Social landlords "faced 300,000 anti-social behaviour cases in 2011/12"

Social landlords in England and Wales had to deal with up to 300,000 cases of anti-social behaviour in 2011/12, research has revealed.

Publishing its fifth annual benchmarking report, HouseMark estimated the housing management cost to social landlords of dealing with anti-social behavour in Britain to be nearly £300m a year.

HouseMark said the approximate £300m costs included employee time, overheads and direct costs such as court fees, but not consequential costs such as graffiti removal, repairing vandalism and void rent loss.

“The overall cost of ASB is likely to be some way higher,” it suggested.

Other findings from the report include:

• Most ASB recorded by social landlords fell into the NSIR (National Standard for Incident Recording) nuisance category. This accounted for 45% of all new cases recorded.
• Noise continued to be the most reported type of ASB making up a third of all new cases, with harassment/threats ranking second.
• Nine out of 10 ASB cases reported to landlords ended with the ASB ceasing. London-based organisations’ resolution rates were over 10 percentage points lower than the rest of the country.
• Less than 1% of cases were resolved by evicting the perpetrator.
• The median position for satisfaction with landlord ASB complaint handling was 80%.

The report for 2011/12 was based on data supplied by 160 English and Welsh organisations that manage around 1.5m properties. In total, they recorded 107,693 cases.

Housemark is jointly owned by the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation.