Hackney Council failed to renew a major deal for housing repairs for over six years despite internal warnings over the decline of the borough’s social homes, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) has learned.
To meet the various layers of compliance standards for its roughly 30,000 social homes, like all other local authorities in England Hackney Council is obliged to carry out repairs to its housing stock, of which there are two types: short-term or ‘reactive’ repairs and long-term capital works.
The council often outsources these jobs to third party contractors, and for efficiency it has relied on multi-year deals with preferred companies – known as ‘main contractor frameworks’.
Yet even though the council’s last framework expired in 2019, the local authority has repeatedly failed to secure a new one, piling pressure on its reactive repairs and leading to the council missing an entire structural repairs cycle, insiders have claimed.
In the nearly seven years since the contract expired, the council has twice been slapped with damning watchdog findings into its social housing. Together, the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman found a litany of health and safety issues but also deep problems with how Hackney Council was handling soaring complaints around disrepair and maintenance.
Although the council has blamed the lingering impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and a 2020 cyber attack which wiped vital housing data from its systems and hobbled its housing management system, council records and insider accounts suggest the lack of a contractor framework paralysed the council’s ability to carry out major structural works to its decaying stock.
The council triggered the procurement process for a new £180m contractor framework in October 2025 – its third attempt to do so. But this followed an earlier doomed effort to find a procurement shortcut the year prior, which the council pursued despite being warned of the legal consequences. The council has refused to disclose how much this failed procurement strategy cost.
Hackney Council has repeatedly declined to give its own account of why it had not secured a new framework, and why progress towards it was sluggish while numerous residents continued to languish in blocks like Fellows Court, whose occupants continue to plead with the council to address their “atrocious” conditions.
Interviews conducted by the LDRS with staff suggest the reason behind the council’s inability to replace the deal went beyond both the pandemic and cyber attack.
‘Like a rudderless oil tanker’
As early as June 2019, the council was warning that the high turnover of senior staff meant it did not have the internal expertise to replace the contractor agreement. Council reports state that many “key staff” had left as the council reabsorbed an arms-length management body, Hackney Homes, back into its teams.
Under procurement law, contract arrangements like these have strict lifespans to allow councils to change suppliers or adjust terms to reflect new guidance. The contract expired in November 2019 with no replacement in place, though the council was legally allowed to continue to use it for repairs and capital works until August 2020.
March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis hit with lockdown imposed, putting major capital works on hold. The council was then granted a one-year extension for the contract, ending in August 2021.
According to one insider, Max, who joined the Property Services department in 2020, the “constant churn” of personnel continued to hobble the council’s ability to secure a new framework. To his astonishment, little came from his raising the alarm bells to senior managers in 2023 over the urgent need for the framework, for which the “shocking state” of blocks including Fellows Court and Pitcairn House served as a constant reminder. In September the Housing Ombudsman launched a special investigation into Hackney Council over the scale of complaints.
Speaking to the LDRS, the former officer described his department as a “rudderless oil tanker”. He accused senior management of dismissing and ignoring his warnings that an absent contractor deal was allowing housing stock to deteriorate.
Meanwhile, he said, the borough’s £160m housing budget was instead being used towards reactive repairs – with workers painting over the walls of flats riddled with damp and mould rather than tackling the root cause of the decay.
Max was also damning about the council’s blaming the crisis with housing repairs on the cyber-attack. “It was probably the biggest blessing” for the council, he said, claiming that the legacy IT systems were “already on their last legs”.
Another former officer who the LDRS spoke to under the condition of anonymity said he had also warned council bosses of the problems stemming from the outdated contract, and was similarly mystified by the failure to procure a new one. He also claimed his concerns were brushed aside by management, including by some “pretty inept” members of staff.
The former staff member said: “It’s a massive contract, and it’s really peculiar that it wasn’t re-procured. It’s not a difficult thing to do.”
He added: “It was a cock-up, but not a conspiracy.”
The watchdogs investigate
Eventually, Max says he lost confidence in senior management’s ability to grasp the nettle, and in May 2024 blew the whistle to the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) and the Housing Ombudsman over a litany of issues. These included the lack of a main contractor framework, the failure to carry out a survey of its housing conditions since 2018, and the fact that between 5 and 10 percent of Hackney’s social homes (1,600 – 3,200) were suffering from “serious damp and mould issues”.
He added that the council had relied on Google Sheets ever since the cyber-attack crippled its housing IT system, and the council was yet to even begin procuring a replacement.
The Regulator’s office replied on June 21 that year, confirming that it had escalated Max’s referral and it would contact Hackney Council.
Hackney Council self-referred to the RSH the same month, announcing that external assessors had found its housing stock was not compliant with the regulator’s new safety and quality standards that came into force in April 2024. However, Max claims the council was trying to “take the sting out” of a regulator probe triggered by his revelations to the RSH.
Two months later the regulator published its report and slapped Hackney with a C3 rating, identifying “serious failings” to comply with standards across its housing stock. Post-judgement, the council’s number of open damp and mould cases rose from 1,422 to 1,967.
In its response to the regulator’s report, the local authority named the “contractor capacity and management” as a key driver behind failings, adding that this was exacerbated by the pandemic and the 2020 cyber attack, which it said had wiped all of the council’s existing housing stock condition data taken from 2019-2020.
The August 2024 regulator report also revealed that over 15,000 homes were without a current electrical safety certificate (7,000 of which had never had one) and over 400 homes lacked statutory gas safety inspections.
On May 22, 2025, two weeks after Hackney’s Cabinet Member for Housing, Clayeon McKenzie, resigned, the Housing Ombudsman published the findings of his special investigation, criticising the council’s overly-positive approach to skyrocketing housing complaints. The watchdog later labelled Hackney an “outlier” compared to other boroughs in terms of the severity of its failures.
After the Ombudsman’s report was published, the council released its Housing Improvement Plan, stating it would survey its housing stock to understand the scale of works needed.
In reports published later that year, the council publicly accepted that “delayed or incomplete capital works” had largely contributed to its serious failings around leaks, damp and mould in social homes that were flagged by the special investigation. In these reports council officers admit Hackney had “insufficient internal resources for contract management due to restructures or competing priorities”.
A botched shortcut
Following the RSH downgrade, in October 2024 the council had started implementing a shortcut to let it quickly appoint contractors for £180m worth of capital works through a ‘Fusion 21’ framework. However, at the time legal advisers warned the council of the risks attached to this option, stemming from council leaseholders.
Under the Landlord and Tenant Act, councils have to consult leaseholders before agreeing a new framework if they want to recharge them for major capital works. Hackney had missed the window to notify leaseholders, exposing it to legal action that could see leaseholders force the council to cap any service charges for refurbishment.
Six months later, the council abandoned this route and limited the Fusion 21 framework for internal works only.
Council reports from March 2025 showed that procurement of repairs contracts remained on hold due to “conflicting priorities”. As the disrepair has lingered, residents in Fellows Court and Pitcairn House have protested over the conditions in their block, with the latter withholding their service charge payments until issues such as damp, mould and leaks are addressed.
The LDRS put several questions to Hackney Council earlier this year about why the contract process had taken over six years. The council refused to answer many queries, including around the shortage of staff with procurement expertise and the pace of progress, both before the pandemic and after.
In his response to the LDRS, Hackney’s Deputy Mayor, Guy Nicholson, (Labour) in February said the council aimed to build a “full integrated back office system” after losing so much internal data to the cyber attack. The council added that it held stock condition data on 30% of its homes.
Cllr Nicholson said that the council had put in place contracts with “a range of specialist companies to ensure it can deliver on the refurbishment and renovation commitment for all tenants and leaseholders”.
After the local elections delivered a new Green administration, the LDRS again put the claims to the council, having now spoken to other council insiders. In response, Deputy Mayor and Cabinet Member for Safer Homes and Housing Services, Councillor Dylan Law, has pledged that the council would “learn from historic issues” and ensure past mistakes “do not happen again in the future”.
“Changes must and will be made under my watch so that the mistakes of the past do not happen again in the future. Good quality housing and services help improve the quality of life for all of our tenants – and this is what I and Mayor Garbett are actively working towards and committed to delivering,” he said.
The council pulled the trigger on the procurement of a new framework in October 2025. If successful, the new deal will allow capital works to start on-site by November 2026 – seven years after the original framework expired.
Got a story? Email josef.steen@reachplc or @jslondonldr on X.
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