Housing associations ramp up stock surveys due to disrepair and decarbonisation
Major housing associations have unveiled plans to survey all of their stock to tackle disrepair and decarbonisation.
Aster, Notting Hill Genesis (NHG) and GreenSquareAccord are all increasing the number of homes they survey to get a deeper understanding of their stock and to prioritise investment where it is needed.
Elly Hoult, director of assets and sustainability at NHG, confirmed that the 66,000-home landlord intends to undertake 14,500 stock condition surveys over the next two years to remedy the fact that its stock data is currently only 66% accurate.
Speaking at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s conference in Brighton, Ms Hoult said that the London-based landlord is currently opening more disrepair cases than it is closing each month, and that she “cannot be confident” there are not “some poor homes” in its portfolio.
Ms Hoult said: “I want to be saying in two years’ time, ‘I know the condition of our homes, we’ve been in it, we’ve had a look and this is what we need to spend to get it to the right point’.”
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It comes after a year in which disrepair in social housing has been under the spotlight.
ITV News has been running an investigation into cases of severe disrepair, while social housing activist Kwajo Tweneboa has been using social media to highlight the poor conditions social housing tenants across the country are living in.
The spotlight on disrepair has also led 25,000-home GreenSquareAccord to undertake a stock condition survey of all its properties, according to housing minister Eddie Hughes.
Speaking at a recent session of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee’s investigation into the regulation of social housing, he said he had recently been told about the plans by the housing association’s chief executive, Ruth Cooke.
“She was talking about the fact that they’ve ordered an internal stock condition survey of all of their properties to make sure that they get inside and can check that they don’t have any [disrepair cases] that they’re either unaware of or haven’t bubbled to the top in terms of management understanding,” he said.
GreenSquareAccord said it had nothing further to add to Mr Hughes’ comments.
Meanwhile, Wiltshire-based Aster, which previously surveyed 20% of its stock on a rolling basis, is also in the middle of a full stock condition survey, aiming to inspect 100% of homes.
Emma O’Shea, chief operating officer at Aster, told Inside Housing that the housing association does not have a high level of disrepair cases and that the main driver behind the decision was the “decarbonisation agenda”.
She said that funding decarbonisation is “tricky”, adding: “It’s being able to bring together the whole picture around energy efficiency and the stock to help formulate a really solid plan.”
Ms O’Shea said that the survey is about “being proactive and getting to the heart of the data”, and that it will help Aster to plan its investment programme more effectively for residents.
She added: “What we’re trying to do is do a short, sharp programme, rather than a rolling programme over a five-year period, which allows us then to do really detailed modelling.
“It’s really just making sure that the data that we’ve got around the stock is right, and we’re targeting that in the right places.”
Research by Inside Housing in 2020 revealed that one in five social landlords did not know the average Standard Assessment Procedure rating of their housing stock.
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