Landlords spend £325 million every year on dealing with ASB

Housing associations are dealing with 300,000 cases yearly, the sixth annual report by HouseMark has found.

The report says staffing makes up around half the overall cost, with an estimated 5,000 full time staff employed to manage ASB by social landlords across the UK.

The cost estimate is up £25 million from the estimate in last year’s report.

Eamon Lynch, managing director at Social Landlords Crime and Nuisance Group, said: ‘It’s encouraging that landlords are being able to maintain investment in ASB at a time of the whole picture of public sector cuts.

‘That underwrites the importance of dealing with ASB as part of a landlord’s role.’

HouseMark’s ASB benchmarking system is designed to help social landlords measure and understand the ASB they are tackling on a day-to-day basis.

Covering the financial year 2012/13, with cost data from 2011/12, the sixth annual report of findings from ASB benchmarking shows that noise is the greatest anti-social problem faced by social tenants, featuring in a third of all cases.

And the report reveals that while private letters only manage to resolve one in five ASB incidents, social landlords manage to stop ASB in nine out of 10 cases.

HouseMark is a provider of performance improvement and value for money solutions to the social housing sector and is jointly owned by the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation.