Improving Our Housing Services

Inspection of Council Housing Services

The Regulator for Social Housing (RSH) completed a thorough inspection of Broxtowe Borough Council in October 2025, in relation to the Regulator’s consumer standards, which are:

Safety and Quality Standard

Requires landlords to provide safe and good-quality homes for their tenants, along with good-quality landlord services

Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard

Requires landlords to be open with tenants and treat them with fairness and respect so they can access services, raise concerns when necessary, influence decision making and hold their landlord to account.

Neighbourhood and Community Standard

Requires landlords to engage with other relevant parties so that tenants can live in safe and well-maintained neighbourhoods and feel safe in their homes.

Tenancy Standard

Sets requirements for the fair allocation and letting of homes, as well as requirements for how tenancies are managed by landlords.

Rating

Following the inspection, Broxtowe Borough Council has received a C3 rating from RSH, meaning that the Council is not meeting the Regulator’s requirements and must work to improve its position. This is the first time that the Council has been assessed in this way following the introduction of new regulations as part of the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023. 

View the full judgement on the RSH website (Opens in a new window).

The inspection concluded that there are serious failings in two areas, which are:

• Fire safety: a lack of clarity about the length of time fire safety actions have been open, as well as a lack of evidence of mitigations in place while these actions remain outstanding.
• Diverse needs: not fully understanding the diverse needs of all our tenants, meaning the Council is unable to proactively tailor services to meet all tenants’ needs, or demonstrate that tenants are receiving fair and equitable outcomes.

 The inspection also identified some weaknesses, which included:

• Data quality and up to date information on the quality of all of our tenants’ homes.

• The approach to collecting and providing performance information to tenants (which limits how tenants can scrutinise performance).

• Limited evidence of how the Council identifies and shares lessons learnt from complaints.

• The accessibility of information available for tenants reporting ASB and hate crime, and how the Council takes prompt and appropriate action.

The inspection did identify a number of positives, with RSH having assurance that the Council is:

• Meeting legal requirements for completing the majority of tests and assessments in all safety and quality areas.
• Delivering an effective, efficient and timely repairs and maintenance and planned improvement service for our tenants (Tenant Satisfaction Measures data for the last two years demonstrates an improvement in tenant satisfaction with repairs).
• Treating tenants and prospective tenants with fairness and respect.
• Working in partnership to deter and tackle ASB and hate incidents in the neighbourhoods that we provide social housing.
• Meeting the tenure requirements of the Tenancy standard.

Making Improvements

The Council’s focus remains on delivering safe, high-quality homes for our residents, and we are committed to learning from the inspection and demonstrating progress. We will continue to work closely with the Regulator as we continue to implement actions within the Service Improvement Plan over the coming months. The plan focuses on a number of activities to improve service delivery, including:

• Continuing with the implementation of activity to reduce the number of outstanding actions following the completed Fire Risk Assessments.
• Continuing with the implementation of activity to fully understand the diverse needs of all our tenants so we can tailor services appropriately.
• Completing the remainder of our stock condition surveys, which will improve the quality of our data on all our tenants’ homes.
• Providing more robust information to our Housing Influence Panel, which will enable tenants to better scrutinise performance.
•  Implementing a better system to capture and share lessons learned from the complaints we receive to improve service delivery.
• Improving the information available for tenants reporting ASB and hate crime, to enable the Council to take prompt and appropriate action.
• Ensuring tenants are fully aware of the timescales aligned to our Damp & Mould policy.
• Improving the visibility of reporting on analysis and associated service improvements (which includes the Tenant Satisfaction Action Plan being published for tenants online).