SIGNIFICANT improvements to Caerphilly County Borough Council’s delivery programme for the Welsh Housing Quality Standard (WHQS) will result in a follow-up review later this year.

The WHQS is a Welsh Government scheme that requires all social landlords to make improvements to their stock before December 2020 to offer good quality homes to tenants.

The initial review, carried out by the Wales Audit Office (WAO), in March and April of last year stated Caerphilly was “unlikely to achieve the standard by 2020”.

The council has previously committed to ensuring that 75 per cent of internal works and 40 per cent of external works would be completed by the end of March.

Shaun Couzens, the authority’s chief housing officer, said: “At the time of the review, the WAO concluded that the “majority of tenants homes remain below the WHQ Standard due to longstanding inefficient and ineffective programme management and the council is unlikely to achieve the standard by 2020”.

“Whilst officers accepted the recommendations within the WAO report, they did not agree with the overall conclusions made, as it did not reflect the position of the programme and evidence to justify this view was provided in the report to cabinet.”

The percentage of housing stock in Caerphilly fully compliant to the WHQS was 34.6 per cent of properties by March 31.

Of the 10,805 homes in the housing stock, the number of properties with completed external work was 4,754 – 44 per cent – so 6,051 houses remain outstanding.

Meanwhile 76 per cent or 8,218 of homes have had internal work completed, leaving 2,587 properties with improvements required.

“Officers accepted further improvements need to be made and agreed with the recommendations set out by WAO,” added Mr Couzens.

“It is accepted that the recommendations were following the review during March/April 2017, however at that point in time significant changes were already in the process of being made and this has resulted in significant improvements having been realised.

“Officers, therefore, remain of the view that the delivery of WHQS by 2020 is achievable although the programme remains challenging.”

Cllr David Poole, the leader of the council, has written to the Welsh Government outlining Caerphilly’s achievements in order to meet their external and internal commitments.