Brent Council found to have 'serious failings'

The housing regulator has highlighted "serious failings" by Brent Council in ensuring the health and safety of its tenants, including fire risk cases that had been closed despite not being completed.

The north-west London authority referred itself to the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) in April after it "identified weaknesses" in how it followed up on completing housing repairs and said it had "let tenants down".

The RSH's review focused on the safety and quality standard of Brent Council as a landlord and found "significant improvement" was needed.

The council said it was "determined to improve the quality" of its homes and had "made real progress in recent months".

Brent Council owns around 8,800 homes across London, most of which are under its direct management, alongside an additional 4,000 leasehold homes in blocks, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

The law requires councils to have up to date evidence of the condition of the homes under its management, as well as for necessary works to be carried out "within appropriate timescales".

The LDRS found that within the last year, about 12,500 actions arising from fire risk assessments had been closed by the council.

However, the council referred itself to the regulator after a spot check revealed that despite a case being closed "evidence of the completion of the actions was not available in all instances and some actions had not been completed at all".

Most of these were deemed to be of a high and medium risk and were being treated as "overdue".

The review by the RSH earlier this month revealed the data for fire safety, smoke and carbon monoxide safety, asbestos management and water safety "cannot be reconciled" and the council "is not able to determine which legally required checks and assessments have been completed".

It also found that despite the council reporting it has condition data on 95% of its housing stock, almost half of its homes "have not had a recorded survey".

The council "has plans in place" to understand the impact of its current position, according to the RSH judgement.

These include working to understand the root causes of the problems, reviewing the completion of all closed fire safety actions and working to develop a suitable action plan to resolve the issues.

The RSH judgement added: "We will continue to engage with [Brent Council] as it seeks to address the issues that have led to this judgement.

"We are not proposing to use our enforcement powers at this stage but will keep this under review as [Brent Council] seeks to resolve these issues."

Fleur Donnelly-Jackson, Brent's cabinet member for housing and resident services, acknowledged there was "still much more to do".

She said: "We take our responsibilities as a landlord very seriously and the council accepts that we have let tenants down and for this we apologise unreservedly.

"We will continue to work proactively, positively and in an open and transparent way with our residents and with the regulator to fix the issues identified."

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