Nottingham has the resources to deal with a council house repairs backlog that could cost over £900,000, an official says.
Nottingham City Council began a full stock condition survey of almost all of its 25,000 properties in 2024.
This started shortly before the Regulator for Social Housing (RSH) conducted an inspection and gave the authority the second-lowest possible rating in January last year.
The regulator said it uncovered almost 1,000 live cases of repairs, which were a “significant driver of complaints”.
Further problems included gaps in checks on smoke and carbon monoxide detection measures.
The last full check was done almost a decade ago.
So far, 76.2 per cent of all homes have been surveyed, and the estimated repairs bill now totals £958 millions.
The significant bill was highlighted at an audit committee meeting on Friday (March 27), after an auditor who reviews the council’s accounts said it presented a “significant weakness”.
Andrew Middleton, an independent member of the committee, said: “The area that I was particularly alerted to was the £958 million housing repairs, which not only gives us a problem that we’ve got a lot of disgruntled and unhappy tenants, but also that we’ve got the Regulator of Social Housing seeking satisfaction.”
Stuart Fair, the council’s corporate director of finance, said the figure is the estimated cost of repairs that the authority needs to invest through the Housing Revenue Account to get the stock condition to a certain point.
“We’ve certainly got the resources to deal with it,” he said.
“It is constrained by capacity, contractor capacity to deal with it. But we have a programme of improvements to address that.
“This is not unusual for such an asset base.”
New figures show the council has now surveyed 18,815 homes out of its entire stock of 24,701 homes.
The wards that have the highest percentage of homes left to be surveyed include Hyson Green and the Arboretum, where only 59.6 per cent of council homes have been looked at, as well as Radford at 63.8 per cent and Berridge at 67.7 per cent.
The council says the key problem now is tenants deciding whether to let the surveyors in to have a look at their homes.
In total, 5,571 homes are yet to be surveyed, and 315 households have refused access.
