Council repairs to face checks

by Kathy Watson



Spot checks are to be carried out on council house repairs under a new Treasury investigation into the quality of local government housing work.

Launching the initiative last week, the Treasury said: "There is currently too much variation in the cost of repairs and the time taken to carry them out. This project will seek to find out why these differences exist and will carry out spot-checks on repair work to discover the level of customer satisfaction with repairs."

Andrew Foster, controller of the Audit Commission will head the team comparing housing repairs in his role as a member of the newly launched Public Services Productivity Panel. The Treasury remit for the group is to find £8 billion a year of efficiency improvements throughout the whole of the public sector by 2001-2.

Up to £1.5 billion a year is spent by local authorities on housing repair.

The Local Government Association said it welcomed the initiative, conceding that there are bound to be disparities across the 360 local authorities.

But Matthew Warburton, head of strategy at LGA, said the panel's task might not be easy. He cautioned: "There are wide variations in local circumstances which have caused earlier working parties to fail. Things like unreliability of data on stock condition, lack of robust data on conditions of high rise and non traditionally constructed dwellings and the expense of repairs in some areas where high materials security is needed."