Poor performance not behind ALMO decision, insists Harrow

Harrow council’s housing management was well below the two-star standard needed to access government funding when it ditched plans for an arm’s-length management organisation last week.

A briefing pack for candidates for the job of ALMO chief executive, advertised just days before the plan was abandoned, admitted that services to be transferred to the organisation were the weakest in the whole housing service and “significant improvements” would be required to achieve a two-star rating.

Council minutes obtained by Housing Today reveal the housing department is still dealing with the fallout from a £2m overspend on its responsive maintenance budget that resulted in a resignation, the sacking of two consultants and a flurry of disciplinary actions.

In the briefing pack, the council announced new management posts to address identified weaknesses in housing management.

A member of Harrow’s shadow ALMO board said: “The place is in meltdown. The ALMO was supposed to launch last November. Then it was April. Then 1 September, then 30 September. Finally, they said that if we didn’t launch by January next year, we wouldn’t have time to spend the government funding.”

A council spokesman said: “No one can predict whether or not the council would have won two-star status and it played no part in the decision taken by the council.”

However, one reason given by council cabinet member for housing Keith Burchell for deciding to use prudential borrowing, rather than transfer stock to an ALMO, was that this would have guaranteed funding to bring estates up to the decent homes standard and pay for other regeneration costs.

Harrow achieved two-star status for its entire housing service in November 2003 but this was boosted by a homelessness service that has been given beacon status by the government and was not due to transfer to the ALMO.

The council concedes that a contributing factor in its decision to ditch the ALMO was housing managers seriously underestimating the costs of meeting the decent homes standard due to inadequate sampling.

Harrow was allocated £11.8m from round three of the government’s ALMO programme and had hoped to access a further £4.2m. The total forecast cost of an investment programme that would exceed the decent homes target in 2010 is £65m.