Warnings of a major winter crisis in Lewisham Council’s housing stock due to an increase in legal cases, an inundation of repairs and serious staff shortages, were given to councillors at a recent meeting.
Margaret Dodwell, Chief Executive Officer of Lewisham Homes, told councillors she was feeling “the most nervous I’ve ever been going into winter in housing.”
Sarah Willcox-Jones, the Director of Repairs at Lewisham Homes, also told Lewisham’s housing select committee: “I’ve never faced the challenges we do at the moment, for us and our residents.”
Willcox-Jones was delivering a Repairs Service Update to the council. She said that Lewisham Homes currently average 5,000 repairs each month – above its target of no more than 3,500. Lewisham Homes manages 19,000 homes on behalf of the authority.
William Cooper, Labour councillor for Lewisham’s Evelyn Ward, read out a repair testimonial from one of his residents at Daubeney Tower in Deptford who had been waiting for a window to be repaired since May.
The contractor who came to repair it in August subsequently broke another one of her windows. She had to push back a major surgery as a result and on the morning of the appointment for the new repair it was cancelled. It was rescheduled for September 15 and cancelled again.
Cooper said she had emailed him saying: “As the cold weather is here now, I really need my windows repaired so my curtains can be put up for me before I fall ill because I can’t afford to put the heating on this year due to an increase in the gas and electric prices.”
Willcox-Jones said: “We really struggled with window and glazing this year. We lost both our internal glazing operatives … just coming into the summer months … because of the staff shortages we’ve struggled to recruit to them.” At time of publishing, the report said there were 267 live legal cases against Lewisham Homes.
The wider housing crisis in London is stark as data from London Councils suggests there are 155,000 homeless Londoners and the city accounts for two-thirds of England’s homelessness total.
Stephen Penfold, the Labour councillor for Brockley said that this was an “increase of a fifth” since January, when the number of legal disrepair cases was 224.
Dodwell said that one of the reasons for the increase was cold calling, and residents were being “enticed to bring a disrepair claim against [their] landlord.”
She added that this doesn’t excuse the increase and said: “We do need to see a reduction in the number of people bringing claims against Lewisham [Homes].”
Penfold replied: “That’s exactly what you said nine months ago.” He added: “Out of their disrepair budget spend of £1m [in January], 75 per cent was spent on compensation and legal fees, so for every £4.00 spent, £3.00 went to a lawyer or for compensation.”
Penfold asked for the equivalent spending breakdown for that month which could not be issued during the meeting.
However, Willcox-Jones said that Lewisham Homes had recently recruited a paralegal to work with its solicitors to help cap costs. And it has also introduced a resident liaison officer in order to have “closer working relationships with [its] residents” and “gain more trust … without the need of a solicitor.”
She added: “A lot of [residents] don’t want to go down the legal disrepair process, some of them are slightly excited by the carrot that the solicitors give them in terms of high levels of compensation until they realise that compensation’s probably not going to go to them.”
She added: “All we want to do is put the resident’s property right.”
Dodwell said: “We do need to do better.”
The Social Housing Regulation Bill is currently at the stage of passing through the House of Commons and will ‘make all registered social housing providers subject to a tough new regulatory regime, with failing social landlords facing unlimited fines if they fail to meet the standards expected of them.’
