Transcript

[INAUDIBLE] So we, I'm just running that online, so we are online. Thank you. [INAUDIBLE] Give me one minute, Roger, then let's start. I just want to put this into my script. [INAUDIBLE] Good evening, everyone, and welcome to this evening's housing exclusion subcommittee meeting. I'm Councillor Joe Drombo-Hormley, chair of the committee. This meeting is being recorded and it is being broadcast live. In the event that technical issues require the meeting to be adjourned and it cannot be restarted in a few minutes, further updates will be posted on the council's marketing Twitter account, which is @LBLdemocracy. Please note that the council is due to protect sensitive personal data to ensure such information is not inadvertently disclosed. Please avoid using full names or any other details that may reveal the identity of others. And for fire exits, exit the room from either door and then go upstairs to street level. And regarding toilets, there's an accessible toilet just outside the right hand side of the room from the public's view. In terms of apologies, apologies for absence have been received from Councillor Liam Daley and Councillor Nicole Griffiths. Thank you to Councillor Adrian Garden for stepping in for Councillor Liam Daley. And we've also had apologies from Councillor Danny Diffilore and Councillor David Brinson who are not here. We do have someone else from the cabinet team to speak tonight. And in terms of introductions, please can the housing security subcommittee members please introduce themselves.

• Hello, my name's Alison English Jones. I'm Labour Councillor for Clapham Common and Abbeville and I have no peculiar influence to declare.
• Hi, I'm Mariana Masters. I'm Councillor at Leeds districts of Wales and I have no pecuniary interest to declare.
• Hello, I'm Andrew Collins, Councillor for Clapham East and I've got no interest to declare.
• Councillor Adrian Garden, from Common Ward, no pecuniary interest to declare.
• Thank you. And Adrian, welcome to the committee. Next, we move on to the minutes of the previous meeting of the committee which was held on 16th of July. These are set out in agenda pack on pages one to 10. Democrat services have received amendments from Councillor Jackie Meldrum, which sort of largely regard comments that she made at the meeting. They sort of, I'm happy to accept the amendments which Roger, I believe in the updated pack. So do I have an agreement from colleagues?
• Yes.
• Fantastic. Thank you. Now, we move on to the first item of core business sites meeting, damp and mould policy, which is item three on the published agenda packs 11 to 20. We'll first hear from the deputy cabinet member for housing, investment and new homes. Councillor is here in person. You have up to five minutes to introduce the report.
• Thank you very much, Chair. This report provides an update on our efforts to address damp and mould issues since the last update to this committee in February. Dump and mould continues to be a significant concern for our residents and we're very committed to resolving these issues. Since January, our teams have completed nearly 550 inspections. We are working closely with residents for the task and finish group to refine our approach. While we progress has been made such as introduction of our new technology to predict and prevent damp and mould issues, it is clear that more needs to be done. We're not staying away. We are not shining away from the challenges in groups those raised by our residents regarding communication and follow up process. Our aim is to ensure all cases of damp and mould are treated effectively and within reasonable timeframe and that the feedback receives is vital in shaping our future approach. Thank you.
• Thank you very much. Well within time, that's it. We've had requests to speak by Councillor Jackie Noldrum, Manager in Plaquette and Pete Elliott. We've also had written statements submitted by Jason Munch and also by Benjamin Plaquette. Can I invite the first speaker?
• Well, I thought I was speaking to this one as well.
• Later item. You can speak on a later item.
• Yeah, sorry. Thank you. It's just I have a bit of issue at the box.
• Can I invite Councillor Jackie Noldrum to come up and speak? We've got maximum three minutes for speeches tonight. Please do not speak beyond because I will insist that you stop. We have lots of witnesses on all items tonight and it's very unfair on other witnesses if you go on. And furthermore, if we have any interruptions in the session more widely, I will pause the session and ask people to lead. So Jackie, when you're ready, your three minutes will begin.
• Good evening, everyone. I think anyone who's elected Councillor know how, and I think most people in housing staff also know how big a problem damper mould is. And I think when we look back over time, a lot of it is to, it's not the cause, but replacement windows have got a lot to do with the cause of damper mould because that stopped the map of the building. So I think that's what we're trying to do. I think that's what we're trying to do is I've got a lot to do with the cause of damper mould because that stopped the map of drafts in the property. So the properties used to be cold and drafty, but weren't quite so mouldy. Now they're less drafty, but they're mouldy. So the issue really is about ventilation. And of course, over time, because our social housing properties, I've got a lot more people living in them than everybody else's properties, which I think are in space for people to breathe out and so on. So it is a chronic condition. People, tenants get very fed up with the mould washes because they seem to get nothing but mould washes. So all these KPIs about mould washes, it's very useful, but it's not getting to the root cause. The root cause might be, and the root cause is probably mainly ventilation, poor ventilation. It might be leaks up, down the walls. It might be lack of insulation. And one of the things I've noticed recently is that roof insulation started to deteriorate because it was installed in the 1980s. It's got to be in tune with what they're old and tired and you have to put them in. Now the fluff has started to shrink and some of it's gone down really low and it's not working as roof insulation. But this is not part of the damper mould project. And I would suggest that the committee might want to ask that to put it into the programme. I would also suggest another important solution is look at the letterable standard. When a property is empty, it's a void property, the easiest time to do any repairs. There's nobody there. You don't have to make any appointments. Just get in there, make that property. That and all three went through all the ventilators working, put in thermo boards and all the output stools. And I think we've got a long way to preventing this damper mould, which is such a problem and causing so much ill health. Children, I've been asked the healthy, health and whatever it is they used to be, health and wellbeing boards, if they could map the distribution of asthma prescriptions on the borough, but they said they haven't got technology at the moment, but maybe they can now, because we're all getting very smart with computers. I would suspect a lot of concentration on our housing estate, sadly. One thing, sorry, I'll pass a piece of paper around, which is the lovely damp survey that is mentioned in the report, which I commend officers for doing, but I haven't managed to find anybody who's actually using that yet, but I think it's very admirable because it's room by room and nicely to understand English, so it's very good.
• Thank you very much, Jackie. Please, can we have our next witness, Benjamin Blackett. Benjamin here.
• Yeah, he's online.
• Online, okay, sorry.
• Hi, sorry, just getting used to team, sorry about that. Yes, I am a lease holder in a property that is managed by Lambeth Council and still, you know, parts of it are social housing, parts of it are private tenants like me. I don't live at the property. I have tenants there and I suppose my motivation for speaking here tonight is to express my immense frustration at the process of trying to rectify damp and mold in my flats. I try really hard to be a good landlord, a responsible landlord for my tenants, but I can only do so much. I'm not in control of damp and mold when the root problem is the flat roof above the property. You'll see from the written evidence that I have submitted that basically the main problem is that nobody at Lambeth ever wants to help with rectifying the situation. You'll call up and get sent from one department to another, to another, to another with basically everyone giving you very good reasons why they are not the people to help with this particular issue. Denials that there is anything wrong, suggestions that it's not the roof, that it's poor ventilation by the people who lived there, et cetera, et cetera. In the end, the neighbour above me who had the same problem ended up commissioning a private report, a private survey of the roof, which detailed a lot of defects that needed to be fixed. And we submitted that for evidence that cost him thousands of pounds. And to be honest, it wasn't until I contacted our local Councillor, Donna Harris, who I'm very grateful to, and it was her action sort of pushing it from within the bureaucracy of Lambeth Council that actually resulted in anything happening. In the end, Lambeth Council has reimbursed me 11 and a half thousand pounds for costs that I've incurred to make my flat safe for the people living there. And consequently made the repairs that were suggested in the private report that we commissioned and paid for. Obviously, I'm now glad that those repairs have been made, but as a taxpayer and as a person who pays the service charges, I am very frustrated that that wasn't just the first course of action because it's great you've reimbursed me for my costs and it's great that you've paid for those things, but what a waste of money. They should have just been fixed from the get go. I wish you all the best of luck, but really your whole internal process needs to be completely reviewed and there needs to be a massive change in the working culture that this is something that is A, taken seriously and B, is not just passed from political post. Thank you. - Thank you, Benjamin. Thank you. Thank you very much. And having been previously a tenant in a property managed by a landlord where there was damper mould in Lambeth, I have had similar experiences from the other side, but thank you for sharing your experience with us tonight. And finally, Pete Elliott. Maybe your three minutes will start when you begin.
• Thank you, Chair. Pete Elliott, Lambeth Green Party. President Scrutiny is not working in Lambeth and has not been so for a very long time, as was approved, especially at the overview and Scrutiny meeting on Tuesday, where none of our points were properly addressed, I felt. Officers and cabinet members are throwing our good money away with no improvements to show for it. Your contracts and contractors are failing because there seems to be zero control from Lambeth management. And this seems to have got worse over the 10 years that I have been scrutinizing the housing services in Lambeth. Successive cabinet members, I'm disappointed that the cabinet members are not here tonight, but housing and senior officers have let down their residence through not learning lessons and continuing with the same old failing service levels and service design. You're throwing our good money away with absolutely no improvements to show for it. You refuse to listen to residents who seem to understand the services far better than the professionals being paid to manage them. When you speak to the end contractors carrying out the work in residents' homes, they know that they are failing residents. The management at Lambeth is a joke. The following story is typical of so many experiences I have had in Lambeth with council tenants and moulds and leaks. I reported a leak from a bathroom ceiling in Gypsy Hill at the beginning of June. The resident had first reported the problems early in 2023. This leak, which must have been coming from the roof, had caused lots of damage to moulds in their homes. To date, no one has been around to properly identify the source of the leak, but the mould has been washed off on multiple occasions by mum and the council's new mould wash service. The mould is sure to come back because the root cause of the leak has not been investigated and addressed, and there seems to be no sense of urgency to do so. This particular home has probably caused asthma in her son, and the mould is making worse the existing extremely dangerous situation. Bressingham Gardens has had damage done to all of their roofs as we go to the shooting meeting, but this is just ignored. Roofing maintenance, if it ever happens, seems to create more issues, and repairs never seem to be completed thoroughly if they are ever finally attempted. The senior officers and cabinet member continue to accept such appalling mediocrity from their service providers. They appear to have no ambition to genuinely improve the life of residents whose rents pay their fat cat wages. There need to be some urgent changes, but I've been saying this for years. This mould process will continue to fail while bigger issues with the repair services go unaddressed.
• Okay, fantastic. And just before we turn to members' questions, I will just flag that the issues with the damages to the roof in Crestham Gardens was indeed discussed over the shooting on Tuesday. One of our recommendations was to commission a specific report from officers on that, which will come back to this committee. So we will have that in due course, because, yeah, there were some quite serious issues that were raised on Tuesday. So I will turn to my colleagues for questions. Who would like to go first? Okay. I read the report, and I listened to the comments. Now, the report goes that the processes and procedures are improving dramatically. I was at an action, day of action, and saw some of the new technologies they're proposing. Everything is improving step by step, and this shows that. And then I listened to this lot, and I hear the same that I've been hearing year after year after year, almost identically. There's a dichotomy between how we establish our process. Shouldn't it be a question? I suppose it would be a question mark at the end of it. There's a dichotomy between what would the work you do on establishing best practice processes and procedures and incorporating new technology, and people on the ground doing stuff. It seems that people on the ground doing stuff who are often contractors, but not necessarily, are not doing the job properly. So what seems to be lacking, and I think Peter mentioned that, I think everyone mentioned as well, management. There seems to be sort of the personnel management of the people doing stuff seems to be what's lacking. We're not bridging the gap between what people should be doing and how they're doing it.
• And I would sort of just like to add to that question before we go to officers, is if we look at point 2.12 of the reports, which is looking at kind of attractive performance, we don't seem to have any KPIs around, does the mould return? Do we monitor the kind of sustainability of solutions? And if not, could that be something that happens going forward? 'Cause we've heard it time and time again, it gets resolved in six months later, it comes back, and actually that isn't a long-term solution. So yeah, open to officers.
• I can take it, and I might ask colleagues to come in as well. I think we are very concerned about the damper mould issue. I think that as Councillor Meldrum outlined, I think we would reflect, it's positive to hear you reflect that we are seeing change, you're seeing improvement in the processes, the procedures. And I think we have been clear, we are on an improvement journey in housing. Damper mould is not a new issue, but I think speed at which we're responding to it means we're having to catch up and respond to it as a new issue. It's certainly being reported far more and ever increasing. And so we're having to very much catch up with the kind of volume of damper mould cases. Absolutely reflect that there are cases where residents are coming and saying, It hasn't worked. It hasn't worked in my case." I think it has worked in lots of cases. I think we obviously don't see and hear from that as much. Where we do really struggle, and I know officers around the table will reflect, is what we are seeing, is where we have roofing, which is interesting, that's what we've heard tonight. Roofing issues, water ingress, leaks, structural damage. So that is where we do struggle, I think. We can acknowledge that. It's not that we can do the mould wash, we can do the surveying. We're often treating that and it's coming back and we're having to investigate again. We're obviously trying to link this into our major works. We did a stock condition survey last year, the first in a while. We are now finalising our asset management strategy and we've been talking today about how damper mould will be. We expect one of the priorities in which we prioritize major works, because what we're seeing here is buildings that need major structural investment. That's what's causing these problems time and time again. So I suppose it's just that assurance that we know that we haven't got this totally right, that it is a journey. If I can hand over on the technology question, if that's okay, Chair, perhaps to Barry and Tim, I don't know if he wants to come in on that.
• Yeah, sure. Yeah, in relation to the technology, we're piloting some home sensors.
• Sorry, could you just speak up a bit more?
• Yeah, so in relation to the technology point, we've got some pilots of home sensors with trialling our car garden. So, you know, another tool in our toolbox to try and remedy and monitor issues where there have been damper mould cases who had a severe case. We'd look to put home sensors in so we can then check that those conditions aren't arising again, so we can monitor that more effectively. But there are also other solutions, better extractors, improved ventilation. So these are all open to our surveyors when they go out and inspect a home to specify those particular interventions to get to the root cause of the problem. As Sir Meldrum mentioned, the Healthy Homes Action Plan. When our surveyors do go out and inspect a home, they'll produce one of those action plans and that will have timelines against all the interventions we're making, exactly what we're doing. So, you know, those have been rolled out this year. I hear the point about everyone perceiving them, so that's another action that we've got in terms of doing regular case reviews so we can pick up, but that's not happening. Alison?
• Thank you, Sir. I'm really grateful for your response. What do I say to residents? What do you suggest I say to residents? I've got probably about 10 pieces of casework at the moment where it's damp and mould and I know that major works are needed. What can I say to residents to reassure them that help is on the way? But what's the timeline? What's the process?
• Yeah.
• Oh, if help isn't on the way, then it's unseen. Please be honest with them because I think what we've heard particularly from our witness online is just not being sort of given the frank truth about that.
• And it's constant washes and I know, I mean, I'm not a surveyor, but I recognise that as you flagged, there are structural issues. What do I say to them?
• Yeah, I agree. So I can always go backwards a little bit and I think you're right, Sharon. I wanted to address Mr. Packett's statement and I think less about the damp and mould and more about this kind of toing and froing and us not, the senior management team and our office is not picking up the right first time. And again, we think this is something that we're improving on, but we are still seeing too many cases like this where people aren't getting the right response first time. Not familiar with Mr. Packett's case, so we will take that away. We can take that as an action to review it and respond within an adequate time period.
• I think in terms of what you say around major works, this is a difficult question because what we know from our stock conditions survey is that the investment that is needed in our stock is extensive and it is beyond our means. And that is the reality. We wish that wasn't the case. As a council, we would like sufficient funds to do dedicated, holistic major works on every single straight property, every single block, every single estate. That's what we would like to do. That isn't going to happen, we will know that. So I suppose the short answer is, if you could hold on a little bit more time because we are planning, Andy may want to come in, I don't know, as I said, our asset management strategy is very near to being finalised. We will bring it to scrutiny. We are, as I said, going to be looking at, we are going to have to prioritise. And we will be prioritising based on condition. And as I said, Damkham Road will be one of those real driving factors. And we will set out to the public, this is the highest priority estate because there's the most need. And this is the lowest priority estate because it is the least need in terms of condition. We know that will be really difficult for residents because they may feel that there is need and they may be right, but it may be that there is higher priority needs in terms of condition. But we will be able to share that information. So that will be the answer to residents. This is when it's coming. This is where it is on the list, I suppose. Or it isn't, we would like to do everything we are having to prioritise, which I know is difficult.
• Yeah, I first want to say as a Councillor, proud Lambeth Councillor, this is a London-wide problem. And I just, regardless of it being political to and fro, every single council, whether of any colour, is dealing with this. But on the other side, equally, it's the biggest part of my job to get. All of these complaints, some of which are really, really frustrating because reading the new plan, that's fantastic. That's how it's academic. It's how it should work. And I hope that actually what we do is have a sort of tracking system for how we're getting closer to the ideal. Right now, we have cases that, for as long as I've been a Councillor, five, six years, I've had some cases that are almost through the whole time. And suddenly somebody's touched on a wash, a mould wash. Like that's the answer. It's been noted from Councillor Meldrum, Councillor Garden, lots of people that, we have structural problems with our roofs. This time of year, it's absolutely, it's the worst case scenario with leafs, block drains. I've got sacral estate in my ward. And I can guarantee that the mould's going to get so much worse in the next few weeks. Interesting that Albert Carr Gardens, which again, used to be in my ward, there's a child there who's developed a skin irritation because of the mould. And it's just horrific. Really, I can't even begin to stress how horrific it is. And then there's another thing that I need to bring in, in that, I'm sorry you have to do your job, but the culture is just not caught up with the ambition, the culture, the blaming culture. Given that a lot of our residents, English is not their first language, they're culturally, we are diverse, we celebrate our diversity, but the minute something goes wrong, it's almost that we look down on people that are our clients, our customers. I think it's really disgraceful and it needs to stop. We also need to be really more vigilant about our contractors. So I would ask, and I've been through the responsible procurement system, but again, what are we doing once we've got these contracts in place to actually enforce them and to actually, is it that, and I've got cases and we've all got cases of somebody who will go in and they've had somebody call in from a call center, I know that's another piece, but telling what's wrong and somebody will turn up, knowing what's wrong with the wrong parts. People are working, not everybody that lives in an estate is on benefits and doesn't work. People take time off. And they stay and they wait for somebody if they turn up with the wrong parts. It's absolutely unforgivable. So I want these things to be embedded and tracked and KPIs against these things, cultural change, engagement. We shouldn't have 61 respondents for the whole of Lambeth. We should 10 times as much, all of that. So I've got lots more, but I'll shut up.
• Yes, if someone wants to come in briefly. We are obviously going to go on to other items which we show in the lap there. If someone wants to come in briefly.
• Just to respond to what you said, Councillor Marceau, I think we hear what you're saying. We absolutely recognise what you're describing. And we are also very constrained by the resource, the position we're in, but we have to be absolutely transparent on how we communicate back to our tenants, where we're at. And where things aren't working on the ground and where that's a result of, whether it's a contract going in or our staff, we need to know and hear that feedback and we need to respond to it appropriately because we expect our staff to be able to work with the tenants that we have and work on our estates in such a way that that works better. So those things we can improve on and we absolutely will take those on board and part of our improvement journey is the culture of the way staff work and the way that those teams work on the ground. But we do, we really rely on the input as well from our councillors and our board councillors particularly know these stakes incredibly well. We know that you're in contact with our tenants and we hear what you say. And so when we're out and about in those stakes as well, making sure that we're working together to try and be honest, but actually really work out the things that we can address that you don't cost money, being kind to people doesn't stop being honest with people doesn't cost anything. And just acknowledging that this is really difficult. We know a lot of our tenants are overcrowded, all of those things, none of those things we're going to be able to fix or acknowledge. But I think being realistic and I guess having some hope that we together can make it better is the place we want to put ourselves and we're on a journey to do that.
• Thank you, and before we conclude this session, I just want to add one more recommendation if my (indistinct) which is given that we've touched on major works, we'll obviously be looking at this in much more detail in January. When we finally have this clear timeline of the way forward on estate regeneration, I would like to see a piece of work in place to support those who are in a position to fund repairs themselves for the council to support them to do so. The amount of casework I get from people, for example, who want to replace their windows and can't do it because of particular rules in place. And then the only thing we can say is, well, you know, you might get major work soon, you might not, we can't do anything. If we know that the major works are going to happen in this estate in 12 years time, I want someone, if they want to self fund their windows repairs next year to be supported by the council to do so. And I'd like to put as a recommendation that when we revisit major works in January, we have a proposal in place around this. Fantastic.
• Brilliant. - Not just major works.
• Not just major works.
• 'Cause it has actually, that's a really good point because it actually has been that tenants have waited and had so many visits that they've independently then got quotes for something. And I've helped them be able to, you know, for the council to then come back and say, well, this would cost X amount and then go ahead and do that and be reimbursed for the work that's been needed to be done. Which actually, right from the beginning, there should be almost a bit of honesty in terms of we're never going to fulfil everybody's repairs. We just, we need an influx of money that we just don't have. And instead of letting a problem fester for years and years and years, it might be almost better to just price it out to see, are we able to get it done and get it done quickly? Bear in mind that there are still consequences of mental health and so many different parts to this.
• Often this is the case that people are perfectly willing to self-fund it.
• They will say, I need this fixed and I know this is going to cost this much, can the council help? And it might be quicker and easier for us to do that. And I would also take issue with a point about looking through the estates and seeing which one, prioritising according to probably age and deterioration, because actually we could find ourselves in situations where we have young children affected, elderly affected, because, you know, it's a sort of, I've got respiratory problems, for example. And in every other way, I'm healthy. However, I've got that weak spot. I could be living somewhere that you deem to be not in your top 10. However, the unintended consequences of me living with damp means that my lungs could collapse. So, and that happens with children. And so I do think that, and I think Jackie touched on it, that we don't have any tracking of, you know, it just takes a survey. It takes us to really engage with our estates, but to understand the long-term medical conditions. People living with sickle cell, people, you know, and we have disproportionate amounts in our borough. People living with respiratory illness, people recovering from cancer. These are, yeah, sorry, I could take the whole meeting.
• Fantastic, thank you. I'm just going to wrap up with recommendations 'cause I'm aware we've got a long way to go in tonight. And I think we have one recommendation around doing repairs on vacant void properties when they're found to do those kind of long-term repairs there and then. And we had another recommendation around explore whether, you know, we have the technology available to kind of track residents' health against the stock conditions and the mold and damp conditions of properties. We have a recommendation from myself about can we do KPIs on the kind of sustainability of solutions found, which we don't currently have. We have sort of a recommendation from Marianna around the treatment of residents and sort of stronger, sort of better communication and treatment of residents, improving the culture. I'm not sure, Alison, do you have a sort of a recommendation about sort of communication broadly?
• The only thing I was thinking about was the process, sorry, sorry. The aim of the group, the Damp Mould Past and Finish group. So I wouldn't mind knowing, having a better timeline on finishing.
• Okay, providing a place in time.
• I would also like to understand within this, I think in order to be able to help us, how many times does one issue, how many times do we have to go back to resolve one issue?
• Yeah, exactly, yeah, absolutely. And then finally, my recommendation about ahead of the kind of the stock condition survey being completed and repairs prioritised, what we can do to support those who want to self fund repairs to do so, fantastic. Okay, well then I will move on to our next agenda item, which is the call centre and customer services, which has obviously overlapped slightly with what we've discussed already. This is item four in the published agenda pack, pages one to 54. We'll hear first again from our deputy cabinet member for housing, investment and new homes. And you again have up to five minutes to introduce the report.
• I'll try to limit as much as I can, obviously, as we have dominated the agenda. The reports on the call centre and housing repairs focuses on a vital role to the contact centre placed in delivering our housing repair services. Outlines how the call centre has been instrumental in diagnosing and prioritising repairs, ensuring that residents issues are addressed swiftly and correctly. The report highlights several key improvements since April, including significant increase in the number of jobs pointed by the contact centre and more accurate diagnose of repair priorities. These improvements have been essential in reducing wait times and ensuring better coordination with contractors. That said, we recognise that there are still areas where we need to improve, but particularly in ensuring that work in progress level are kept manageable and communication with residents is clear and consistent. I understand that some of the witness today may have concern about specific cases. And I look forward to hearing their feedback as we continue to refine our approach service delivery. Thank you, Chair.
• Thank you very much. Okay, moving on to witnesses. We have requested to speak from Councillor Jackie Meldrum, Thomas Gray, Eleanor Leon, Kirsty Oliveira and Pete Elliott. We also have a written statement submitted by Eleanor Leon. So I would invite witnesses to speak. First of all, Councillor Jackie Meldrum. And again, Jackie, you have three minutes from when you begin.
• Your body. It's good to hear some plain speaking here almost about the need to get the basics right. But my concern is that while we're getting the basics right, we're focusing on the organisation. We're not focusing on the customer. And as the Councillor said, the customer's voice is not being heard. Remarkable, that's a dampened bowl survey. Only three people bothered to come and talk about it. That's extraordinary. And then even ringing up, you could only get eight. Well, it's the top issue anyway. It's a whole, I think, so what I really want to say, the main thing here is about the culture of customer care. And this idea that you can find your housing officer and report a repair to them. Has anybody ever heard of that happening? I've never heard of that. I mean, people always want to try and get hold of their housing officer, it's not possible. So I think the customer centre, I tried ringing them today to try and find out a repair. 20 minutes wait, they told me. Quite a long time to wait. And the problem is if you ring after three o'clock, the caller centre cannot get through to the contractor. If the caller centre cannot get through to the contractor, they cannot make an appointment. So the only time you can ring up is nine till four. Of course the contractor started at eight in the morning. So there's a dissonance there, but I have heard that putting the contractor scheduling team together with our repairs team is working well. And I can admit it, that's fine. (indistinct) But we really need to get this customer focus here. And a lot of our tenants have not got laptops. They, when they're online, if they're online, they've got a phone. How long do you think it's going to take to read this 54 page manual on a phone? Not possible. They don't have laptops. They don't have a nice big screen. They don't have two screens. They're lucky to have a phone, an online phone, that's got a child on it. So I think we've really got to have these other channels and I'll keep getting told about people coming on to the civic centre where they get turned away. Maybe they weren't presenting their case well, but anyway, they get turned away. And the phone system, lots of older people find the robot phones really, really, really difficult. Press this one, press that. It can't even press properly. The processing skills are not like ours because we do it all the time. So there's all sorts of issues there. What they really want is face to face. And what we really need, I think, is to go back to those area offices. Only the people who can't communicate are going to bother to queue up, spend all the time travelling to an area office and doing something. Anybody with any capacity will go online. Obviously it's a sensible thing to do, but there's a lot of limitations on that online thing. You can't talk back. It gives you an appointment. You can't do anything else with it. And the other major lack of all this is that the only people the system will talk to is the tenant or release holder. So we heard from, was it Adrian? He's got private tenants. They can't report anything. Reholders, they can't report anything. Neighbours, they can't report anything. And counsellors, we can't report anything to the system. We have to do MEs. So I would recommend that we really up our gateway into the repair service to allow all these people to go online, because most of them prefer to go online. Some of them need this extra help by doing something different.
• Thank you, Jackie. Okay, next we have Thomas Gray.
• Good evening and thank you for having me. My name's Thomas Gray and I'm a lease holder from Liam Court Estate in Stratford Hill and a member of a group of tenants and lease holders who've struggled with council repairs. Many residents, especially the council tenants, are living with damp, mould, drafty windows, leaking roofs and walls, dangerous standards of living, think exposed wiring, and vulnerable residents without flushing toilets. These issues are made worse at times by the council's siloed, dysfunctional approach to customer services. Residents are resorting to legal, action or ombudsman complaints. The key problems from our side seem to be, number one, urgency. People are waiting months or years for basic triaging work to be done. A typical case may involve multiple calls, only to be told, back office haven't updated the notes, we don't have a response from waits, notes are unclear, the work's been sent out, no fair timeline, and so on. Each call leads to another 10 plus days of SLA waiting and easily stretches into months or years. There are plenty of good examples in private industry where customer reps will pick up and own a problem and see it through to resolution. We need service reps with cross departmental knowledge who can push cases forward and don't just transfer us across, leaving us to fall in the cracks between teams. Number two, accountability. The council risks becoming a bit of an accountability thing. Instructions can be confusing, not joined up, and many of us are passed from one team to another. We're told to wait for the back office or waits or a subcontractor or somebody will reach out, but often we've got to piece it all together ourselves. Even our councillors are struggling to get proper answers to simple questions like, when will the repair works get done? What hope has your average resident got? We or our councillors need named, accountable persons who can help pull together those silos and drive forward individual cases. Number three, efficiency. Residents will spend hours on the phone with service reps while they navigate various systems looking for updates and notes. Frustrating for residents, I'm sure very expensive for the council. From what we gather, internal teams and contractors are working on different systems, interwoven by point to point emails, often not at a good level of detail, and the online portal is fraught with bugs with people who's always having to pull. Fractured nature of the process, as well as the number of people involved, these details are lost between the customer and the ultimate subcontractor. We regularly see scaffolding go up, come down, only to go straight back up again for another repair to the same structure with com pull. It's inefficient and I'm sure hugely expensive. Fourth and final product of comms and transparency. Many residents you speak to will talk about contractors arriving unannounced or not arriving at all. They'll talk about struggling to get clear updates in simple language. One resident even set a service rep admitted, all contractor repairs tickets were closed when the council stopped using that vendor and new tickets weren't opened. Meaning you potentially have people sitting there waiting for repairs that aren't even raised. With modern IT systems and proper service design, it's perfectly possible to ensure people get simple, clear, proactive communication on the status of their work. In summary, we all know there are huge pressures, financial and otherwise, but you can make things better. We need more internal council processes, more efficient use of your resources, and we need you to look at slogan in the foyer that we hold ourselves accountable and we get the basics right. Thank you very much for your time.
• Thank you. Perfectly at three minutes. Thank you very much. Next up we have Eleanor.
• Hello, thank you. I agree with a lot of what's already been said. So I won't go over that too much. And I think some of what I have to say will link to something later on, which is about the repair itself. But what I'd like to talk about is the process that I've gone through. Because the leak that we're dealing with ongoing now for three weeks, hasn't been repaired, is from my neighbour's flat upstairs. I've been told repeatedly when I call that I'm not entitled to information pertaining to this request because I live at a different address. And this is just by having called and told them the effects it's having. It's coming through my ceiling, down the walls, in the cupboards. It's now progressed, because it's been so long, through the light fitting. It's a hazard. I'm worried very much about fire risk, et cetera. But to not be able to get information on what's being done because I don't live at the address where the repair originates is, I think, a huge problem and something that needs to be reviewed. I try to get information, and when I do manage to get it, it's always second-hand information, as has been already mentioned, from weight. So you're on hold for 20 minutes to get through to Lambeth repairs. Then you're on hold again while they try to contact weights. Initially, the issue escalated because they couldn't get through to weights. So something that was an emergency that was then designated not an emergency because they said it couldn't be fixed in two hours. So I've got a question about why are the priorities off of what's actually considered an emergency and what isn't. I had explained to me that if it can't be fixed within two hours, it stops being an emergency, and then it's basically just a normal repair. The only thing that you can do when you call the emergency line on the weekend is have your property made safe. So by that, they meant isolating the electricity in my kitchen, which I could have had done immediately, or I was told to wait and call them back if my socket started fizzing or smoke started appearing in my kitchen because of water coming down through the electronics, which just seemed pretty wild to me that they would suggest something like that. In addition, there seems to be this 24-hour delay that they speak about. So even if you get different information via my neighbour to say, oh, they're coming tomorrow, what have you, when I call up to find out if that's true, they can't tell me because they say, they're constantly saying it takes time to update, we can't see it yet, and there's all these different reasons why. I started a complaint about all of this. I went through to the early resolutions team on calling back after waiting the requisite amount of days. I was told that it had to be, it'd been referred back to them again because it was not pertaining to my address. Apparently the person who took the complaint from me on the phone wrote, please escalate complaint, and what they should have written was, please look into complaint. Well, that's fine, but that's got nothing to do with me. I don't understand why my complaint then had to be resubmitted. So I had to wait again. I called them today again to check, to see where I was in the complaints procedure. And again, they told me I can't make a complaint because it has nothing, it's not my address.
• Thank you.
• So I've had to start again.
• Thank you, thank you. And I'm very sorry, I think one recommendation that I would jump to immediately is, let's ask someone to look into this case specifically. Fantastic, thank you. Thank you, Eleanor. Next up, we've got Kirsty. Not sure if Kirsty is online as well, fantastic. Kirsty, your three minutes will begin when you're done.
• Thank you, hi, yeah, I'm Kirsty. I'm a Lambeth tenant. I'm also the manager of a community hall in Lambeth. And I'm also in part of a campaign group called Lambeth Tenant Tea Campaign. We're fighting against the extortionate price rises that Lambeth put on estates with heat networks. So I speak to a lot of people. I represent not only myself, but a lot of people in the estate who are struggling. I've got lots to say about the call centre. I want to start with the rents team. We've had, I've had a lot of contact with the rents team on my behalf and other people's behalfs because of this, our price went up. Our heating and hot water charge has been up by 393% last year. So obviously a lot of people went into arrear. We've had many meetings. We've been fighting this for a long, long time. When people have called the rents team, the majority of, I've had a few nice people, a few sympathetic people, but the majority of people you speak to in the rents team are very unsympathetic. Oh, well, you've just got to pay it. Well, you're this much in arrears, you just got to pay it. I was told, having met with the rents team manager, we were told they'd been retrained. Of course, they shouldn't say that. That doesn't seem to have happened. That was last year because you still have, you still like bang your head against a brick wall. They're just horrible. They just don't care that you can't afford to pay this money. You know, how am I supposed to find an extra 60 quid a week out of nowhere? And I've just become eligible lately to refer people as part of the whole manager job, to refer people for fuel vouchers. Now, this is something that Lambeth can refer people for. And it's been going on nearly a year, this scheme. Nobody knows about, nobody on my estate who's having the problems with this know about this. Lambeth hasn't referred anybody. Why, when all these people were phoning up with problems, with not being able to pay their rent, why did people not say, oh, let me refer you for a fuel voucher? It's a simple, very, very simple process. And I've referred two people already. It's very easy. Nobody referred that. So I'm really not happy about how the rents team speaks to people. The call centre regarding repairs, there seems to be no communication. And I'll give you an example. I've got a job, a very simple job, I think, in the hall. I'm on the phone to them all the time for jobs raised for the hall. Very simple job to do with my tap in the kitchen. It's a couple of months ago I reported this. I've had four different, well, three so far, different contractors come. They sent me Fortham, Fortham said it wasn't their job. They sent T. Brown. T. Brown came on three different occasions for some unknown reason. And then they said, oh yeah, we'll phone up and sort it out. And then I phoned Lambeth and I said, what's going on? And they said, oh, it's not T. Brown's job. Well, I could have told you that in the first place. So they referred it to Waits. Waits turned up. Oh no, Waits didn't turn up. I waited for a whole afternoon waiting for them to turn up. They never turned up. And then when I phoned up to say, what's going on? They said, oh, we've passed it over to Community Works. So now I'm going to wait and see if Community Works wants to turn up. Four different people. What a waste of time. What a waste of my time, Lambeth's time. Why did the call center not know who to raise the job to in the first place? I do not understand that. It's shocking.
• Thank you, Kirsty, thank you for everything. Thank you very much. And finally, we have Pete Elliott.
• Thank you, chair, Pete Elliott, Lambeth Green Party. Even if the performance of Lambeth call center was spot on, which it certainly isn't, then it will never satisfy residents as there are so many other service failings. The housing repairs and maintenance service needs a service designer to carry out a complete rework on it. If an IT services designer and someone who regularly listens to residents and their Lambeth housing woes, I can see where and how improvements could be made. I also know that it is highly unlikely that in Lambeth, the changes needed will ever be made and cabinet members and officers will continue to spin the great work that they are doing. The call center in my view should be a service desk and the single point of contact for residents with all contractors aligned with it. The reality though is very far from that as residents end up dealing with all the subcontractors individually. So no one is in control of the work that is happening on homes, especially in situations where more than one separate subcontractor attends, you can guarantee that there will be no logic applied to complete the work in a sensible sequence. Reports I hear from residents are that call center operatives can appear disinterested and rude. And although there are priorities assigned to work, target times seem to be routinely missed with contractors not having the right equipment or with the wrong work ticket or not turning up at all. Just this Tuesday, I was at a resident's home expecting a surveyor and disrepair manager to turn up, but that did not happen. In the private sector, this would not be tolerated, but at Lambeth Council, which has little or no control over budgets or service standards it seems, this management, this mismanagement and inefficiency is normal. I'm not sure what the contact center does with its data or how that data is turned into service improvements, but I know that far more could be done. Paragraph 2.9, headed repairs improvements. It does mention process, but with absolutely no explanation. I would like to see the word process expanded into service design with a lot more meat on it as to how service improvements will be achieved and what the end-to-end housing repair service should and could look like. What residents have articulated this evening is all real. I have been raising all of these same issues for the last 10 years. When will the council start learning from their failings and from the experiences of residents? Lambeth has spent around 600 million on refurbishing homes to the Lambeth housing standard over the last 10 years. It has borrowed a further 590 million pounds since January, 2019. And yet there are still many homes that have not been refurbished to the Lambeth housing standard. With that scale of spend, the housing department could have done an audit for the climate emergency and refurbished and retrofitted all council-owned homes and many more. It's well overdue time for change at Lambeth council. And I hope that come May, 2026, residents see the failing labor council for what it is and votes them out. Thank you.
• Thank you. Okay, moving on to questions from the committee. Who wants to go first? Marianna and then Alison, and then Andrew.
• Yes, again, I mean, this piece goes into, it overlaps with the last. So I would challenge that the, again, the cultural training call centre, I would say has improved quite a lot in the last year. But I like, and I do sense, 'cause I have had to make calls on behalf of people. So I've literally heard people being quite polite, but from frustration of not being able to track down contractors that are assigned to a job and increasingly getting annoyed people, like myself and tenants, they lose their rag. I think that we constantly need to be training our staff on how to manage really stressful. It's a stressful job, I appreciate that. Sometimes it's not helped. And then the connectivity, again, it's a structural problem. How are we tracking? We have people that are answering and helping as best they can, but if they're not able to find a contractor, to find out, to go to source, and it seems like we are spending a lot of time, the paper is, if your paper worked, it would be fantastic. We would still not solve everything because we don't have the money to, but the experience would be so much better. So the basics, let's try and build on how do we connect with our contractors? How are we, let's put in a KPI of how responsive they are to us tracking them down because so many times, a call centre person that I get that is actually on site will try up to three times. You're on the phone for over an hour, trying to get hold of X, Y, and Z, trying to, from different sources and still not find out. So let's try and do that and let's have a measurement for how, and let's also, I don't want another layer of bureaucracy, but accountability with our contracts. Let's not just squeeze all our, through a procurement process and go straight to the bottom and then that's it. Let's hold our contracts. Let's have somebody that's actually going through that who also is tasked with satisfaction surveys, but not just by like a handful of people. Let's build, let's, you know, let's have a minimum of how many we're engaging with because it seems to me that's awful. And yeah, and also the surgery aspect. Let's try and ramp up what we do actually in community halls. A lot of our estates have community halls. Let's do that. I know that we have area and it does happen, but not, if it can happen on a regular, but even on a quarterly basis, it would be good. And you know, some of the, and I know some of the area offices, the one by Albert Carr Gardens wasn't fit for purpose 'cause where the staff worked, they had an infestation of ants and all kinds of things. So poor staff were having to deal with problems as well. And also again, we really need to have an overarching policy of looking at tracking our long-term medical conditions in our state because, you know, it's not just the case of somebody's elderly and they're vulnerable. We need to actually understand who's there. I've been to places where people have been on oxygen and they've been surrounded by damp that's looked like fire damage. It's been that bad. And also has been touched on as well, trees. Lots of people call up this time of year, buttering, and they're trying to ask what's happening. There's tree against their door, their window. They've got very poor lights. They've got damp that's coming through. They can see what the problem is. We now have a policy of, no, this is not our responsibility, but we have tenants who have not planted trees. We have planted trees to make our estates look nice. And I'm talking specifically of Valley Road Estates where you actually have trees up to windows. So with tenants, not leaseholders. So I understand with leaseholders, it's not our responsibility, but can we have a one-off event where we actually do some tree maintenance for both leaseholders and, 'cause you can't just say, well, your house is leaseholder. Just do it once, and then write to everybody and say, this is what we need to do going forward. So yeah, again, I could be here all night.
• Thank you very much, Alison.
• Sorry. - Thank you. So what happens when, what I suggest to my residents on Oaklands, which I'm going to get put on the digital signs, which are very helpfully on there. I'm going to say to, I do say to them, but I'm going to get it put on the digital signs. I say, call the call centre if you've got a problem, get a reference, call me, I will escalate it. We have a fantastic housing officer who I'm probably not allowed to name, but he is incredible. And then I escalate it with him and we get it done. It's absolutely, it works seamlessly, but it works seamlessly because I'm available 24/7. And I don't need, I only run the food bank, so I don't need to, so that is why it works for me. However, my concern is with the second, as the second witness flagged, there is not a seamlessness if councillors who have full-time jobs aren't necessarily available. And the only way it works in Cap-and-Cormor-Nurville is because I constantly make myself available and escalate absolutely everything. So the seamlessness, which is drastically needed. Also, secondly, my other question is, what constitutes an escalation? Because I escalate stuff, which job, I get a job reference, it's not solved, I then escalate it. And I can't understand why it's not escalated in the first place, but I'd like an answer to the questions raised by the second witness as well.
• Yeah. - Okay.
• Thank you. - Someone to come in on that?
• Yes, I will. There's quite a lot, if I go over everything, let me know.
• Haven't gone through all of it yet.
• I'm gonna repeat, sort of repeat it back and hand stuff over. If we do miss anything, please let me know. So I think there was some there about the call centre and the operation of the call centre. Natasha Paterson, director who oversees the capital contractors online. So I'm hoping she might come in and want to talk to some of that. I think there's a really interesting piece here. And obviously the paper reflects our link between the call centre and our contractors. I think a lot has come up there, which we are talking about a lot, which is that seamlessness of connections. And I think we're aware, it is not always seamlessly connecting. We see that in the cases and the witnesses speaking today. We see that in the escalations. We receive an incomplete. And I think it's really interesting, Councillor Masterson reflected that if this paper is reflecting truth 100% of the time, then it is the case. That's where we're working to get to. I think it does reflect it often. And we're seeing that and trying to oversee that and check that that's happening. We know it's not happening all the time. So I think I might ask Barry Montgomery, maybe Tim to come in on some of the work that's happening around that connection. I think it's interesting some of the things that have been raised about the call centre's ability to link in with the contractor, which we will pick up and take away because some of that you need to pick up. There was a point about accountability in holding our contractors to account. That is absolutely something that we have identified as a weak area for us. And we have put a lot in place over the last 12 months in that area. We have had some changes around contractors and we've had to deal with that first. And our relationship is very much growing with our contractors, as well as our more formal oversight. And I think one of the witnesses mentioned about we're now co-locating. So our contractors are sitting with us in the civic centre. And that is both relationship building as well as oversight and accountability. Again, colleagues, we want to come in on that. Councillor Marce says the point about vulnerability, more medical condition. So I'm going to ask Tim to come in on that. We've actually started that piece of work where we are essentially doing a vulnerability audit across all our 23,000 tenants. It's a five-year programme. There are 23,000 tenants. It's going to take time. But essentially it is identifying that kind of information from each of our tenants, where we often have information from the day that they signed up for the tenancy. And actually capturing up-to-date information so that we can do some of this work around damp and mould and respiratory condition and what's being aware of those things when a call is made. So if I can ask you to come in on that in a second. And I think the final point is around face-to-face. It's really good to hear that reflection about housing, obviously. It's brilliant, I'll be happy about that. We know that's not always the case. We were disappointed to hear that.
• You moved to Wells. - No.
• But also take the point about it can't rely on a counsellor in that connection. So I think it's all I can do at this stage is take that away.
• We love talking about a lot as a team. And I think Councillor Meldrum mentioned this. There is something about, we're making a lot of progress around digital and technology and a lot of that is going to streamline a lot of things that will make things a lot quicker and a lot more efficient, but for a lot of our tenants. Listen, we know it's not going to work for everybody. And what we also know really works is having a named housing officer on the ground that knows their tenants and tenants know them. And we will be moving in the next 12 months really getting to grips with what is our on the ground offer? Where is it working? Where is it not working? What's the difference and how can we improve it? Because when it comes to repairs, actually it is that bit that is the key. It's not the call center connecting to a system, connecting to it's that bit. And housing officers having the ability and the empowerment and the system to be able to escalate that without Alison's involvement. Sorry, bit of an overview and in no particular order, should I just start Natasha? Are you able to come in on the call center points?
• Yes, I'm just coming in. I apologize, I had a major dental procedure done today. So if I sound weird, that's the reason. So on the call center, I'm not going to take too much of your time 'cause we've obviously gone over these points in quite a few of these scrutiny meetings. So all I'm going to say, 30th of October, we're taking the paper to informal cabinet on the recommendations around the end of capital contract. So the capital contract ends end of November, 2026. Once the cabinets agreed recommendations or made a decision, you know, we have committed in the last scrutiny committee that we will provide an update here as well. But irrespective of that, at the end of, at that point in 2026, we either have to bring the servicing house or do something else 'cause that capital contract does not allow for any more extensions. But what we need to do irrespective of that decision over the next two years is precisely what some of the witnesses and some of the counselors have been saying around the services line, around service improvement, around investments in technology. We absolutely have to transform the customer journey. We absolutely have to leverage technology that we have and bring in the new emerging technologies in order to improve that experience, which would then compliment the work that the housing colleagues are obviously doing in the contractor space and the repair space. So I think I, as a Chief Digital Officer, absolutely acknowledge that the way the service is delivered and has been delivered for a while is become outdated. We housing colleagues and my teams are well aware of that and work really well in that space. So at the moment, the current performance, we try to manage it robustly. We try to maintain it. There isn't a lot of investment coming from capital, obviously due to the contract end. However, we are still pushing for pockets of it wherever we can through the contract in terms of the, as Councilor Meldrum has mentioned, the outdated telephony system, which we are looking to hopefully replace over the next 12 months and the pockets where we can. So we do learnings from the complaints and from the customer feedback through the call centre and we hold that rich data, which hopefully will help that transformation journey over the next two years. That will kind of aid us to have better control of delivering that element of this service.
• Thank you, thank you, Natasha. Okay, so just so I've got that clear, we've got the contracts, which is sort of expiring in 2026. So until then we can try and improve fits and bobs of the current service, but we can't do a full redesign. It's quite clear that a bit of a redesign is needed. We all, you know, I have Octopus Energy, they're a fantastic energy company. I call them, I can speak to someone, they'll sort out and answer any question I've got. Monzo the same, eBay the same, but we've all tried to call HMRC at some point in our lives and it's a complete nightmare. And we try and call up to get repairs done with Lambeth and it can also be an absolute nightmare. So I suppose my question is, what is the plan for this big redesign? How can this committee and interested councillors and interested residents be part of that? There are very obvious things I think we all need, completely agree with what some witnesses have said. You should be able to call someone and they sort out your problem. They of course need to go and speak to other people to sort out your problem, but they're your person. And then afterwards you get a text message and an email confirming the conversation you've had and the details you've had, just like if you'd call up a particular private company to do this very well. And so you've got evidence of what has been agreed. And then if something goes wrong days down the line, you can point to it. And currently we're not in this place at all. And so I suppose, yeah, what is the plan? And I know two years sounds like a lot of time, but it's not really that much time. So what is the plan for the redesign and how can we be involved?
• So, I mean, everything you've just described is that experience that every resident wants of any public or private sector. So this is where technology needs to come in place. I mean, the call centre omni-channel technology has developed significantly in the latter years, which does enable that first time resolution, the notifications, the confirmations, the tracking of the job from the resident perspective. So the entire transformation ahead of the end of the contract is gonna revolve heavily around investing into the right technology to enable that. At the same time, the complexity of how this entire service works end to end is enormous and challenging to do a lot with whilst we're dealing with a third party at the same time. But I'm more than happy to following the informal cabinet validation of the recommendations and the reports. I'm happy to come back with a plan, if that makes sense, 'cause I'm conscious that I won't be able to outline it in the full detail now. And I wouldn't want to preempt anything that may happen in the informal cabinet as well.
• Okay, Jeff, do we know when cabinet are making a decision?
• 30th of October.
• Fantastic, so I'm trying to think just now.
• Can I just come back on?
• Sorry, yes.
• So, and I should actually start off by saying, I think it was two years ago that you started, is it two, Natasha? How many years?
• No, four, four.
• Oh my goodness, wow, time flies. You've definitely made an impact. So thank you for what you've done. I would say though that I think things are slipping a bit in terms of response times to when people calling in. So it had got to the stage where you improved, it used to be horrendous. And then I did see an improvement in sort of response times when you're calling up. And now it just seems to be back into the sort of 40 minutes hour. And a lot of the time I've got really stressed people and you're doing it, you're offering, when you've got some time to actually get on the phone for them. And so I just worry if we are now very close to looking at plans going forward, there's so much emphasis on, oh, we need to take up what we're doing. Actually, are we, when we're looking at our fundamental contracts, have enough staff to carry out everything? It's all well and good having backend systems, but we need to make sure that we've got the basics. Because if we don't have enough staff, then they're stressed and they're picking up a call when someone has already been on the phone for 45 minutes. So basics like that really have to be sorted.
• I absolutely take your point. So I don't know if you've noticed any headlines recently in the papers, Capita has gone through their internal turmoil and has let go of some 40,000 staff across the thing, across their estate, including the contact centre, which has inevitably had impact onto the performance. However, that is not our problem. I have, since that's happened, Councillor Marceau, just to put your mind at rest, replaced, I'll be kind, the account manager that we had in place. And we have a new account director in place who I've last met today. So even though I'm at the director level, I get involved with the operation and I know what's going on. So he advises September's still going to be probably a bit rocky, but that we should be seeing difference from the October, particularly going into the winter period with the massive recruitment. 'Cause when the performance goes, it's the staff that leaves, it's the high churn. But as I say, again, that is absolutely not our problem. That's something that Capita was very clearly managed to sort out.
• You should have it in a contract.
• It is in, yeah, yeah. So we do have- - Service levels. So if you're allowing your contractor to get rid of, say, 10% of their staff, that's going to have impacts on our service levels. So it should absolutely be our problem.
• So we do implement, just, sorry for barging in, we do have penalties through the contract for the consecutive failures of the service level. So we do enforce that, yes.
• And I'm keen to make sure also, I think I've mentioned this in a previous Haslam Committee, when I called the call centre and the person at the other end didn't realise I was a counsellor and was incredibly rude to me until he clocked that I was a counsellor. And then everything changed. I'm not going to name who it was because anyway, I just don't know who it was. And so I didn't bring it up as a sort of major issue. I just want to make sure that those people at the other end of the phone are properly managed.
• I'm always a secret shopper. (laughing)
• I don't want people to get stressed. Stressed people doesn't create good outcomes. So how will we manage that call centre? I do think the staff have to be, where wellbeing has to be considered.
• I do. - No, absolutely.
• So how do you, and then after this, we're going to say, so I said, yeah.
• So my issue really was the extent to which the call centres are geared up to handle emergency. So I'll give you an example of for several weeks, we've had this crisis on the Notre Dame estate whereby there's been no, that they've had intermittent access to water, but a lot of people have been without water and use basis. So it's a major, major issue. And in terms of when it first happened, I was told by various residents that whenever they called call centre, they would be disconnected. They'd be on the phone for an hour. Some people would just be disconnected when they got through or even indeed when they're on hold. When they kind of approached me to deal with it, I called kind of emergency out of hours people. And I did, to be fair, get right through. But the problem is all the information they had was, you know, that an engineer's looking into this. They didn't really have a kind of crisis management plan in terms of just the basics, like getting people access to bottled water. So, you know, I said, well, why haven't you deployed someone to actually go round and hand out bottled water at each address? And they said, no, it's incumbent on each resident to make a personal phone call on an individual basis, which is ludicrous given that all of these people are being cut off. They're not able to get through to people. So, you know, what am I supposed to then just ask each person in a giant WhatsApp group that I'm in and then phone them up myself where, you know, this just isn't appropriate. So I said that they should have basically deployed a team. 'Cause if there's someone there to individually give up water, they should be knocking on doors and making announcements and saying, my God, all these blocks are without water. You know, these are the kind of fundamentals, you know, water's a human right. You can't leave people with no access to water. So this is what we're cleaning and drinking water. They really love it and it's still going on. And for a lot of these, still it's still happening. So if I did email you, you know, but you were away, but so you also have awareness of this, right? So, you know, it's two things here. It's really the call centre, but also, you know, what happens after that. But I don't know what are the, maybe beyond this piece, but definitely on the call centre issue there, you know, I think that needs to be addressed.
• When there's something big and serious like that, how quickly is it not necessarily escalated to one of you guys, but how quickly are you made aware? Obviously you're not made aware of every single phone call that comes in, but something like that, are you immediately made aware? Is this going to the emergency team in the council?
• Yeah, so yeah, I think that's why we're quite surprised by this and saw your emails, see retrospect, and it's 'cause it had moved on while it was on holiday. And we can pick up any existing issues and whether it's resolved or other.
• 'Cause it isn't, I can tell you that even today, they're, not to cut you off, but it's still going on and on. Not for everyone, but some of the blocks are still in crisis for that minute.
• I think we're looking at a puzzle because we so frequently have these kinds of emergencies where we're contacted, we respond very quickly. Certainly when it's come through to housing, we wouldn't ask individual residents. If a tenant says the whole block is out, we head over with water. We also have, you know, robust out of hours, rotor where our individual officers sort of take it in turns to be part of the out of hours, rotor. We've had a number of emergencies even in my 12 months with power off gas leaks. I mean, so where we are doing our response. So we need to look into how this didn't get to us in housing quickly enough. Can I just clarify, Councillor Ponce, was it the capital call centre you, that tenants were calling in the first instance?
• I presume it was, I think so. I think so, yeah.
• Okay, so Natasha May would help coming in on the capital bit of this journey and why this may not have happened in this case.
• I genuinely don't know 'cause the process is clear. The workbook is clear, particularly for the emergency. As you say, we do have these fairly often. I'm gonna, I'm unaware of this case. So the best I can do is take it away and come back. But I also find it really strange that it would be each resident calling, but then at the same time, I know that call centre works on the process of the workbooks that we've furnished them with and signed off. So I don't have, I'm afraid I don't have already answered straight away to that one. I'm gonna have to take it away.
• Thank you, Natasha. I'm just incredibly conscious of time. I've got two more items to go through.
• Just make one recommendation on the back of that because we hear this and it's frustrating for us and it must be so annoying for residents because this is a reality. This isn't like a out of the ordinary thing. So I wonder whether as part of your own KPI that a group of you get together and look through the worst cases and actually physically go and visit and speak to the resident and see the damp and see the repairs and hear that, you know, I had a case of an elderly woman who had a banister. She was looking after her son who had autism, who's in his fifties. She, that gives you an indication of how old she is. She had a banister that wasn't working. It took years for it to be fixed properly. And it was only until I got an officer to actually come and hold the banister and hold out, you know, so I think that as much as everybody sits there and says, I can't imagine this is done. It would be great for you to, and I know that you do, 'cause I've got, in Wells I've had up to 10 people turn up because they know that I'm coming. And it's like, here's somebody from weights and here's somebody from the rubbish and here's somebody from, and that's great to actually speak to a resident and see the level of damp and see the repairs and see and hear and hear the experience. I want that to be a recommendation that we hear back how many of these are actually happening.
• Thank you. Agent, very, very quickly.
• A very, very quick one. And I only want to mention it because it was one of the witnesses and it's about leaks. In years, I have been going on about housing repairs does not have a process or a procedure for dealing with leaks where the leaking property may or may not be a lambeth one. The property suffering may or may not be a lambeth one. And you have to get both properties together and there is never been a process and it always ends up like this witness to say that it goes like that. Do something about that.
• Okay, I'm just going to go to recommendations on this. And I'm also, if it's okay Roger, if we can add to the previous item, a recommendation to see what more can be done on loft and roof installation, which Jackie had raised. And I forgot to mention that. In terms of recommendations for this, we've got a lot improving communication with local housing officer, particularly where they're not sort of answering the phone, tackling the repair call centre waiting time and enabling the call centre to get through to the contractors after 3 p.m. to make appointments, provide a version of the repairs handbook that is readable on mobile phones, have a accessible phone option for those with access needs and they can't necessarily sort of keep pressing through to different options. Allow everyone to report repairs on the online platform, including tenants and properties, counselors, et cetera. Enabling customer service reps to own problems and resolve, which is what we talked about earlier. Improving bugs in the online portal to prevent people then being forced to call if they can go online. Ensure tickets are not closed when we transfer contractors. That isn't something that we're able to discuss, but it was obviously raised and would be helpful if officers can kind of provide a bit more detail on that sort of after this meeting. Which has been touched on by witness and Adrian, all the others written down, enable kind of impacted residents to raise cases and get updates in relation to issues with their neighbour's property, particularly when it comes to flooding. I had a piece of casework recently that was exactly that. And there's real frustration that people get pushed from pillar to post on this. Ensure the system updates immediately to provide residents with prompt updates. You know, if it's taking 24 hours to update, I don't see why an IT system should be working like that. Improving the culture of the rent team and being more sympathetic and, you know, having the capacity to refer people to fuel vouchers and other support, which is obviously available. Giving sort of on the valley road estates, looking at whether there can be a one-off piece of work to do tree maintenance. If you guys can be liaise with your colleagues, that'd be fantastic. And I would like to say that after the cabinet decision on the 30th of October on the future of the call centre, you know, officers to sort of develop their new proposed model and not in our January session, which we've already planned, but for the first housing scrutiny committee meeting after January, so probably next May, June, that session be dedicated to looking at the new model. So that would give your team roughly six months to design the new model from the end of October, if that seems reasonable. And obviously I may not be chair and we may not be on the committee. So that may well be changed, but if people are happy for that to be a target.
• Have a benchmark of where we are and to actually track.
• And also just that, you know, we're going to have this new proposed model for 2026 and for us and for witnesses to be able to look at that and comment on that at that meeting. Investigate the specific issue of the water supply raised by Councillor Collins in a state in his ward. And also have a sort of periodic review of the worst cases by senior management, including onsite visits and reporting back to housing scrutiny committee on the number of the serious issues and what went wrong. Anything else?
• The connectivity, can we have a report on sort of like, I don't know, tracking of contractors? Because that's a lot of the problems that we've got where, you know, a call centre person starts for the best of intentions, but they cannot get the answer as to, is this person that's been booked in going to turn up when you've taken time off? And yeah, so that's really important.
• Sophie has a point.
• Yes, Sophie.
• We will also respond to their cases, the witnesses' friends and make sure that we come back on the response.
• Thank you very much. Okay, now we move on to the third item of core business and we are running behind, so as quick as possible, on tenant services, including repairs, health and safety, including fire keys, lifts, anti-social behaviour and crime. This is item five in the published agenda pack, pages 55 to 68. We'll first say again from our deputy cabinet member for housing, investment and new homes, and you have up to five minutes to introduce the report.
• Thank you very much, Chair. I'm pleased to introduce this report on tenant services, repair, compliance and anti-social behaviour. This report outlines the council continuing effort to enhance the housing services for our tenants and leaseholders, focusing on three critical areas. Responsive repair, building compliance and anti-social behaviour. We are aware that the performance of this responsive repair services has not always met expectation, and we have taken this challenge head on. Services improvement plan we are implementing, including the core location of staff and enhancing contractors' performance monitoring. It's designed to directly address these issues and ensure we meet our key performance indicators. Additionally, reports highlight the strikes we have made in building safety compliance. It all requires fire risk assessment and cast safety checks now up to date. This ensures that the safety of our residents remain our top priority. On anti-social behaviour, we are improving our partnership work with the police and other local agencies to address these complex cases effectively. I'm sure there will be some concerns raised by our speakers tonight, and we'll recognise them. I want to assure this committee that we are committed to improving services standard and addressing tenant feedback to build safer, better, maintained homes for Lambda.
• Thank you, Councillor. We have requests to speak from Councillor Jackie Meldrum. Jackie has left.
• He left the building. Excuse me.
• We have a leaseholder in the borough who has asked that their aim is not made public. We have Sabine Mary. We have Kevin Otre. We have Alistair Ross. And we have Eleanor Leong again. So with Jackie gone, can I call up the resident who wishes to remain anonymous, please? You have three minutes from when you begin.
• All right, just before we start the clock, I did issue some pre-read. I hope people have a chance to look at it before, thanks. Okay, so we start the clock. So I'm a leaseholder of 12 years. I presented to this committee last year in November about the lies, the failure and the fraud that I've witnessed at the hands of Lambda Council. Myself and other leaseholders continue to have to endure the inability of the council to deliver on its legal obligations as a free holder. I will start with progress 'cause there are signs. Thanks must very much go to Councillor Inglis-Jones, to Sophie Taylor, to Daniel Day and Robert Mowatt for meeting me, for listening and actually taking positive action. Sophie, Daniel and Robert have actually done what they've said. Their engagement is nothing short of positively radical compared with my experience with this department and some of their other colleagues. Less positive news, which there are four points. Sadly, the 12 year issue with my property persists in part. I'm trapped in a flat that I won't be able to sell until this fix is sorted. It's taken its toll on me significantly, my health financially and I can't make my plans. I know Sophie and team are getting on this and getting it fixed and to be fair to them, they are picking up the horrendous legacy of their many useless predecessors and sadly some of their colleagues in the housing department. I'm going to talk a bit about service charges because when you get onto these failed repairs, you then get a recipient of these bills, which frankly range from fantasy to fraud, to frankly the absurd. You, Lambeth Council, have and continue to charge for repeats of repeats of failed work. In my block of 40 flats, this will come over to over a million pounds of complete and utter waste in the last few years, purely because of the failure in your housing team and your repairs team. And worse still, you charge for work that you know has not been done. It's not a one-off, it's not a small error, it's not a blip. I have sat in front of your offices in the council who tell me they know bills go out for work that's not been done. I shouldn't have to say this, but stop charging people for work that you know has not been done. Other aspects that service charge bills, I'd like to draw attention to, which don't add up. I've seen no evidence of clawbacks from your failed contractors. Your previous favourite South London roofer earned hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of pounds from this council, repeatedly failing to fix my roof and many, many others for well over a decade. When a resident tells you something hasn't been done or the repair has failed, apparently your people and your system know better than the person that initiated the repair or lives in property. Your assessments of charges on the grounds of reasonableness is frankly indefensible. Recently, I suggested I would raise one with a journalist and suddenly the cost was halved, but the cost is still absurd anyway. On the fire safety points, frankly, the quality of the Saville's FRAs is absolutely abysmal. The subsequent jobs that you decide to do bear no resemblance to common sense. Getting service charge bills isn't right, it isn't easy, but having an attitude towards your leaseholders, which is make them pay, chase them, threaten them with breach of their property or repossession is not on. Final point, very quickly, complaints is an interesting one. I received a response in January 24 to a complaint I issued in August 23. And frankly, the response was woeful, incredibly one-sided, misleading, and it contained lies. You talked about talking to 10 council officers, but you didn't speak to me, the complainant, at any point in that complaint response. As a resident, my only step is obviously to go to the housing ombudsman, who you know have backlogs, or a tribunal. Really stop being introspective. You can talk to people like me and many others here and we'll tell you what's going on and we'll tell you what we experience and we'll tell you it really honestly. Because frankly, some of these reports that have been issued in this meeting today, I've read them, you might be compliant, but a lot of BS in that written document. And I could, line by line, go through it in some of these reports today and call it out.
• Thank you, thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you very much. And thank you for the written submission as well. Next, we have Kevin. I'm sure Kevin is... (silence) Kevin, three minutes to begin whenever you start.
• Thank you for having me. I'm Kevin Naught, leaseholder in Aussie Court on Westbury Estates. I'm the last leaseholder in Aussie Court. And one member of council approached me saying that he wants to regenerate my area, which is absolutely fine. The issue was that due to the way it was managed was horrible. I was left to be the last person in that block. I was forgotten about as a leaseholder, attended a resident association meeting and told we've moved every tenant out of the block. Nobody's left on the block. I then said, I'm a leaseholder, you've forgotten me. Fast forward six months to a year, people have moved out, I'm there alone. I had to witness prostitutes on my block, people defecating on the stairs. I've had to reach out to Councillor Bray, Florence Esholomi. I'm literally disgusted at the way Lambeth Council has dealt with antisocial behaviour, how they've programmed the renewal to leave me and my two year old son to potentially get stabbed, shot or worse. I had to go to work and be fearful of coming home that my property was broken into. As a professional trying to earn a living, trying to better my life, my community circumstances, it's unacceptable. My gas meter is external to where I live. It was stolen three times. I reported it to the Lambeth Council each and every time. Nothing was done. Me and my son had to sit in that property, no heating, no hot water, scared for our lives because you yourself did nothing. I'm here today to look at the people in the face that made the decisions and have left people like myself, people that have spoken today in these horrendous situations. I want to know if you're taking your job seriously, that you care and you're doing something about it. I've got email chose with the MP, the captain of S&T, the local neighbourhoods, YouTube groups, everybody that can organise suffering. This is two years ago, trying to get things done. Clearly there's not the right KPIs in the place to show where the failings are or where they're caught. Clearly from your reports I've read, you're aiming to make progress and that's fair enough, but it is so slow and it is so dangerous to the people that live in the estates. When I chase up the repair spot to secure the gas meter box, we're chasing on it, we're waiting on it, we're waiting on it. It's unacceptable. How can I have a little two-year-old boy with no heating or hot water? And I'm reaching out to every channel. I had to send an email at 6 p.m. and luckily Councillor Heshy came to my house 15 minutes early, said he was going to the cinema, but stopped because he said my email was just horrendous to read. And the first thing he said to me was, I am scared to be here, this is not safe. And that is due to a poor level of officers and staff. I don't believe they're trained well 'cause when I'm emailing and trying to correspond, they're not coming back to me, they're clueless. You need to care. The right people have the right guidelines in place and stick to it. Fortnightly monthly meetings, check and progress it. Let us know that you care. Thank you for your time.
• Thank you very much guys. And to start, can we have Sabine?
• Well, I don't know how I can follow that, sorry. Before I sit down, I'm just going to find it, sorry. Okay, so Sabine Mary, Chair of Central Island State Residence Association. I wasn't going to come today to talk, but really the repairs that just keep coming up, they just, I thought, okay, well, I'll come and talk. So firstly, I have to address this issue of that there is no money. As Pete mentioned, over half a billion pounds was spent on decent housing and none of it on Central Island State. There's just money going hand over fist, being spent buying out properties that then get boarded up and left there. They may not come from the housing revenue account, but when they flip to social housing, possibly that debt will go with them. So it's just like where you spend your money is absolute nonsense. And to say that there is no money is just very misleading. Okay, so I bumped into a resident and oh yes, yes, no, Central Estate, before regeneration was planned, was on the list to have its roofs done and possibly the sewage and drainage later. 10 years fast forward, we don't have regeneration, we don't have our roofs systematically done. They will fix one part or one roof and the leak is coming from a separate part. And it's like, well, the cost of all that scaffolding and all those bits getting done, why doesn't the whole roof of all our estate get done? And please don't tell me that there's yet another consultation about yet another plans or whatever. We have been paying our rent or our service charge or have lived on that estate long enough that we deserve to have things done. Guttering has not been done for 15 years on some properties because someone actually heard a workman who was very openly telling them saying routine guttering doesn't get done anymore. And it's like, what? So it leads to leaks. So therefore it fulfills the narrative that our housing, so that our blocks need knocking down when they're structurally sound. But I bumped into a resident. How are you? How's it going? Oh, fine. I've been helping our new neighbour for three months and has had a blocked toilet. I'm like, I didn't even know about that one. Then I have, oh, Sabine. Yeah, my roof's been leaking for like three years. Can you do something about it? Send me a video. Then I go and write a complaint. It's like a dead mouse in someone's flat when they're supposed to have had their mouse stuff fixed. Like someone comes to inspect, but it never then gets followed up with anything. There's never any following up. And I just had a woman who moved into, had a blocked sink. She's been living like that for three years where it just keeps on blocking and it blocks and goes into her washing machine. She opens the door. It leaks onto the floor. It's like, you know, I just have to bring this up. It's like, I'm a volunteer. The committee is a volunteer organisation. You guys are the people who are getting money for doing this. I'm just go home and I eat my food, but no, I'm not getting covered for coming here. It's like, just sort yourselves out. That would just really help. That's pretty much it. I'm sure I have lots more, lots more cases, but it's like enough is enough. Dead pigeons on a balcony I reported six months ago, or at least three or four months ago. And I've actually taken pictures with a council officer. They're still there. Dead pigeons caught up in the net. It's decaying carcasses. It's like, come on. They're just balcony windows that fall out. I mean, God, that's not even internal. I'm not even expecting miracles, but it's like, Central Hill Estate was self-financing and ran a surplus before regeneration came along. Don't come to me about there's no money. It's about how you organise yourselves and how you manage it.
• Thank you. And next up, we have Alistair.
• I'm Alistair Ross, leaseholder. Yeah, so I've got some questions about-
• Sorry.
• Alistair Ross.
• Oh, brilliant.
• On the 1st of July, BBC London News aired a report into the failings Lambeth Council regarding the handling of major works and the mischarging of these works to leaseholders. Given the BBC felt this issue was important enough to broadcast an eight minute segment, the 8.8 million population of London, I've got three questions regarding the actions Lambeth councillors and officers have taken to resolve the issues highlighted in the piece. The report highlighted how non-disclosure agreements are used by Lambeth when service and major works charges are refunded and adjusted. This is clearly done in order to prevent leaseholders from informing their neighbours and ensuring fair charges for all affected residents. So number one, what action has the council taken to end this practice? I understand that Lambeth has simply decided to impose these NDAs at the start of negotiations. This change is not useful and it will not lead to improved services. It seems like a tactic to bully people to either sign an NDA or force them to apply to the first tier tribunal, which Lambeth knows full well is going to be very daunting to many people. The report highlighted that leaseholders are being charged for substandard works or in some cases, works that were not undertaken at all. When works are charged by contractors, but never completed or completed to a poor standard, this is a waste of the council's own money as well as that of leaseholders. Number two, what action has Lambeth taken to increase oversight of major works and recover money erroneously paid to contractors? Finally, the report highlighted instances where Lambeth had admitted to incorrectly charging leaseholders 18,000 pounds each for major works. When the council acknowledged errors in its consultation process, these fees should have been capped for all residents, not just those that complained. When Lambeth continues to take money from residents, knowing it has not followed proper procedures, it targets those least stable to fund. Vulnerable residents like pensioners on fixed income and busy families. I cannot see how Lambeth can claim to have any integrity in its processes for charging for major works. In my own block, I know that the council is still doggedly pursuing money from some leaseholders, money which has in fact been refunded to other leaseholders in the same block. It's forcing leaseholders to take action via the tribunal, which will cost the council and leaseholders time and money. We're all waiting to see what Lambeth has learned from these errors and how it will improve its handling of major works. So my final question is specifically to the councilors here. How are you holding the offices to account and what concrete data do you ask for that demonstrates measurable improvement in management of these works and the customer experience? Thank you.
• Thank you very much. I'm going to go to the, I think the final witness we have speaking, which is Eleanor again. Do we have Eleanor? Eleanor, can you hear us?
• Yes, hello, hi.
• Fantastic. Okay, your three minutes starts now.
• Thank you. I think I should just quickly say also that I've been corresponding with Councillor Swain James and me and my neighbour did meet with him at his surgery. So we are getting help, but he was the one that recommended I came along to this. I won't go over what's happened. As you all know, it's a leak coming from my neighbour's kitchen, which has been going on for three weeks. So I'll just go into what I think I would recommend, which is firstly, a reevaluation of what constitutes an emergency, or at the very least a reprioritisation of cases like this. I do know that this is not as urgent as a gas leak, but it does seem to be treated with the same sort of priority as like a broken cupboard or something. There should be reasonable solutions given. Expecting my neighbour to go without running water because she was basically just told to turn the water off, or for me to have the electricity in my kitchen switched off isn't an appropriate response. She's been using the stock clock to switch the water on and off when she needs it, which is now leaking, because obviously it's not a tap. It's not supposed to be turned on and off several times a day. The cupboard that that's in houses the gas and electric meter, which is now obviously, like I say, leaking. My cupboard with the same is below. And I've been told that if water starts coming through to there or via the bit on the ceiling that has my carbon monoxide meter, carbon monoxide monitor, or the smoke alarm, that again, I should call them because that would mean that we would have to potentially be evacuated out of, you know, have the whole electricity isolated and be moved out of this, out of this home, me and my son. These timely repairs save money. It's taken three weeks to this point. It's still not fixed. The damage that's been done to her kitchen and mine in that in the meantime is, I don't know how much that's going to cost to repair. The date we've been given for it finally to be fixed is the 19th of September. That would be a month in total. I don't believe that they're going to come out. We've already had four appointments, two where they haven't shown up and two where someone's turned up and not done the work. The first time they just had a look at it, despite being told on the phone what was wrong. The second time the person turned up at five, it was 10 to four, he had a look, said no, I'm knocking off at four o'clock. I can't finish this job today. It's too much work and left. I'll be back on Monday. Didn't come back on the Monday. It just doesn't, it doesn't make sense that they don't know what they're coming to when they get here. I'm sure this has been said earlier. I'm sure somebody said it, that they should have the notes. They should have all of the phone calls. Somebody actually came out and took photos, she said. And again, they didn't know what they were coming into and didn't bring the right tools, didn't have enough time to do it. They all shout, I don't know why they're knocking off early on. I know it's Friday, but why, when you'd be given a one to six appointment time while somebody leaves at four. And there also finally seems to be an issue with sending out more than one contractor per job. So in this case, we need a carpenter and a plumber. And I don't know why it's an issue, but they don't seem to both be able to come out at the same time to complete the job. And that's another mismatch that's been happening, which has contributed to the delay in this.
• Thank you, thank you very much. Just before we move on, I'm just going to pose that we continue for the next half an hour.
• Yes.
• Brilliant, fantastic. Thank you. Now we go to members' questions. I'm just going to flag on Alice's evidence that obviously the first question was around NDAs regarding service charges and major works. On major works, including the process of planning and delivering them, but also the charging, we are looking at that in the meeting in January. So if we can focus on NDAs around service charges, Alice, you'd be very welcome to come back in January, also resubmit some written evidence. We're going to look at that. We decided to break it up, so we'll look at service charges today. But then on January, we're going to have a big session looking at major works, including the charging, but just to flag that to colleagues. If we go into that, we can focus on NDAs around service charges. That would be fantastic. And over to questions from colleagues. I'll go, Adrian first.
• I'll try and make a couple of questions this time. You've greatly improved all your assessments. You're nearly up to 100% on all of them. I don't see anywhere you are forecasting the work from the assessment is to see if it's okay. So you may well find it's not okay, which leads to work. On various estates I've been with, there have been terrible problems in dealing with the outcomes of the assessments, electricity and gas, where the work took ever such a long time to do. So do you build a forecast of the work to be generated when you do the assessment? Number two, when are you going to move towards standardising your lifts? All the lift breakdowns, if ever there are, last forever because that particular lift has got unique paths, usually in the EU. Number three, you don't want me to ask anybody about NDAs I just gathered.
• You can ask about NDAs, but with reference to service charges, major works charges. You can talk about service charges.
• I heard that four years ago, great concern about NDA and everything the witness said about them. I think it puts around within a terrible light to do these NDAs and then people find out about them and look what happened. I really think we should reconsider then. And the last one is what comes out of all of them. Whatever you're doing on KPIs, processes, procedures, working on what to do, additional work. There is nothing in any of the plans or processes that does the personnel management of responding when someone doesn't do something right to retrain them and make sure they can now do it and then monitor. There is no personnel management throughout all five.
• Thank you. Alison, do you want to come in on service charges?
• Not on service charges, but on double charging and triple charging.
• Perfect, I'll go over to you. And then if we could then get to officers on that issue.
• Okay, so firstly, I want to echo the thanks of my resident who doesn't want to be named for all the work that's been done by the housing team. I'm really grateful, but I would also, I make no apology for bringing her along, which is the second time. So I bring her along, sounds awful, but actually requesting her to appear because I genuinely think that there are some real issues here which also have been raised by another witness as well. I'm really grateful to someone in your litigation team who I won't name, who is an excellent officer, who has been through line by line with me on another issue about charging double, triple, quadruple charging by contractors on works that have been turned time and time and time again. I would really like to get to the bottom of why I have to do that week after week on substandard works, double charging and incorrect charging. Why is that happening? And to echo Adrian's question on NDAs. I'm really grateful. I just want to say I'm grateful.
• You're going to want to do council assessments and lifts, if that's okay, on the assessment. I'm assuming, Councillor Gordon, you mean fire risk assessments? Is that the assessment?
• Yes, well, not only fire risk assessments, all our elective and gas assessments, electric and-
• I'd ask officers to read to me as quick as possible 'cause we've got 35 minutes to get through to-
• On those two and then Chris will pick up on service charges and NDAs.
• Indeed. I'll speed through then, I'll speed through. In terms of the fire risk assessments, obviously it's a legal requirement to have a fire risk assessment on certain buildings. We've got 100%, we've surveyed every building. From that, you will then have a number of actions and a number of recommendations. A number of recommendations you may or may not have to do, it's just a recommendation, but also we have to pick up the critical. It's about tolerance, what do you need to do? Fire doors is one of them. We've got a programme of fire door replacements ongoing. Something also around the tolerance level, there will be a certain criteria, what do you need to do in a month, a day, three months, et cetera. So we pick up all those items. We've got lots of programmes of re-clouding buildings, fire doors, compartmentation, et cetera, et cetera. So we can share that information when we come back, maybe in January with the major works, maybe we can incorporate some of that in there to explain a bit more if the chair's okay with that.
• Particularly just on fire assessments, it was also raised to me by another Councillor, the issue of properties which are close to businesses, many of which may have kitchens in, and there does seem to be sometimes oversight about the potential risk there. So if you could.
• Yeah, there's a particular risk, obviously, where you've got shops or particularly like fast food establishments below flats. That's the corporate team, but we're working with them to address those. It's interesting to pick up what the residents said there that Saville's under looking to that personally. I'm not aware of that, but I'll certainly pick that case up there.
• Thank you very much.
• Yeah.
• Lifts, Andy, lifts up there.
• And lifts, that's the go on the pickup again. We've got over 400 lifts, various ages. A lift depends on how many times it goes up and down, is its life expectancy. In a high rise block, it's going to last a lot less than it would if it was in a block with maybe two or three floors. We've got a programme of lift renewal. They're expensive. We could be talking £400,000 for a lift replacement in a high rise block. And we replace about four to six lifts every year. But out of 400, it takes quite a long time. We have got some lifts that will agree with class history. Parts have to be manufactured. That is a big problem. And that is because the amount of money we need to invest in lift replacement.
• Yeah, my point is every time you replace a lift, do you make sure it's a standard one so the parts will be easy to obtain? That was the point, Michael.
• Well, a lot of the lifts are now gone over to sort of digital. A lot of the components now are more standardised. But some of the old lifts that I think you're referring to, the old parts as co-bank lifts, a lot of those parts are obsolete. But we are replacing those less standard.
• So just in terms of the charges, I think it's probably just worthwhile, I've been very, very quick, but just worthwhile setting out, obviously, with our annual service charges, most of you wouldn't be aware, we run estimate service charges, first of all, and then we have actual service charges 18 months later on. Where the complexity, I guess, comes into that is as repairs, particularly, I think, as Councillor's alluding to, as repairs get raised by our operatives, by the contact centre, by our operatives, those charges will get registered onto our system, as a management system, and they will feature as part of the actual recharges, as part of the actuals in that type of performance. What can happen, and I think that's been a bit of a theme tonight, is in terms of the kind of joining the dots that we would notice, what we need to be able to do, which is difficult, every time somebody raises a repair today, or a repair tomorrow, or the day after, every time that repair gets raised will be registered, potentially, as a new repair on the system, unless the connection is met. And therefore, whatever is raised at that stage will filter through what an actual charge is going to be. Now, obviously, when we publish those actual charges, that's when, obviously, my team quickly get involved. If these others, say, for example, really have been double charged, or either been incorrect charged, it's at that stage that we make the amendments, and do the various adjustments to correct that. Ideally, what we'd be able to do is kind of in that chain. If systems were probably between operatives, between the housing management system, if that was a wee bit more connected, what we could do is kind of link those orders together more clearly. And if there's been, if the same works order is connected, then we'd ensure there's a bit more scrutiny there that we could prevent that from going through to the actual bill. At the moment, I think we mentioned there's about 110,000 jobs that are being raised per year. That is a manual job when it comes to the actuals. So, as much as we guess prominently, in most cases, we do get the calculation service charts and the enforcement pretty spot on. There will be occasions where either a job has been raised twice for the same job happening. Obviously, my team will go through that and make sure that we make every effort to remove any duplication whenever possible. Where there's incorrect charges, I guess maybe, again, we'd have known the exact example. What we might be referring to there is if a repair is raised against the wrong block definition. So, it wasn't done against that block definition and a mistake, it was done against a different one. That can happen. That is human error, unfortunately. It is difficult to completely eradicate that from the system.
• So, there's a-
• Monitor when repairs get completed, don't we?
• Yeah.
• Why don't we charge against a number of completed repairs, not the number of repair requests?
• That's exactly what we do. Yeah, so it is, but there'll still be, there'll still be errors in there. So, what my team will do is we're not picking up work order numbers, for example, that are still pending. That's not what happens. It's only completed before the work order starts. We stop literally from the 1st of April to the 1st of March. But there's still, there is still that opportunity there for a duplication of it. When I say a duplication of a job, it's not the same work order when it's raised twice. But it could be the same job that gets revisited that potentially, if it wasn't done at the point where it's incorrect the first time, you're not gonna raise a couple of, another repair is raised a couple of days later. Obviously, that is where the kind of global charging effectively can come in. And the work that we need to do is understand sometimes, and this is the complexity of repairs, I'm afraid, 'cause it's not straightforward, is that you might very well fix the issue. The contractors might fix that issue first time, but there might be another issue that wasn't, that wasn't linked to the first part of that repair. It's difficult because, for example, if the leaking or, you know, anything like that, it's very difficult first time round sometimes to get that 100%, right? That, of course, is the aim to get right first time round. But repairs do have that complexity of where, you know, it might be, you might sort out this part of the job today, but then somewhere further down the roof, there might be another leak, you know, a week or two weeks later, or even a couple of months later. And that's where it is difficult, I know, and I'm very conscious of that for leaseholders, particularly as well, and for tenants, of course, too. But we need to be really clear on something, when we use the language for travel charges, it's not a case, or very rarely should be a case, where we've done this job here, and then we're going out a week later and charging for the very same job again, that can happen if it's not right first time round, of course, but we need to be able to kind of have a bit more evidence than we've seen where the contracted issue was there.
• And even if that happens, and it's not done the first time round, I mean, residents shouldn't be double charged, if, you know, your team and your contractors haven't done a good enough job the first time. So am I right in saying that if a job, you know, within a week, to use your example, within a couple of days, if the job's having to be done again, are residents being charged twice for that?
• Well, that's what-
• Has actually happened, yes.
• If it's been, if it's raised on the system as another brand new job, that will probably come true as a additional charge one day. What we need to be able to do is, again, that might require additional scrutiny of the charges to see if, is it the very same job that we're getting the cost of the job? That's where, unfortunately, it sounds very easy to go along with, of course, two different jobs, but without knowing the exact example, it could be tricky just to give a 100% answer.
• Each case is different, but I mean, I'm a homeowner, and if I had, you know, I've had a bathroom put in, I will go through things and I can understand, you know, something that was initially built for has had another component to it. It's not complicated, I don't understand. I've got so many leaseholders where you can actually see that they've been billed twice. Not even twice, up to four times for the same thing. And there's so much reputational risk for us, and on a slow, slow news day, ITN or BBC or whoever, it's gonna come back to us, Lambeth, six months on. You know, it's just, it's just embarrassing. And as a Labour person, it's disgusting that the non-disclosure agreements is just like wrong.
• So on that, can we, I appreciate we've got very limited time. We've got a lot that's been raised. Can we go to NDA?
• I was gonna say.
• Thank you.
• So obviously, non-disclosure agreements, we refer to agreements. Now, I have to say, this is specifically in relation to major work which I know we're gonna cover in January. So we do have instances where I think first and foremost, it's very, very important to say, no leaseholder has ever been forced to sign an NDA, to sign a confidentiality settlement agreement. The reason, it's probably very clear, the reason that we have to do settlement agreements, number one, the first tier tribunal is very, very clear around actually being able to, that we have made every effort with the leaseholder to try and settle those issues. So as part of that, our litigation team are trained mediators. So they work with leaseholders to ensure, can we settle it? Are we in a position, Lambeth Council, are we comfortable going to the first tier tribunal to actually have the case there and have a public decision made? Is the leaseholder comfortable to go to the first tier tribunal to what one of the witnesses was saying? It can be, it is an informal, anybody who's been to the first tier tribunal, it isn't informal for a setting or a hearing tribunal setting. But nonetheless, we do acknowledge that. So that's why settlement agreements for us is it does contain a confidentiality clause because individual leaseholders will have different issues unfortunately. We have leaseholders in the same block where 99% of them are absolutely fine. There's maybe one leaseholder who is unhappy with how the work is carried out. They want to challenge the quantity, the quality, is it reasonable, is it not? And it's in those cases where we make it a kind of professional decision between litigation team and prepaid mediators to say, actually, this is the situation. We're happy to settle, but obviously it's part of that. It's a confidentiality clause in turn. And that's where we've done, I can't think of the number off the top of my head, but it's, we're not talking about the thousands and thousands of major invoices that we serve. We're talking about in the low, maybe, I was going to say between maybe 100, 100 or maybe 50 cases of where we've done this, out of thousands of invoices that have been served. So it's not a case of this is something that is proactively jumped to, and I think-
• Media now though.
• I suppose the suggestion is that if there weren't NDAs on those 100, 150, then there may well be other billing challenges that come. But we are going to look at that in January. We are going to look at major errors. The one thing just on billing transparency, I do want to ask, if a resident challenges their service charge and you guys accept that their mistakes have made, do you automatically reduce the service charge for all other residents on that block?
• That's true, I'm dashed, Robert.
• Yeah, so for the annual service charges, in this scenario, you highlight, there's a works order, we agree, wasn't done or wasn't done to a good standard funded, then we will refund automatically for the leaseholders in that block.
• Yes.
• Just to be clear, this is only leaseholders, tenants aren't rushed at the same one.
• Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• I'm afraid we can't, but Alice, please do come back to us in January.
• I will do, it's just like completely disagree with what you said about negotiating.
• Okay, well, we will revisit this in a great deal of detail. We made a specific decision to move it to our next meeting for that reason. Okay, I know we may have other things you want to raise, but I am going to move on if that's okay, 'cause you've got another item to get to. So in terms of recommendations, I think sort of a quicker, more comprehensive response to complaints. I also would like to ask, when really formal complaints are made, as we raised, Alison, from I think one of your residents, could there be an option in future when people make formal complaints to kind of have their Councillor made aware of a formal complaint that's been made? I think many people are unaware of that, and maybe that could be explored. I think it'd be interesting to get, if the issues that Kevin has raised could be looked into, and a kind of comprehensive response provided to him, and any outstanding issues resolved with regards to the antisocial behaviour on estates. It'd also be interesting to get an update from officers about any sort of, you know, what is the plan to support remaining residents on estates that are being vacated, particularly when it comes to antisocial behaviour, and also access to things like hot water. We have, I think, looking at that, ensuring that failed or partial repairs, which require revisit, don't result in double charging. If it's the fault of the repairs team that haven't done the repair, I don't see why residents should be ill twice for that. And ensuring that assessments of repairs include a planned resolution, including the parts that are needed, and also ensuring that going forward, where possible, lift replacements are done with kind of modern standard lifts, with replacing parts in abundance. Anything else? We didn't touch on it. I wanted to understand whether we have enough people on the community mental health team, 'cause mental health is a massive issue, causing antisocial behaviour, how we deal with that. Do we have people that are trained, fully trained in that? And also, our summer sort of prevention of, you know, whether it gets increasingly well, gets good at summer and there's more and more sort of parties and so what, you know, and the police just are non-responsive to it. So what are we doing to ensure that there was some kinds of resilience, there is a proactive engagement with parents, because usually it's children that are doing this, jumping on roofs and having parties and smoking weed and whatever, and no one is attending to this. So what are we doing about that?
• Thank you. Okay, now we move on to the final item of core business for science meetings, sport and leisure in estates, which is item six in the published agenda pack, pages 69 and 76. We'll first hear again from our Deputy Cabinet Member for Housing Investment, you have up to five minutes.
• Thank you very much, this is the last one. Access in sports and leisure facilities can improve the health and mental wellbeing of our residents and support them to thrive. We want our state to be welcome spaces for our residents and a great place for our young people to grow up. Both our housing strategy and our child-friendly land-based strategy reflect this ambition. We have over 200 play area, including pool pools, outdoor gyms, play areas, and table tennis. We have taken key steps to improving these facilities, including beginning to remove no whole game signs, which we know our young people will welcome. The paper goes into detail on the range of aspects of sports and leisure on our state from inspection, regimes, pair, and the servicing of outdoor gyms. The paper also covers recent projects, including upgrade to play area and your town, as well as a new pool court in Woodfell. We have ambition to go further. A key project to the council is currently working alongside the Foothill Foundation is the creation of a new play zone to provide sports programme to all those currently engaged in sports. Thank you, Chair.
• Thank you very much. Now, I don't think we have any witnesses to speak. There was a late request by Sandy. (indistinct) Yeah, that's what I was to say. Andy, thank you for coming. You have three, if you'd like to, you could sit there or come to the table.
• Come to the table.
• That's Nick. (indistinct)
• And the plan, I live on Cushingham Gardens this day. Was in trouble to you people for years now. And I'm a retired civil servant. So I know all the tricks, especially you, Chris.
• That's fine.
• So basically, I'd like to draw your attention to point two on two, safety. Where you said the safety of used players is of the utmost importance. Rows and cares can be assured that the estate players are safe or inspected previously. What was my style when we'd request vendors? Blah, blah, blah. It's not actually very accurate where a play area in our community hall is involved because it's a very faulty equipment and rotting and the soft play area having hardened and de-laminated for five years now, and nothing has been done. So a play area that gets used, I've got figures here. So it was at 59 children's parties in the last 12 months. Two league parties. Community events, including that annual Easter egg hunt and the Brookson Chamber Orchestra has played there. We currently have three foxholes in a garden the size of this hall. And much of the wooden play that was put in place in the 1990s has rotted out. We've actually asked your people to come in, remove and make safe. That hasn't happened. The last inspection we had was three years ago. The community hall itself is affected by this. We can't get repairs done on the whole area. And because we've formed a TMO and just to give you a bit of information, it's nothing like Kensington and Chelsea's one. That was an ALMO that was given the wrong name. This is a tenant management organisation. We can't move on with progressing, getting everything signed off by the council because we can't get the play area sorted out. We can't sort out the rest of the community hall where our office should be because everything's confused. Also, you have virtually no post inspection regime. So when work does get done, it's not post inspected to see whether it's any good. You allow your contractors to mark their own homework there. You're supposed to post inspect one in 100 repairs. Nobody on my entire estate had phone call or a postcard or anything to check up whether their repair has been done.
• Thank you very much. Thank you.
• No problem.
• Okay, over to members questions.
• Before we do that, I'd just like to call out the-
• That's what I would like to do too. (indistinct chatter)
• Can I say, I'm comfortable with officers being singled out for praise, but I'm not comfortable with officers being singled out. I don't think that- (indistinct chatter)
• Absolutely. (indistinct chatter)
• Had your three minutes, thank you. Alison, over to you.
• A very stressful job in itself, so-
• Thank you, anyway. Just one thing that has to be flagged on here, and I just want to say congratulations on the water play in Clapham town. I'm aware it's not on the estate, but I really, really think I've had, I would say it's 100% support for the incredible work that has been done there and the immense popularity, especially as it's provided to many families who aren't able to afford anywhere else to go. So I'm extremely grateful. I'm aware it's not on the estate, but I wanted to say thank you for that.
• Diana.
• I'm glad we're ending on this item, because actually in Wells, we have, yes, things could always be better, but I think our sports, our provision and our estates is actually really fantastic. My complaint is that we're not engaging with the whole community to use the facilities. So you have a very diverse population and you have, say, maybe Muslim women who are concerned about being out in the open air, using our sporting equipment. Can we be creative, maybe put some screens up and then have an officer, a sports trainer to come and do a session for people to get them to use more facilities? Because I know that more of them would be used if they were, when you walk around the estate, you will see the usual suspects of body trainers, bodybuilders using our facilities or maybe just kids. But there are lots of people that should be, that I think we really can be engaging with. So can we look at that? Repairs, yes, I've had issues before with Valley Road Estate, but again, we flag things up and they are being attended to. In terms of using, my complaint is about how we get our facilities to be used more. So are we engaging with local groups? Are we looking at maybe not charging so much to get local groups to use our facilities, whether it's a local netball team or just different schools as well? Just are we trying to get our community to use our facilities at a much reduced rate so that at least more kids are getting the opportunity? That's my two pennies.
• Thank you, yes.
• I don't have a question, I just want to congratulate you on your no ball game sign.
• Yeah, yeah. And I do want to ask on that actually, do you guys have a sort of a timeline? I know it's an ongoing project, but for a timeline of...
• Sorry, I interrupted your chat today.
• No, no, no, go on, yay, yay.
• Pull down, is that what you're gonna do?
• Yeah, yeah, effectively, yeah, if it's going so well.
• A year.
• It's a year.
• One year, fantastic, great. I don't know if officers wanted to respond to any of the comments.
• Yeah, they will. I don't think we do charge for any use of any type of Facebook media.
• No charge.
• So we need to just get people to come.
• Yeah.
• Well, I can speak to Sandra and Mahim from the engagement team.
• Right, yeah.
• But I'll also take away your query about Cressing and Engagement.
• Thank you.
• That's normally my experience.
• No, no, I just thought, yeah, the question, I mean, it's already been answered. You've seen, you mentioned in terms of engagement, it's an area I'm looking at. And one of the things we are doing, there are teams within the teams offices here, is that looking at engaging those, you know, marginalized, whether it's in language barriers, young children, and a similar thing is happening already in some of our states in the North, where young people are involved, and others are involved in terms of coming in ideas, sort of improving those play areas, and that the council is doing everything. And this is an area that I'm looking personally to make sure that we are doing what was said.
• Fantastic.
• Fantastic.
• Thank you. So just as recommendations.
• So can I just add? Obviously, I just wanted to come in in that comment, and we appreciate in terms of our officers here, and the professionalism, and what they have to face every day in terms of dealing with a lot of sensitive cases. And it is very upsetting to be singled out one officer. Well, we have many here. And Chris, we appreciate all your hard work, and continue in terms of-
• We'll call you out, though. We'll always call you out. Nicely done. In terms of recommendations, so I think I have three. One is to make sure that we're inspecting work after repairs, and not just allowing contractors to mark their own homework. The second, already noted, is to pick up the specific issues referenced in Preston Gardens. And thirdly, it's about ensuring that the marginalised communities are fully engaged in the kind of design and ongoing use of these facilities. And with that, fantastic. Okay, on to... All right, so there's no any suggestions, and re-summarise all our recommendations. I'm actually not minding to do that, 'cause we haven't had anything before. (all laughing) Yes, we're gonna read them for minutes tomorrow. And finally, we turn to the work programme, which is item seven in the published agenda, back from pages 77 to 96. Do we have any comments from members? I had a couple of notes, which were on, in terms of our next meeting, on major works. It'd be great to get a kind of update on the stock condition survey, and also look at the reasons for the delays we've had. I have written down here, enabling private tenants to fund their own improvements, so clearly I'm really on that, 'cause I brought up earlier. And also to look at the news stories, as well as the witness statement we've had here tonight, about the charging issues when it comes to major works and NGAs. On new homes delivery, I wanted to kind of build on the open scrutiny meeting in June 2024, which looked at the new homes programme, including player targets, and also look at the transition of homes to Lambeth, sort of in-house. But any other comments from anyone else? Not right now. (laughing)
• And I suppose also the point we mentioned about having a future meeting to look at the new proposed plan in the following meeting.
• I missed anything, would you?
• No, I'll just ask members to review the action log, 'cause it goes on, of course.
• Yes, absolutely.
• Yes.
• It's quite regular.
• Yes, yeah.
• Adrian?
• On the point of something or other, shouldn't we take up with the Brixton Buzz, the incorrect information they publicised about this meeting?
• They said, Adrian?
• They said, we're going to be discussing tonight what we're going to be discussing in general.
• Oh, right, well-
• Tonight, especially, huge people outside.
• They're gonna hate us regardless.
• Yeah, exactly. (laughing) Okay, I am, in that case, gonna give everyone six minutes of their lives back. And thank you, officers, for your time.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Thank you. (laughing) [INAUDIBLE]