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THE CITY OF EDINBURGH COUNCIL’S HOUSING SERVICES INSPECTION REPORT

The Scottish Housing Regulator today published its inspection report on City of Edinburgh Council’s housing service. It awarded the Council an “excellent” rating for its housing management services and a “good” rating for its asset management and repairs services.

The purpose of inspection is to provide an independent external assessment of the effectiveness of housing service delivery, and make recommendations to help improvement.

Lesley Kerr, Acting Head of Inspection at The Scottish Housing Regulator, said:

“Our inspectors found that the City of Edinburgh Council has a number of significant strengths across its services. It provides excellent access to its housing and to its responsive repairs service, has an excellent approach to managing antisocial behaviour, is developing ambitious and innovative plans to build new council homes and it reports consistent improvement in tenant satisfaction across all of its housing management services.

The Council works in a very challenging context of high pressure on its housing resources and we found a consistent track record of improvement in its services over several years. It has a culture clearly focused on improvement, an excellent performance management framework and a strong awareness of where it needs to improve overall. Its approach to gathering service user feedback is excellent and it involves its customers in service improvement activities in an excellent range of ways.

The Council is aware it faces challenges in managing its Housing Revenue Account to ensure it can deliver its planned investment and build new houses and we saw it has plans in place to achieve this.”

Councillor Paul Edie, Housing Leader of the City of Edinburgh Council, said:  "These gradings are thoroughly deserved and our excellent staff should be congratulated for this terrific achievement.

"The Regulator’s assessment can be added to a number of other important results that Services for Communities has achieved: The number of tenants evicted from their homes is at a record low, homelessness has fallen for the fourth year running in spite of the dire economic circumstances and work is due to start on the first new Council homes for a generation.

"We are committed to providing tenants in Edinburgh with excellent housing services and here is independent proof that we are meeting that goal."

NOTES TO NEWS EDITORS

1. Inspectors gave the following grades:

2. Full details of the City of Edinburgh Council inspection report can be found on the Scottish Housing Regulator website at www.scottishhousingregulator.gov.uk

3. The Scottish Housing Regulator came into operation on 1 April 2008. It is the successor to Communities Scotland’s Regulation & Inspection Division. It operates the powers and duties of the regulation of social housing which are set out in the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001. The Scottish Housing Regulator is an arm’s length executive agency of the Scottish Government. It has operational independence, while being accountable to Scottish Ministers and through them to the Scottish Parliament for the standard of its work.