Decision

Guildford Borough Council (43UD) - Regulatory Judgement: 9 July 2024

Published 9 July 2024

Applies to England

Our Judgement

	Grade/Judgement	Change	Date of assessment
Consumer	C3: Our judgement is that there are serious failings in the landlord delivering the outcomes of the consumer standards and significant improvement is needed	First grading	July 2024

Reason for publication

We are publishing a regulatory judgement for Guildford Borough Council (Guildford BC) to confirm a consumer grading of C3.

This is a result of our responsive engagement with Guildford BC that focused on the Safety and Quality Standard and the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard. This is the first time we have issued a consumer grade in relation to this landlord.

Summary of the decision

Our judgement is that there are serious failings in how Guildford BC is delivering the outcomes of the consumer standards and significant improvement is needed, specifically in relation to outcomes in our Safety and Quality Standard and our Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard. Based on this assessment, we have concluded a C3 grade for Guildford BC.

How we reached our judgement

We began our responsive engagement with Guildford BC when it made a self-referral to us in December 2023. It had identified issues within its housing service that included potentially unnecessary repairs being carried out to tenants’ homes.

During the period of our engagement, Guildford BC investigated the issues further, which led to it identifying additional concerns relating to its statutory landlord health and safety compliance and its failure to collect and report the Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs).

Our responsive engagement with Guildford BC about these issues included reviewing documents and data provided by Guildford BC, with follow up meetings and discussions with Guildford BC. Our judgement is based on all the relevant information we obtained during the responsive engagement process. In making our decision, we have considered how well Guildford BC is delivering against outcomes of the Safety and Quality Standard and the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard.

Summary of findings 

Consumer – C3 – July 2024

The Safety and Quality Standard requires landlords to identify and meet all legal requirements that relate to the health and safety of tenants in their homes and communal areas, and that all required actions arising from legally required health and safety assessments are carried out within appropriate timescales.

The information provided by Guildford BC to us during our engagement with it demonstrates that Guildford BC is failing to ensure that it meets a number of legal requirements in relation to health and safety. Guildford BC has failed to ensure that it is meeting electrical safety requirements. It has reported to us that it has around 1,700 homes without a current electrical condition report, with around a further 1,000 with unsatisfactory certificates. Additionally, Guildford BC has reported to us that it does not have evidence of a current electrical condition report for more than 100 communal blocks. Guildford BC has informed us that it also needs to complete a data cleansing exercise to confirm whether electrical safety remedial actions had been completed.

Through our responsive engagement, we learned that Guildford BC did not have a consistent process for re-inspecting asbestos in its communal areas and that more than 100 re-inspection surveys were overdue. Guildford BC reports that this matter has now been remedied. Relating to fire safety, Guildford BC has over 1,300 medium and low-risk fire remedial actions that it cannot evidence have been completed. Guildford BC is carrying out a validation exercise to confirm the position.

The Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard includes the requirement for landlords to collect and report annually on their performance using a core set of defined measures (the TSMs) in order to support effective scrutiny by tenants. Guildford BC stated that it had not collected any TSM data for the 2023/24 reporting year and is therefore unable to publish this data, or to submit it to us. Guildford BC has been unable to explain the reasons for its failure to collect this data, and as a result, tenants are not supported to effectively scrutinise Guildford BC’s performance in delivering landlord services.

Taking into account the breadth and significance of the issues across the relevant outcomes of both the Safety and Quality Standard and the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard, we have concluded that there are serious failings in how Guildford BC is delivering the outcomes of the Consumer Standards and significant improvement is needed.

Since its self-referral Guildford BC has engaged constructively with the regulator, and it has taken steps to address the failures including work to complete outstanding health and safety checks and actions and to validate the data it holds. The council has developed an improvement plan, commissioned an external review into its governance and implemented improvements in its reporting.

We are engaging with Guildford BC as it continues to address the issues that led to this situation. Our engagement includes ongoing monitoring of how it is delivering its health and safety programme and how it is collecting and reporting its TSMs for the 2024/25 year and beyond. Our engagement with the landlord will be intensive and we will seek evidence to give us the assurance that sufficient change and improvement is being made. Our priority will be that any relevant risks to tenants are adequately managed and mitigated. We are not proposing to use our enforcement powers at this stage but will keep this under review as Guildford BC seeks to resolve these issues.

Background to the judgement

About the landlord

Guildford BC owns around 5,200 social housing properties. It provides predominantly general needs accommodation, with some supported/sheltered accommodation. It is responsible for all statutory landlord functions within the Housing Revenue Account.

Our role and regulatory approach

We regulate for a viable, efficient, and well governed social housing sector able to deliver quality homes and services for current and future tenants.

We regulate at the landlord level to drive improvement in how landlords operate. By landlord we mean a registered provider of social housing. These can either be local authorities, or private registered providers (other organisations registered with us such as non-profit housing associations, co-operatives, or profit-making organisations).

We set standards which state outcomes that landlords must deliver. The outcomes of our standards include both the required outcomes and specific expectations we set. Where we find there are significant failures in landlords which we consider to be material to the landlord’s delivery of those outcomes, we hold them to account. Ultimately this provides protection for tenants’ homes and services and achieves better outcomes for current and future tenants. It also contributes to a sustainable sector which can attract strong investment.

We have a different role for regulating local authorities than for other landlords. This is because we have a narrower role for local authorities and the Governance and Financial Viability Standard, and Value for Money Standard do not apply. Further detail on which standards apply to different landlords can be found on our standards page.

We assess the performance of landlords through inspections and by reviewing data that landlords are required to submit to us. In Depth Assessments (IDAs) were one of our previous assessment processes, which are now replaced by our new inspections programme from 1 April 2024. We also respond where there is an issue or a potential issue that may be material to a landlord’s delivery of the outcomes of our standards. We publish regulatory judgements that describe our view of landlords’ performance with our standards. We also publish grades for landlords with more than 1,000 social housing homes.

The Housing Ombudsman deals with individual complaints. When individual complaints are referred to us, we investigate if we consider that the issue may be material to a landlord’s delivery of the outcomes of our standards.

For more information about our approach to regulation, please see Regulating the standards.

Further information

• Regulating the standards

• Regulatory standards for landlords