New Five Year Contract for RBH

In recent surveys of all the borough’s council tenants, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) came top as the preferred choice company to manage the 14,500 Council homes in Heywood, Middleton, Rochdale and Pennines. 

Four years ago, management of the Council’s housing stock was transferred to RBH - an arms-length management organisation (ALMO) owned by the Council - on a five-year contract. This was primarily to allow access to over £120M of government funding to bring homes up to the Government’s Decent Standard. As an arms-length company, RBH has its own board of directors, which includes six tenants, directly elected by tenants in their township, four councillors and three independent members. From its inception, RBH took over all aspects of running the Council’s homes including collecting rents, letting homes, maintenance and repair.

As the contract was up for renewal, Councillors had to decide now whether to continue with RBH or to find another solution.

The survey results showed that the majority of tenants (76 per cent) wanted to continue with RBH, 20 per cent said they wanted the Council to take it back and four per cent thought management should go to a housing association.  This survey, together with other supporting evidence helped Councillors to decide that they wanted to award RBH a further 5 year contract.

Councillor Zulfiqar Ali, lead member for Housing and Community Cohesion said ‘this was a very important decision for the Council to make and we wanted to be sure that the majority of our tenants supported it.  I am pleased that we have been able to make this decision and look forward to working with RBH to continue improving the services for our tenants and seeking ways to build new council homes’.

RBH allows tenants to be at the heart of the decision-making process with significant representation on the board.  Tenants also had a major say in how the Major Investment Programme “Raising the Standard” was carried out, right down to choosing the two contractors that did the work – Bramalls and Crudens.

But RBH doesn’t just manage homes. It also contributes to a number of the Council’s wider aims, such as reducing crime and the fear of crime by improving security to homes and tackling anti-social behaviour. Their Legal Services and Enforcement Team has also helped put local people into local jobs, with its trainee and apprenticeship programme and through staff employeed by the two contractors. Indeed, over 80% of the 600 staff working for RBH live locally.

RBH have worked to improve the health of residents by improving the condition and energy efficiency of their homes as well as reducing pollution and waste generally. One visible example of this is the installation of solar panels to the roofs of College Bank flats, near Rochdale town centre. £100,000 has also been spent on tree management and planting and £1.5M is being allocated to environmental improvements identified by local tenants groups.

As the new five-year contract comes into effect RBH will be looking into other areas for improvement.

They include redevelopment of land on Council estates, further remodelling of estates themselves, closer working with the Safer Communities Partnership to back up the fight against crime and anti-social behaviour, increasing support for vulnerable tenants and working to prevent homelessness. In approving another five-year contract for RBH, the Council will be working with RBH on a development plan to build on this success and address new priorities.

The Audit Commission has already given Rochdale Boroughwide Housing a two-star (good) rating and the organisation hopes that the improvements it is able to make will  lead to three-star (excellent) status. This will mean that the organisation will be able to apply for Government funding to build new homes, as well as just managing them.