Newark and Sherwood District Council is to create 13 permanent posts in its housing repairs service, a move it says will add between 7,500 and 10,000 repair jobs a year and reduce its reliance on agency staff and outside contractors.
The council’s cabinet approved the expansion on Tuesday 13 October, together with a budget of £527,920 for 2026/27 that includes the cost of buying additional vans. The new roles are eight repair operatives, a repairs and voids supervisor, a surveyor specialising in damp, mould and disrepair, a works planning supervisor and two customer service advisers dealing with repairs. Recruitment is expected over the coming months.
The decision follows the council’s first inspection under the tougher regime for social landlords introduced in April 2024. In a judgement published on 29 July, the Regulator of Social Housing gave Newark and Sherwood a C2 consumer grade, the second of four, meaning it found some weaknesses and that improvement was needed. The council owns around 5,500 homes.
Repairs featured prominently in the regulator’s findings. At the time of the July inspection, the council was completing 90 per cent of emergency repairs and 75 per cent of non-emergency repairs on time. Inspectors said performance was improving and services were meeting tenants’ needs overall, but they identified weaknesses in the quality of the council’s repairs information and in how it monitored and assured itself on damp and mould cases. The regulator said the council had measures in place to reduce the risk to tenants and plans to resolve the problems within a short timescale.
The new damp, mould and disrepair surveyor is the post most directly aimed at that criticism. Damp and mould have become a central concern for social landlords since the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale in 2020, which was linked to mould in his family’s housing association flat. Awaab’s Law, which took effect for social landlords in October 2025, sets legal deadlines for investigating and fixing such hazards.
The inspection raised other issues outside the repairs service. The regulator found the council did not yet have complete, up-to-date information on the condition of all its homes, and that 9 per cent of them did not meet the Decent Homes Standard as of April, a figure the council expected to fall once outstanding surveys were completed. It also noted the absence of third-party oversight of health and safety compliance, limited service standards for tenants, and underdeveloped arrangements for tenants to scrutinise policies. On the positive side, inspectors found the council met legal health and safety requirements, handled complaints fairly and promptly, and showed a respectful culture towards tenants.
The council currently carries out about 23,000 repair jobs a year, or roughly 100 each working day. It says demand has risen because of stronger regulatory requirements and more complex work involving damp, mould and building safety. On its own figures, the extra capacity would amount to an increase of around a third in daily output.
Councillor Lee Brazier, the cabinet member for housing, said permanent in-house staff would make the service more resilient and allow it to deal with emergencies and return empty homes to use sooner. “Tenants deserve a repairs service that is responsive, reliable and keeps them informed,” he said, adding that feedback from tenants and the regulator’s visit had confirmed repairs as a priority.
Empty homes are the other target. Council properties left vacant between tenancies, known as voids, earn no rent while waiting lists remain long, and the council has said the additional staff should cut the time it takes to prepare them for new tenants. It has not published current turnaround times.
How the expansion will be paid for in future years is less settled. The council says it expects the costs to be met through efficiency savings, lower spending on contractors and its normal budget-setting process. It has not set out how much it currently spends on agency workers and contractors for core repairs, so the scale of those savings cannot yet be assessed.
The council says it will judge the investment by improvements in repair times, empty homes turnaround, communication with tenants and a reduction in temporary staffing. The regulator, which said in July it would continue to engage with the council as it addresses the weaknesses identified, will be watching the same figures.
