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The government has announced it’s latest great idea for housing, and although the scheme is aimed at social housing I am sure that it will have a knock on effect on the private sector, if only by influencing people’s attitudes and custom and practice.
The government thinks that some of the maintenance works done by social landlords to their housing stock could and should be done by tenants – and that if it was done by tenants it wouldn’t cost as much. So it is proposing Tenant Cashback – a scheme which will allow residents to take control of their repairs budgets for their homes and carry out their own DIY, or pay for it themselves and pocket any savings made.
With maintenance and repair costing £4billion a year Social housing landlords responsible for England’s more than 4 million social homes spend an average of £1000 per property annually on repairs – so regardless of the government protestation that maintenance budgets on social housing won’t be cut by this proposal, it would be naive to think that this initiative isn’t incentivised by the opportunity to cut costs. Community groups will also be able to take on the repairs on a particular street or neighbourhood, helping out those who cannot take on the responsibility themselves. Tenants will be able to pool their resources, creating a ‘Community Cashback’ account which could be used to fund improvements to the local area for the benefit of all residents.
All these proposals are bound to find support from private home owners with leases on social housing estates who are finding themselves faced with massive service charge bills for maintenance that they have no choice or control over, nevertheless landlords in the private sector would tell the government if asked that an annual bill of £1000 for maintenance of a property is probably below average.
The proposals have many minefields to negotiate their way through:
- Planned Maintenance Programs will now give way to the “You can’t fix it if it ain’t broke” mentality.
- There will be little control of cowboy builders, inventing repairs and charging inflated rates.
- It’s not clear how tenants inventing problems, booking ‘repairs’ through their mates and sharing out a £1,000 a year is to be controlled.
- It’s certainly an opportunity for landlords to shed themselves of the complicated responsibility of maintaining the property and stick to the rather simpler job of collecting the rent.
- A raft of safety oriented legislation has been brought in over the last few decades to control how private landlords conduct their maintenance. Will this now be revocked in the face of a tide of DIY maintenance?
- Will we now see a new generation of litigation lawyers living off the pickings of botched social housing maintenance?
