Councillors agree 'five practical improvements' to help housing tenants

A motion around “basic living standards” put forward by the leader of the Green group achieved cross-party support, reports Joe Ives, Local Democracy Reporter

Kettering Road Estate and (inset) Enfield Lock councillor Sarah Jons addresses Enfield Civic Centre

Enfield Council has agreed to try and address residents’ “constant frustration” at “quite basic” issues with its housing service.

The move follows the passing of a motion put forward by Green councillor Sarah Jons at a full council meeting on Wednesday (11th).

Cllr Jons, who leads the five-strong Green group at the local authority, said the council was failing to honour “quite basic” obligations to its council housing tenants, such as providing working lifts, functional heating, secure entrances “and communal basements that aren’t plagued by rats”.

“These aren’t luxuries,” Cllr Jons argued, “they’re basic living standards that residents should expect”.

Cllr Jons serves as a ward member for Enfield Lock where, on the Kettering Road Estate, she said residents face “constant frustration of chasing repairs” from the council.

She argued that the replies given to residents trying to get in touch with the council are “often very lacking”, adding: “What happens? They report the fault. They get a reference number and wait. And wait. And wait.”

Cllr Jons continued: “Quite often, the council blames contractors. Residents are left making repeated phone calls, sending emails into the ether.”

This leaves many with the impression that “no-one really cares,” she added.

She referred to the ‘C1’ rating the local authority received from the government’s Regulator of Social Housing in 2025, which is the top rating it can issue, before pointing out that “even the regulator recognised that improvements to complaint handling needed to continue”.

Indeed, in an annual council housing report for 2025/26, it was stated that only 28% of Enfield residents polled said they were satisfied with the council’s handling of complaints.

This, Cllr Jons argued, “paints a very different picture” from the high rating the council had received.

In response, she put forward a motion urging the council to make “five practical improvements”. These include a searchable page on the council’s website for “significant faults affecting shared services in council-owned or council-managed blocks” such as those affecting “lifts, water supplies, door entry, and heating or hot-water failures affecting multiple homes”.

The Green councillor asked for this system to include a database of faults, where residents can track when issues have been reported and the efforts being made to fix them, or find explanations for why faults have not been resolved.

In a bid to improve accountability and responsiveness, she said that councillors should also be emailed “when a significant fault is confirmed in their ward”.

Lee Chamberlain, the Conservative-led council’s cabinet member for housing, responded to say he welcomed “the intention” behind the motion, adding it “very much actually aligns” with much of his own views of the problem.

He agreed that keeping ward councillors informed about such issues “is equally important” and said he was “very open” to Cllr Jons’ suggestions, describing her main arguments as “a no-brainer”.

Nevertheless, Cllr Chamberlain also outlined what he saw as “issues with delivery” of the proposals, including their demand on “staff time and resources”.

This, he argued, could “pull people away from priority tasks” in housing. Cllr Chamberlain also said he would “caution against being too rigid” on how solutions could be found.

The cabinet member said he was keen for the local authority to “end up with a properly considered and workable approach and not “a system that creates another administrative burden without improving the service itself”.

Nevertheless, Cllr Chamberlain said he was “very happy” to take the recommendations forward “with due consideration”.

A bad-tempered – and only tangentially relevant – debate followed, where Labour and Conservative members criticised each other’s approaches to council housing over the years.

Despite this, councillors unanimously agreed to pass Cllr Jons’ motion.

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