JUST hours away from the new government’s first budget, the NFA’s council-owned members have already received both the best and the most worrying of news.

The first full year of Tenant Satisfaction Measure surveys are now in – and they show that the ALMO model and our local authority-owned members are more than holding their own in the council housing sector. While not complacent, they have every right to be proud of that.

Meanwhile, Savills’ independent assessment of the dire state of local authority housing finances, commissioned by the NFA with partners ARCH and the LGA, sits uncomfortably alongside this week’s stories that one in four councils fear Section 114 notices and effective bankruptcy.

So there’s the good news and the bad news. But what do we do with it?

More than £10 billion has disappeared from the pot that funds repairs, maintenance and improvement to council homes.

We hope some encouraging news pointing the way forward will come from the Chancellor. But as she juggles with the numbers and the many competing demands on the public purse, social housing landlords have grappled for years now with the challenges of acting on and paying for an array of new regulation, and with very little extra government funding. Pandemic-exacerbated backlogs are still having a knock-on effect on tenant concerns and complaints, and are magnified by a nationwide skills and labour shortages.

As our sector contemplates how it might contribute to the new government’s ambition to create 1.5 million new homes in the next five years, we know only too well the supply chain difficulties afflicting the whole construction sector, we too are reeling from the impact of the inflation shock of the last two years. All of this has been devastating to our sector’s capacity to plan long-term.

Council landlords have also had to watch Right to Buy purchases at unsustainable discounts chip away at affordable housing supply and finances, leaving fewer rents to service the same level of debt. Real-terms rent cuts imposed by central government for the last eight years have steadily eroded maintenance budgets.

The Savills research tells us, for instance, that the government’s rent cap on local authority housing between 2015 and 2020 took more than £10 billion out of the pot from which repairs, maintenance and improvements to council homes are funded. How could any service, public or private, stay solvent in such circumstances?

It’s clearly encouraging for NFA members that insight specialists at Housemark recently found ALMO council housing management, on average, delivers not only better TSM results, but also excellent value for money.

But just as we put aside despair at our parent councils’ difficulties with their HRAs and do what we can with what we’ve got, so we don’t take the comparatively good performance of our mode of delivering social housing as a charter for complacency – or for name-calling. 

This is a good time to recall that when the Regulator for Social Housing launched the TSMs last year, they were crystal clear that this was not about league tables, and not about damnation or self-congratulation.

The point – the whole point – was to learn how we could improve.

We have not lost sight of the ultimate goal of the TSMs – quality social housing and better services. 

So across the ALMO sector I hear acknowledgement that, in common with both housing associations and directly managed council housing, the TSMs show us that our weakest areas are around complaints, dealing with anti-social behaviour, and listening to tenant views and acting upon them.

And it’s this that the TSMs were designed for – to illuminate as precisely as possible the pathway to improvement.

NFA members, I know, will be first to acknowledge that there is much work to be done – and all their focus will be on doing what they do better, no matter how well they may already be doing it. Any help that comes from the Treasury, especially in making Right to Buy more sustainable and otherwise stabilising social landlord income, will be a bonus. 

In the meantime we can say with confidence to tenants and parent councils that, given scarce resources and intense financial and structural pressures all round, ALMO council housing management delivery remains an excellent, value-for-money option that tenants favour.

But we haven’t lost sight of the ultimate goal: quality social housing and better services.

I want to congratulate all NFA members on these very encouraging TSM results. I also want to say that everyone who wants the best possible service for council tenants should take a close look at the ALMO model. When delivered within a joined-up, supportive and healthy council-ALMO relationship, I believe it is unbeatable.