New report on progress of WHQS

Following on from the Wales Audit Office report in January, the Welsh Government have this week published a report on the progress of the Welsh Housing Quality Standard.

The key points from the latest release are:

• At 31 March 2012 a total of 72,329 social housing dwellings (33 per cent) were fully compliant with the WHQS and a further 19,825 dwellings (9 per cent) were compliant subject to acceptable fails.
• A greater proportion of registered social landlord (RSL) dwellings had achieved full compliance at 31 March 2012 at 40 per cent (53,260 dwellings) compared to 22 per cent (19,069 dwellings) of local authority dwellings. RSLs also had a higher proportion of their dwellings achieving compliance subject to acceptable fails at 14 per cent compared with 2 per cent of local authority dwellings.

Responding to the latest figures, Community Housing Cymru Chief Executive, Nick Bennett said: “These new statistics show that we’ve made progress in meeting the WHQS but we know we have more to do. Out of the 222,000 social housing properties in Wales, 133,568 are now owned and managed by our members, with more than half of these properties - 70,258 belonging to stock transfer organisations. Due to the short time period between their creation and the 2012 deadline some have been granted an extension to achieve the WHQS.

Our own commissioned research by the Welsh Economic Research Unit, shows that our members spent £235.8m on maintenance, repairs and upgrading homes (including WHQS spend) for 2010/11, creating many job and training opportunities for local people while doing so.

These findings follow a report by the Wales Audit Office in January this year which found that by 2016/17 performance by members will have reached 98% and all five of the organisations with an extended deadline for meeting the standard until 2014/15 will have 100% of their homes meeting the standard across all of the key components.”