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SOUTH LANARKSHIRE COUNCIL INSPECTION REPORT

The Scottish Housing Regulator today published its inspection report on South Lanarkshire Council’s housing and homelessness services. It awarded the Council an “excellent” rating for its housing management services, an “excellent” rating for its asset management and repairs services and a “fair” rating for its homelessness services.

The purpose of inspection is to provide an independent external assessment of the effectiveness of housing service delivery, and make recommendations to help improvement.

Lesley Kerr, Acting Head of Inspection at The Scottish Housing Regulator, said:

“Our inspectors found that South Lanarkshire Council has a number of significant strengths across its services. It has an excellent approach to managing its tenancies and dealing with antisocial behaviour, it is excellent at managing and delivering its capital programme and at carrying out repairs within target. Its homelessness service offers a range of support and the Council has developed many initiatives for preventing homelessness.

We found a track record of consistently high levels of performance across its housing services. Its culture is clearly focused on further improvement and it has an excellent approach to staff training and development. The Council has a strong strategic planning process in place and a positive approach to equalities. We saw that it has the capacity and commitment to continue to improve the services it delivers. The Council is aware that it needs to improve its performance in delivering some aspects of its homelessness services and it has submitted its plans for improvement action to us.”

Councillor Alex McInnes, Chair of the Housing and Technical Resources Committee at South Lanarkshire Council, said: "The inspection report and the award of two A grades for housing management and asset management and repairs and a C grade for homelessness is a great achievement. This is an excellent result for South Lanarkshire Council and provides a platform for continued improvement in our services. The inspection team highlighted a number of areas of strength and good practice in tenancy management, anti social behaviour, customer focus in delivery of investment programme works and good access to homelessness services.

We also have some important areas of our service that we need to improve and we will continue to work with our tenants and other service users to help achieve these going forward.

I'd also like to thank the staff, tenants and partners who participated in our inspection and the Scottish Housing Regulator’s inspection team for their work over the past few months.”

NOTES TO NEWS EDITORS

1. Inspectors gave the following grades:

2. Full details of the South Lanarkshire Council inspection report can be found on the Scottish Housing Regulator website at www.scottishhousingregulator.gov.uk

3. The Scottish Housing Regulator came into operation on 1 April 2008. It is the successor to Communities Scotland’s Regulation & Inspection Division. It operates the powers and duties of the regulation of social housing which are set out in the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001. The Scottish Housing Regulator is an arm’s length executive agency of the Scottish Government. It has operational independence, while being accountable to Scottish Ministers and through them to the Scottish Parliament for the standard of its work.

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Iain Muirhead, Head of Policy and Corporate Services

0141 271 3760