulnerable time in peoples lives and it’s much more cost effective to have a young adult living in a bedroom in their family home, than to move out and require a one bedroom property.  Is it just an absolute this is the combined family income or would the young adults income be considered not to be part of the household income, because quite often you might have a young adult and then primary school children in the same house and the family might become very stressed about what the implications of the young adult continuing to live in the security of the family home.  A lot of people will presume that their children will continue to live with them until they were secure from feeling the need to ask them to leave because they jeopardise the loss of the family home.  Has this been factored in.  V Cunningham advised that the income requirements is just the tenants not the tenants children.  Cllr Pringle said it came across as household in the report.  V Cunningham highlighted that if it’s a joint tenancy or sole tenancy and that’s the same that’s on the Allocations Policy, so it works hand in hand with that.

L Warden added that if the tenants have over £16,000 at the end of the flexible period will be asked to move out into the private sector, that’s the current position that we have, what we are proposing and looking to move forward to is secure tenancies which means that there is no criteria, tenancies will continue for the lifetime while those tenants are happy living in that home, while they are abiding by their tenancy agreement.  If they breach the tenancy we can still continue to take action and go down that route if needed but we can’t ask them to move out if their income goes over a certain amount.  This proposal will give a lot more security to those individuals, part of the reason for making this decision is because we have had a number of individuals who have had to reconsider progressing at work because they know they will need into the private sector, because they tip over that threshold of earnings as a couple, but in this area it’s very difficult to rent in the private sector with a low income.  If they are earning a very large sum of money then that’s absolutely fine and they’ll be fine in the private sector, but where somebody just tips over the edge it can then be a disincentive to try and encourage people to progress and to work.

Cllr Pringle asked if this has been done with those income and savings thresholds and because the young adult isn’t on the tenancy are they still able to occupy the bedroom.  L Warden confirmed they are.

Cllr Hollinghurst said that the explanations are very reassuring, there’s one point regarding antisocial behaviour, it’s not uncommon for tenants to be very concerned about a neighbouring tenant who’s not behaving well, by moving from the flexible tenancy back to the standard tenancy, where you were talking about the five year review, is that going lead to a lack of flexibility on our part in being able to deal with antisocial tenants.  L Warden replied that it shouldn’t affect it, we have a number of tools and powers through the Antisocial Behaviour Act, but also through the Housing Act that allow us to take action against our tenants, whether they are secure or flexible tenants.  At the moment we wouldn’t necessarily look to wait until the end of that five year period before we took action, we would take the action as appropriate at the time.  It shouldn’t have any impact on our ability to do that.

Cllr England wanted to put forward an idea and it’s not very well thought through, but some of the best ideas are like that.  With the need to think of as many inventive ways as we can to address climate emergency, bearing in mind that we’ve had comments about people being reluctant to move into sheltered housing, is there anything we can consider in terms of communications and trying to create a mindset, that if you live in any housing you shouldn’t be looking at that as somewhere that you would live forever, you should be looking at it as somewhere that is good for your needs right now and consider your needs for the future, if we can incorporate that into our thinking and our advice somewhere, that may have an beneficial effect on sheltered housing but it also might have a beneficial effect on energy efficiency, big empty properties that we suddenly have to insulate when actually what we need to do is just equal out the numbers by having more people live there.  L Warden confirmed that this had been discussed earlier today.  V Cunningham replied that the idea behind visiting each tenant every five years at least would be to give them advice and to suggest if they no longer need that property to think about moving and let them know what we can do to help them to downsize and if we bring that up at each of our five year visit, it will hopefully change the mindset of people that we do expect them to move, although we’re allowing them to have a secure lifetime tenancy, there is an expectation that we would like them to move when they no longer need that property. 

L Warden added where we recently had an individual who was moved to a smaller property and sent an email in to praise the housing staff, saying the difference that it has made to them, she was very reluctant to move, but actually now after they’ve moved they are in a much better position, realising financially they are much happier, it’s a weight off their shoulders and that’s the kind of thing we can use in our News and Views to promote some of the benefits.  We are also reviewing our support to move scheme as well, looking at incentivising moves to smaller homes or moves into sheltered.  We are proposing a slight change where instead of just giving them an amount of money for each bedroom you want to downsize, we will give additional benefit to those that are looking to move into sheltered housing because we know that can make quite a difference to help with removals.  Those are some of the incentives that we will introduce which we think with the combination of changes that we are making will hopefully encourage people to make sensible choices, but without putting the fear that you have to do this and if your circumstances change there’s a risk to you and your home, we’ve found a lot of tenants are very anxious around the time when we are doing the review and are in a state of limbo until we give them the results.  It removes that whilst still making the best use of our stock. 

Cllr Griffiths highlighted that when we first brought out the Housing Strategy, it wasn’t just about Council housing it was about the strategy for people generally all sorts of tenures and she specifically remember having a conversation, because the officers were saying that this is a conversation that we should be having in their 50’s about downsizing because once the children have left home, that is apparently the prime time to downsize.  Once you’ve got used to that space it becomes the family home, it’s gets harder and harder to downsize the longer you’re in that property after the nest has flown.  Cllr Griffith specifically remembers saying that she is in that category and I don’t feel that now is the time I should be moving, but of course, the point is, now is exactly the time I should be moving.  It is a conversation that we need to be having as a nation almost and actually something that is quite dear my heart because as a private householder often go into the likes of McCarthy and Stone where exactly do you go, we don’t necessarily want to buy a bungalow and there aren’t enough bungalows for us to all to buy anyway.  What’s the next option, it’s a really important conversation that the whole nation needs to be having and not just our tenants, but you can only start somewhere.

Cllr Adeleke commented that whilst he’s not dismissing any of the questions that is being asked, over the years this is one housing department that if we are going to award a medal, I would give them double gold, they are very innovative and come up with a lot of ideas and when you watch some of these programmes on television showing Council housing, firefighting and so on, this housing department come up with a lot of good ideas, with so many things they go beyond just providing housing and accommodation, we should from time to time commend what they do and Cllr Adeleke wanted that on record.

Cllr Adeleke questioned the MOT for five years, why do you have five years, when the government is asking me to do my car every year, can’t you make it sooner.  Cllr Adeleke is aware we have resources to think about, the staff, time, cost etc. but five years is a long time and a lot of things can change.  L Warden replied that for new tenants we currently do a six weekly home visit, so shortly after they’ve moved in just to make sure they have settled in okay, we will then go out at around eight months, just to check throughout that introductory period, because we know they are less secure at the beginning of the tenancy, so it’s quite important we put more visits in where they need it.  The intention is that everybody as a minimum will get one every five years, this equates to, excluding sheltered because the supported housing officers will do those visits, it will be about 143 homes we’ll need to visit each month.  Looking at current resources and potential additional resources that we need to be able to do that, that’s how we’ve come to five years.  Our intention is where people need more frequent visits we will do those, for example our income officers will visit whenever there are rent arrears, our repairs operatives and gas safety officers will still be going out and we have concern cards where they can raise any concerns when they visit homes.  We can then go out and carry out an earlier inspection for those, plus then we’ve got our tenancy sustainment team as well, so there are a number of tenants that are engaging regularly with officers who will be seen more frequently.  We also have housing fraud it’s quite a big issue, making sure that the right people are using their homes as they should be, so if we get any reports of subletting then straight away one of the housing officers will go out and inspect that, these are mainly to make sure that we haven’t got tenants living in our homes for 10 years, they are good tenants, they always pay their rents, no issues that we know, but actually we don’t have a relationship with them, because we haven’t seen them for that amount of time and we also don’t know if there are other things going on that they may need support or help with, or maybe they are carrying out alterations to their home that we are not aware of, it’s to mainly try and capture those to make sure that we have the minimum standard of how frequently we are visiting our tenants.  We always have the option to do more and see them more frequently.

The Chairman said this topic has come up twice on the Tenants and Leaseholders Committee and some of these are in consultation with actual tenants and what they’ve recommended as best practice and are a happy medium what the Council needs and what they as tenants needs, so that’s another point that could be definitely commended.

Cllr Griffiths said to follow on from that point, we also need to be aware of is that at the moment we don’t have any plan in place to visit every property over any timescale, so there might be some that there have been no reason to contact them, could be 20/30 years really and we never have as a Council visited.  There is going to be suspicion but once we get into the flow of it, it will be fine, but certainly at the beginning there will be questions why are coming in, has someone reported me for something and there might be a lot of distrust, so it’s a case of building that trust up as well.  I’d hate to say we were going to go and see everyone within a year or two years or three years, we will get the momentum going but if we are only halfway through in three years we and now people are saying well you haven’t been to see me, don’t I matter, so it’s striking a balance for those that don’t want to see us and those that will be upset that we haven’t got round to them yet.

Cllr Mahmood mentioned that 150 houses per month will need 20 working days, seven/eight a day, which isn’t going to really happen, unless you have spare resources and budget, it’s a big ask.  Cllr Mahmood wondered if we had postal contact with people and then visited if needed, because the target we’re setting is not going to be achieved unless you have two or three people going round houses, if someone is talkative you could be there for two hours, the five years programme seems ambitious.  L Warden confirmed there are 12 housing officers that work in the department, at the moment the majority of them are out and about in our tenants homes, that is their main role is to be visiting our tenants, dealing with issues they have, mutual exchanges, tenant queries, changes of circumstances and so we know just through normal contact, we visit a number of our tenants each year anyway, there will be some that may be quite hard to gain access, so those are the ones that are going to be difficult and will be harder for us to achieve this.  We do think it’s ambitious but we also think it can be achieved with the right resource and the right focus for those officers to be going out doing these visits.  In relation to interchanging a bit, the key thing for us is that we’re reflective, so we know that national policy changes, we know the legislation changes, but we also know that the demands from our tenant changes as well, so we made a decision to go down the flexible tenancy route because it sounded like something that could give a lot of flexibility to our tenants and make much better use of our homes.  We tried that for a period of time, we’ve now done some reviews and it’s shown that it hasn’t had the outcomes, so it’s a positive that were are then saying, look we’ve tried this, it’s not been successful as we hoped but we have identified a gap and this is the next focus that we think is needed at the moment.  It is hoped that it is something we can achieve but we will be setting regular targets within the teams so we can monitor how many we are achieving and if there is a chance that it isn’t going to be successful then we will review the current resources, review the barriers that we have and try and find ways to get round those.

Cllr Mahmood requested that we also look at the figures for mental health issues and sicknesses from staff doing these visits. 

The Chairman mentioned that we could look at the timescale but we had quite a robust discussion about it at tenants and leaseholders and there were a number of reasons why we needed to understand the stock condition of our properties.  We’ve had cultural where tenants aren’t used to us visiting and we’ve needed to visit more to make sure we’re keeping our properties in good condition, that was one of the reasons why we wanted the five years and we mustn’t loose that, but the Chairman did agree that perhaps five years is a bit ambitious and you might relook at the timescale, because if you say seven years and you get in done in five, that’s good, but if someone has waited five years, they’ll be ringing Cllr Griffiths saying don’t you care about me.  I had that with the refurbishment programme if one in the street doesn’t need doing, they’ll all phone and ask what’s happening with my house, so you could very well be having that problem. 

The Chairman also said that while you are reviewing this policy can you look at the anomalies with joint tenancies when there is a break up and one person moves, that can cause quite a lot of distress because they both have to surrender the tenancy.  If one person surrenders the tenancy the other person is automatically by default surrendered as well, they find themselves in a situation where they are having to move when they don’t want to.  It’s a tricky one, but it would good if we could try and come up with a way to break that loophole.  L Warden advised that one aspect is to review the tenancy agreement relating to secure tenancies, a conversation we are having is what we need to put in the tenancy agreement should we move forward for all, one of the current issues with the flexible tenancies is that both tenants must sign to end the tenancy, so if one person refuses it holds the other to ransom, that’s one challenge we have.  For secure tenancies unfortunately the Housing Act is very specific that if one party ends a joint tenancy then it ends for both.  It’s not something that we can change and it’s a very difficult situation if both parties want to remain there it can then put a lot of pressure on trying to make a decision about how to progress and move forward.  It’s probably one of the biggest issues we actually have at the moment and we are speaking to legal.  We have cases where we are trying to not have individuals that are not homeless because a partner has moved away and served the notice ending that tenancy.  What we mainly advise is for them to get legal advice because we can’t be the ones that advise which of them who gets the tenancy, especially in some scenarios where there’s misinformation from both parties, it’s not for us to be the ones that make that decision, that needs to be something that’s sorted out between them as a couple.  It is a difficult piece of legislation and unfortunately it’s not something we can change but we can look at how we deal with that when that’s presented to us, to make sure we deal with as sensitively as possible and getting the right advice.

Cllr Pringle wanted to add that presumably in cases where there’s been domestic abuse that would be different, you’d have a special protocol.  L Warden confirmed we did.

The Chairman confirmed the recommendations to consider the report.