Some tenants living in homes owned by Nottingham City Homes in Aspley are not happy with work being carried out, or delays to work, on their properties. One tenant said wrong colour cupboards and tiles have been used to repair their property, another has said she has been waiting months to get solar panels fixed amid the energy crisis, and other residents said they wanted to see money which may have been misspent to have been used on repair work.
It comes as an external report claims £25m has been wrongly spent by Nottingham City Homes and Nottingham City Council. Further investigations revealed on Tuesday (April 26) Nottingham City Homes may have spent £17.158m on the wrong services between 2014/15 and 2020/21, with the City Council spending an additional £8.503m on the wrong services in that same timeframe, according to an external review.
But Nottingham City Homes has hit back, saying it has not wrongly spent £17.158m, and that the money is available in the correct account, which is a fund to carry out work on homes. Nottingham City Homes is a City Council owned company, responsible for council housing in Nottingham, and the company says it has acted in "full transparency and accountability to the council throughout".
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The City Council has already been proven to have allocated £14.367m to the wrong fund. That £14.367m figure is money which was incorrectly credited to the council's General Fund for all council services, instead of being put into the Housing Revenue Account (HRA), which involves income from council tenants' rent and should have been spent on housing repairs. The HRA is ring-fenced, and cannot be used for any other purposes.
Some residents living in Aspley have been among the hardest hit in the wider economic picture, in terms of community centre and proposed library closures to save the city council money, as well as a number of residents there living in Nottingham City Homes properties. They think the money should have been spent on repairing and improving their homes.
Tracey Wilkinson, 36, who lives in Aspley, said: "I'm not surprised to hear more money may have been spent wrongly. Nottingham City Homes are doing my house at the moment, and in my kitchen there are wrong coloured cupboards and tiles going in to repair what's needed.
"They should be the same colour surely, I don't get it. With centres and things closing around here too, there's nowhere left for kids to go either."
Pat Fleet, 63, who lives in Aspley, said: "I was told months ago that I would be able to get solar panels on my house from Nottingham City Homes. But it's been delayed and delayed since I had a survey saying I was eligible for them. I could really do with that now given the energy prices. It's all been trouble since Robin Hood Energy."
Callum March, 31, who lives in Aspley, said: "As a council tax payer, it's not nice to hear this kind of thing happening. Better housing would be nice, the money should have been better spent.
"You never hear those sort of things about money being spent in the wrong areas until something like this happens. But I do think Nottingham City Homes going in-house would help."
Lamin Sanneh, 27, who lives in Aspley, said: "It's bad that it's been wrongly spent, that money could be used on people's homes, especially with things now being so expensive. That money could be really useful to those people."
John Armstrong, 38, a teacher at Rosslyn Park Primary & Nursery School, said: "It's disappointing that money has been spent on the wrong services. If it has found to be wrong, someone really needs to answer that."
The council said it intends to replace the lost money from its reserves, but concerns have been raised by opposition leaders there is not enough cash to replace the money lost. The local authority says the process of repaying their amount has already begun, and a meeting on Thursday (April 28) will take place to consider bringing Nottingham City Homes in-house.
This has been recommended to make sure the HRA is properly ring-fenced. The council has said that this money has been spent on things that have benefitted local people.
The external investigation has been carried out by CIPFA (the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) and Richard Penn, a local government expert. Nottingham City Homes has said that they have not mis-spent the money, and it is available for council housing.
A spokesperson for Nottingham City Homes said: "Nottingham City Homes is wholly owned by the City Council. We only undertake activity requested by or supported by the council.
"There has been full transparency and accountability to the council throughout. We report on performance and finance to the Council, and we have Council nominees on our Board.
"Nothing we do has been undertaken without the council's full knowledge since we were established in 2005. We have noted a number of concerns in the reports being presented to the council, the most concerning being the comment that NCH may have "potentially" spent £17m HRA funding on non-HRA activity.
"We would like to confirm that we haven’t and that this funding remains available for council housing. In addition to managing council housing, we also provide homes for homeless families and survivors of domestic violence - we fund these from the rental income received from those homes without using any funding earmarked for council housing.
"Since Nottingham City Homes was established we have delivered for council tenants, we brought over £200m investment into Nottingham to meet the Decent Homes standard, greatly increasing tenant satisfaction, and delivered the largest programme of new council house building for a generation. We have also managed and maintained council housing very cost effectively.
"Independent benchmarking shows we are nearly £8m a year most cost-effective than other councils and housing associations. This has enabled the Council to keep rents low for tenants - and tenant satisfaction with repairs has risen from 54 percent in 2005 to 80 percent in 2022.
"Delivering the repairs service has been a challenge throughout Covid, when our priority was to keep tenants and staff safe. This has been coupled with supply chain difficulties experienced throughout the sector.
"We now have a programme of catching up on repairs and only last week the NCH Board committed to release a further £500k to reduce the waiting time for tenants. We would prefer not to address individual cases of repairs concerns through the media, but rather to have direct dialogue with our tenants. If the people you have spoken to would like to contact us direct about the issues they mention, they can do so by getting in touch with us via the usual channels."
Councillor David Mellen, leader of Nottingham City Council and Labour councillor for the Dales ward, said: "It's important to make clear that the funding in question has been used for purposes that benefit local people but that are not an appropriate use of what is effectively tenants' money. It also needs to be recognised that in addition to achieving decent homes standards, Nottingham City Homes has worked to improve core housing services, empower tenants and bring about significant improvements to housing stocks, including the response to fire safety following Grenfell and home insulation works.
"This is a clearly a setback, particularly as the council has been making significant progress on improving our financial governance over the last year. This issue demonstrates the importance of that work and how thorough it has been.
"Last year we took swift and firm action to issue a Section 114 Notice and commission two independent reports into the circumstances surrounding the HRA funding. The findings of these investigations show that the finance and governance arrangements around the ring-fencing of the HRA fell seriously short of acceptable standards, although we are disappointed that this wasn't flagged up at the time by the council's external auditors.
"Since these decisions were first taken, new leadership and senior management have shown determination to take the action necessary to address these issues and move forward positively. I would like to reassure our council tenants that we are committed to dealing with these past issues, ensuring that lessons are learnt so that these mistakes cannot be repeated in future."
