Beyond Decent Homes

RBH’s current forecast is that the MRA will enable it keep the stock at the decent standard. Accrued surpluses in the HRA will enable it to deliver £8 millions of environmental improvements over the next three years. Gill Walch, RBH’s Chair comments “We’re very proud that we met the decent homes target so quickly. It’s a massive achievement, but although the Decent Standard Plus will be a smaller programme it will bring greater challenges, not least even greater tenant involvement.”

RBH sought not only Egan style partnering, but also to bring tenants into the partnership. Following a thorough procurement process RBH’s 19 member selection panel, which included 13 tenant representatives, selected Bramall Construction and Cruden Construction using a combination of pre-qualification questionnaire submission scoring, tender submission based on quality and price criteria, site visit reality checks and final interview.

“A primary objective of the Major Investment Programme was to ensure that we developed and maintained sustainable communities,” says Rochdale Boroughwide Housing Managing Director, Paul Neate.

“That meant that from the very beginning we really engaged with tenants and residents’ associations in planning objectives, always ensuring that we were addressing issues that were important to them.”

Tenant choice was given a top priority with a flexible programme of choices. Six choices of fire, five choices of kitchen and a choice of additional item from a list of sixteen items were offered to tenants.

The programme delivered 8,000 new kitchens, 4,400 new bathrooms, 8,400 central heating systems and 6,700 electrical upgrades.

Rochdale Boroughwide Housing was also determined that arrangements should be made to ensure that a proportion of contractor’s labour forces should comprise local people, with access to real training opportunities and long-term job prospects.

The result was that local people represented more than 40% of the programme’s total labour force. With up to £250,000 being generated for every three local people employed, that means that more than £28 million was kept in the local economy.

As well as its Decent Standard Plus RBH also wants to build new desperately needed properties to fill the void left by the Right to Buy and natural wastage of older properties. RBH is working on its own model with Pennington Consulting and it local authority.

Paul Beardmore, Rochdale Council’s Head of Strategic Housing Services said “We are looking to the DCLG to provide the financial freedoms to enable our ALMO to help deliver our housing strategy. One of our key housing strat aims is to increase the number of new social rented homes built each year to meet clearly identified local needs. We are working with RBH on a detailed project plan for a pilot new build scheme”