East Kent councils - Working together with you:
The four East Kent councils of Canterbury, Dover, Shepway and Thanet have been looking at ways we can work together, with tenants and leaseholders, to improve the day to day running of council housing and the management of our estates.
We have prepared these web pages to tell you more about our plans for improving your council housing services. We will also send you more information in your tenant newsletters.
What we’re hoping to do
We’ve looked at lots of different ways for the four councils to work more closely together to improve services and provide better value for money for our tenants and leaseholders.
We believe that the best way to deliver these improvements to over 18,000 tenants and leaseholders is for the four councils to jointly set up a new organisation, owned and run by the four councils, to manage our council houses and estates.
The new organisation
We propose to use a model used by other councils called an ‘arms length management organisation’ (ALMO) to provide the day to day services you currently receive, such as repairs, rent collection, dealing with tenancy matters and anti-social behaviour. There are already over 69 ALMO’s managing more than 1 million council homes, which makes up more than half of local council housing in the UK.
Why are we doing this?
Our plans to set up an ALMO for the four East Kent councils is based on the success of ALMO’s elsewhere in the country. ALMO’s provide the most successful form of housing management overall, with more than 80% of ALMO’s scoring as amongst the highest performing social landlords in the UK.
Their success is not just the delivery of improved services but also the greater efficiencies and wider social benefits that they bring. This tends to be down to the input from the ALMO board, staffing structures, and the way tenants have helped to drive up service standards. People who live in homes managed by ALMO’s have a real say in how their estates are managed, which has undoubtedly led to improved services.
Furthermore, with our plans for East Kent, we know that by joining the four housing services together into a single organisation, we will be able to make efficiency savings and invest those into improving your housing services.
