Newcastle City Council to take back control of social housing

Your Homes Newcastle's head office is in South Gosforth

A local authority is poised to sign off plans to take back control of its social housing.

Newcastle City Council established Your Homes Newcastle (YHN) in 2004 to manage the stock.

Scrapping YHN, which oversees 25,000 homes, would save almost £1m a year, it said.

Labour councillor Irim Ali assured tenants they would still be able to access services and the transition would be "as smooth as possible".

A report to the council's cabinet claimed closing YHN would save £900,000 in 2025-26 and would allow the authority to improve services for tenants.

"Repairs, in particular, is an area where tenants and leaseholders want to see significant improvements, both in terms of the quality of work carried out, the time taken to complete it and the wider customer experience," the report said.

Public support

The council said there was "overwhelming public support" for its plans to take housing services back in-house.

A survey of YHN tenants, leaseholders and the general public found 85.7% of people backed the proposal.

However, the 4,323 comments received represented a response rate of less than 15%, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

It is expected that the council will formally agree to scrap YHN at a meeting later in November.

Once approved, the transfer of the organisation and its staff to the council would take place in July 2024.

Staff would be transferred under TUPE regulations and would not be at risk of redundancy, the authority said.

The plans were initially announced in the summer and led to YHN's managing director Tina Drury quitting her post in response to the restructuring.