Questions over 'serious failings' in Newcastle council housing after raft of problems unearthed

Civic centre bosses in Newcastle expect to be told there are serious failings in the city’s council housing.

Councillors were told on Thursday that Newcastle City Council anticipate being awarded a C3 grading by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH), meaning that there are "serious failings" and that the landlord needs to make "significant improvements". It comes after the authority, which took back control of its 25,000-strong council housing stock from the now-abolished Your Homes Newcastle this summer, unearthed 16 areas where it is falling short of newly-introduced RSH standards – including on safety and rent issues.

Vicky McDermott, the council’s director of housing and communities, faced questions from the authority’s overview and scrutiny committee on the huge scale of the problems uncovered after YHN’s axe. The gaps identified from the council’s own assessment include a lack of an up-to-date stock condition survey, a backlog of over 2,000 damp and mould cases, and poor records of domestic violence-related data.

Damning verdicts in the council’s new plan for its housing stock include the conclusion that residents feel “undervalued” and “ignored", that living conditions “aren’t good enough”, and that people cannot find the homes they need to downsize, afford rent, tackle overcrowding or manage ageing and health concerns. Meanwhile, there are more than 9,000 households on the city’s social housing waiting list – a number that has just 52% in two years, while there has also been an 84% jump in the number of households with an ‘urgent need’.

Lib Dem councillor Wendy Taylor described the report as “quite hard reading” and questioned why the issues had not come to light before now. She said: “My immediate reaction is that there are a lot of issues that have come up and need sorting. Why have they not come up when YHN was running it? There were councillors on the [YHN] board and officers. Why did we not realise then?”

YHN had previously been in charge of the city’s council housing since 2004, before the council decided to close the arms-length management organisation and return its services to the civic centre. Ms McDermott said that many of the issues the council’s housing team was now facing had arisen because of a major change in national regulations which came into force on April 1 this year and set out a “more specific set of standards that we are expected to meet”.

She added: “I also think that, inevitably, when someone comes in with a fresh set of eyes they will find things that people might not have noticed before.”

The council is now undertaking a full survey of its homes which could take until June 2027 to complete, while it has also pledged to visit every one of its tenants over the next year and work to bring more of the roughly 900 empty properties it has back into use. Addressing the importance of the housing condition survey, Ms McDermott said: “That will be key to tell us any underlying issues we have and what we need to do to relieve those. The issues relating to safety and quality are my highest priority. My focus will be safety first, then decency, then anything else.”

She added that it was “very difficult for us to say” what the financial cost of solving the housing problems would be. YHN’s final tenant satisfaction survey showed that only 45.2% of residents are happy with the handling of anti-social behaviour incidents and just 17.4% with the handling of complaints.

The council has pledged to resolve damp and mould problems at a rate of 50 per week, improve its call response times, retrofit four tower blocks by March 2026, and spend an extra £3.9 million repairing void homes in the current financial year.

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