British Gas continues expansion in social housing
British Gas has bought heating contractor PH Jones, in a £30m deal. The energy giant began showing an interest in the sector last year when it partnered with Mears to provide maintenance services. British Gas will provide central heating and maintenance services for over 250,000 properties and will also take on 850 of PH Jones's employees.
More than 6,000 empty council homes in London
BBC One's The Politics Show used a Freedom of Information request to reveal that over 6,000 council homes are unoccupied in London. The report claimed that over 2,300 properties had been vacant for over a year with around a third of empty properties in need of repair. The news comes as the government announced plans to encourage regeneration, including the New Homes Bonus to encourage councils to use unoccupied council houses and £100m given to the HCA to aid social landlords in redeveloping their empty properties.
Social housing fraud: Calls to close legal loopholes
Alison Seabeck, shadow housing minister, has lodged a number of amendments to the localism bill, due to be discussed in the House of Commons this week, to give councils the power to revoke social housing from those who play the system. Seabeck said, "At the moment, the law allows people who defraud their way to a council house to keep it. That's plainly wrong – the law needs to be on the side of people who stick to the rules, not those who willfully break them." The move comes after a Panorama investigation uncovered some tenants sub-letting their council houses, while the Chartered Institute of Housing recently set up an advice bureau to help social landlords become more efficient by reducing fraud and setting up frameworks to make downsizing more simple.
Almo 'likely to be wound up' after council's in-house move
Rotherham Borough Council has taken back control of its 21,000 council houses, after six years of outsourcing management to 2010 Rotherham Ltd. The council resolved to manage its social housing in-house as the Decent Homes programme comes to a close. Out of the 7,590 completed questionnaires, 90% of tenants believed they would prefer the council to directly govern social housing. A number of Almos were altered to become Registered Providers to aid the council's move, which has been welcomed as being more economical. Jahangir Akhtar, cabinet member for housing for Rotherham Borough Council, said: "By making this move we can make significant savings from administration, management and other back-office functions. These savings can then be transferred to frontline housing services - to the direct benefit of our tenants and leaseholders."
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