22 April 2005
Landlords seeking value for money must not lose sight of the need to improve services for tenants, the government's chief housing inspector has said.
Too many social landlords have become obsessed with cutting costs and ignore issues such as quality and performance, Roy Irwin told a conference on housing efficiency last week.
'Service improvement should be part of the day job. It's not something that you do once per year by looking in the rear-view mirror,' he said. 'Being cheap and nasty is unlikely to lead to customer satisfaction.'
Speaking in the week councils submitted their first annual efficiency statements to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Irwin said councils and housing associations could no longer complain about lack of resources.
Councils are being challenged to save 2.5% per year across all services. Instead of looking to outsource, said Irwin, housing departments should use peer review to compare themselves with other parts of the sector.
'The industry is not competitive in terms of learning from one another,' he told the conference in London on April 14. 'It tends to believe that things might be given away by sharing with one another.'
But Steve Coleman, development director at Genesis Housing Group, said: 'We are delivering huge amounts of private finance cheaply and efficiently to back government money. I don't think any other sector has done that.'
Genesis has set up its own group treasury company, Geninvest, to negotiate cheaper finance that does not appear on the RSLs' balance sheet and is building up a 'land bank'.
Neil Litherland, deputy chief executive at the London Borough of Camden, revealed how the London borough has identified housing savings worth £4.5m – more than half the £8.6m it expects to save as a council in 2005/06.
Measures include setting up a consortium with neighbouring councils to buy temporary accommodation for homeless families and using an on-line self-assessment system of choice-based lettings.
'There is an assumption that choice and efficiency don't go well together but we are being asked to achieve both,' said Litherland.
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