Deliberate damage to council houses lands local authority with £150k bill

Alec Doyle, Local Democracy Reporter

Rogue social housing tenants who deliberately damage their property before abandoning it have left a council with a repair bill of over £150,000.

Wrexham County Borough Council’s Housing Department were praised by members of the Homes and Environment Scrutiny Committee for reducing the number of void – or vacant – properties across more than 11,000 social housing properties that the authority operates and improving homes up to Welsh Housing Quality Standard as they become vacant.

But a minority of tenants each year are landing the council with an excessive repair bill.

In the last year 662 tenants carried out wilful or deliberate damage to their properties causing damage that cost £162,166.71 to repair.

Charge tenants

The council’s policy is to charge tenants for repairs to deliberate damage but, due largely to tenants abandoning the home, only 82 recharges could be made, with the authority only recovering £11,242.89.

That is just 6.9% of the cost of the damages – and a problem councillors said needs to be solved.

“Really 6% is a very low figure in terms of what we’re getting back,” said Cllr Mike Morris. “I’d like to know if there are any measures to address that in some shape or form or any sanctions that we’re putting on contract holders?

“I can understand the difficulty where you say you’ve set up payment plans because not everybody can pay, but those are in tenanted properties. You do wonder if they’re only paying a pound a week, are we ever going to see the money coming back in?

“Do we keep the contract holders on a watching brief in terms of future behavior, in terms of how they look after their properties? Because quite clearly that’s a significant drain on the money that we’re getting in.”

Chair of the committee Cllr Paul Roberts went further: “Quite often in my ward I get frustration from contract holders who’ve lived in their property for 30 years, yet see someone across the road move to the next street, have a brand new refurbished property, brand new kitchen and bathroom, yet they’ve left their current property in an appalling condition.

“Should we be rehousing existing contract holders when they’ve created significant damage to their property?”

No simple solutions

Chief Officer for Housing Rachel Powell said the department was working on the problem, but there were no simple solutions.

“In terms of recharges, I think this is a bit of a complex situation,” she said. “One of the things that we have to do is – for those contract holders who also have rent arrears – we have to prioritise repayment of their rent before we can proceed with recovering anything they’ve been recharged for.

“We do have support in terms of financial inclusion officers. We also have increased our softer support with housing support officers based in each of our estate offices, to proactively assist people before they get to the point where we’re applying recharges because they’ve been deemed to willfully have caused damage to their property.

“We obviously have another set of duties around homelessness prevention. If we were to cease a tenancy or refuse a contract holder a property because of their previous behaviour – the way that they’d left another property for example – they would potentially come back to us through that other arm by presenting as homeless and we would be left trying to find another solution in a different part of the department.

“The most efficient way of working is to ensure that we can support people to live in a way that allows them to retain their tenancy to prevent them from going back around through the system and thus having to keep identifying new accommodation solutions.”

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