This meeting of the Housing, Community Safety and Community Engagement Scrutiny Commission primarily focused on reviewing cabinet responses to previous recommendations and planning the commission's future work. The commission agreed to send an interim report on tenant structures to the cabinet. Members also discussed potential topics for the next municipal year, including tenant management organisations, repairs, heating and hot water outages, leaseholder charging, anti-social behaviour, rough sleeping, homelessness, void properties, and the new allocations policy.

Interim Report on Tenant Structures Agreed

The commission agreed to send the Interim Report on Tenant Structures to the cabinet. The report contains recommendations made at the 25 November 2024 meeting, following discussions with residents and tenant organisations. Councillor Emily Tester, Vice-Chair of the Housing, Community Safety and Community Engagement Scrutiny Commission, drew attention to a briefing note from Abi Oguntokun, Director of Landlord Services, providing an update on the council’s work on the Draft Resident Involvement Strategy. The discussion then focused on whether expanding recommendations to include Tenant Management Organisations (TMOs) would be useful. It was decided that a more complete scope of what should be asked about TMOs and resident experiences was needed, and this was moved to the Work Programme as a suggested dedicated topic for next year.

Review of Cabinet Responses

The commission reviewed the cabinet's responses to their previous report, Review of Housing Allocations, Homelessness, and Heating & Hot Water Outages, Fire Safety and Policing in Southwark. Councillor Emily Tester explained that this was the final stage of the recommendation process, with no further formal responses from the commission to the cabinet possible. However, she said that the commission's comments could be noted and brought to the attention of relevant officers and cabinet members.

Specific points raised by the commission included:

• Recommendation 7 (Heating and hot water performance): The commission felt there may have been a misunderstanding in the cabinet response. The commission's original recommendation had advised probing discrepancies between residents' self-reported experiences of heating and hot water, and the performance indicated by centrally held data. The commission clarified that they were not proposing a resource-intensive, consultative exercise, but rather targeted work to understand and explain why this gap continues to exist. They also noted that while they welcomed the reimplementation of the Heat Networks Governance Board, its efficacy might be limited if the data it relies on does not agree with residents' data.
• Recommendation 9 (Heating and Hot Water outages – compensation scheme payments): The commission welcomed the work to digitise and clean the data, but added that efforts should also be made to confirm the validity of the data to be cleaned, i.e. that resident-reported heating and hot water performance data agree as far as possible with centrally held data.
• Recommendation 10 (Reviewing heating and hot water compensation payment scheme to include private tenants of council leasehold properties): The commission welcomed the cabinet member’s agreement with the recommendation’s objective that compensation be paid to those living in homes affected by the outages. They also recognised the legal and logistical challenges involved, given that homeowners are responsible for paying service charges and therefore are due any compensation. The commission suggested that the council, through its Liaison Boards or similar, might communicate to private renters who have had heating outages and who pay for hot water and heating in their rent that they could consider asking their landlords for refunds.

Work Programme 2024-2025

As this was the last meeting of the municipal year, discussion focused on suggesting potential topics for next year’s commission to take up and investigate. The updates and/or topics listed below are in addition to those given in the “Agenda Items yet to be scheduled” section of the Work Programme:

• Checking whether the proposed activities given by cabinet under “Post Decision Implementation” in its response to Recommendations 5 to 10 of the commission’s “Review of housing allocations, homelessness, and heating & hot water outages, fire safety and policing in Southwark” had been completed
• TMOs – scope the state of knowledge about them and their performance; explore their structures, financing, and accountability to residents and the council, as well as broader ways they work; review how the council supports TMOs; hear from residents about their experiences with TMOs
• Repairs – the commission would benefit from revisiting this and hearing on progress of the Repairs Improvement Plan
• Heating and Hot Water outages – getting an update on the status of work
• Leaseholder charging
• Anti-social Behaviour and Rough Sleeping
• Homelessness and Void Properties – the potential of the latter to help with challenges here
• New Allocations policy – (later in the year) review work here and see what a difference the new policy is having