Letter: There Are Many Lessons to Learn from GBC’s Mismanagement

Published on: 23 Dec, 2025
Updated on: 23 Dec, 2025

From Bernard Quoroll

In response to: GBC Tenants Should Be Safe – Money Is Not the Issue

What Mr Young says in his letter is that Guildford Borough Council had enough cash in its ring-fenced housing revenue account to do a proper job of maintaining its social housing.

What it implies is that for decades, GBC sat on that cash rather than maintaining the value of its assets and fulfilling its duties to tenants.

You have to ask yourself why that happened, who presided over those years of neglect and who in opposition failed to point that out?

But it gets worse. When the council realised it was about to get criticised by Government on safety grounds, there was a mad rush to spend some of it – an almost sure way of not getting value for money.

The sad thing is that there appears to have been no transparent, serious attempt to learn lessons.

We still do not know how much money, if any, has been wasted. Everyone seems content to wait for the police to find them a scapegoat.

There is no obligation to wait. By the time the police do identify anyone who might have had a finger in the till, memories will have become even more blurred and the whole saga will be brushed under the carpet.

Officers and members will be ‘in the wind’ as an election for a successor council approaches. More to the point, prosecuting a few individuals will not answer the wider need to understand what happened.

There are many lessons to be learned from this saga of mismanagement, in which no political party can claim to be completely without fault. It also raises fundamental questions about the culture and relationship in Guildford between senior officers and members.

Officers have a duty to speak truth unto power and in public. Members have a duty to seek best value and be curious and constructively challenging. That does not seem to have happened here (or in other areas of responsibility) and you have to ask whether that relationship needs fixing across the board.

A good social landlord, or indeed any good landlord, would have first undertaken a stock condition survey. That would have told them what repairs and improvements were needed over time and how to “package” them to achieve best value – re-roofing, window replacement, electrical safety, plumbing, decorative repairs and so on.

A balance needs then to be struck between cyclic and responsive maintenance, so that urgent repairs are dealt with, while asset values are maintained. Sometimes this will involve “decanting” whole streets of tenants and a need for intensive and skilfully managed consultation arrangements so that things are done with, not to, tenants. It will also need sophisticated procurement systems and monitoring with clear lines of responsibility.

On the council member front, it needs much more than a lead member for housing to supervise one the council’s most important and sensitive functions.

It needs responsive and effective liaison arrangements which engage tenants as partners. It needs a multi party group of members setting and monitoring performance and being educated in housing management so that they are knowledgeable and constructively challenging. All councillors need to be educated in housing to enable them to act as representatives.

I for one will not believe that GBC is really on the road to recovery until these arrangements or something like them are visibly in place.