Thursday 11 October 2012

Housing: Fraud Success and Tackling Voids

The current edition of Hounslow Homes News that goes to Council tenants and leaseholders in the borough has two welcome pieces of news.

Over the last two years since the Tenancy Fraud Initiative was launched, 96 Council Homes have been recovered by Hounslow Homes, 18 through the courts and 78 where tenants handed the keys back once proceedings to terminate the tenancy have been started.

It's a good result, and shows that the additional investment in staff to take action has more than paid its way by freeing up more much-needed homes to those in housing need.  Information about suspected fraudulent tenancies come from a variety of sources, but neighbours raising concerns can be key to an investigation being initiated.


Secondly, it's good to see the Void times finally starting to improve.  Lead members, myself and then Steve Curran, have been pushing Hounslow Homes and the Council teams to work more closely together to get systems in place to cut down the time taken to re-let homes.  It's not rocket science, but needed some "lean" thinking to get the avoidable glitches out of the system, and I'm glad that work is now seeing results.

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