Thousands of renters around the borough have been impacted by Hackney Council’s public admission that the housing department’s internal reorganisation directly led to a high rise in past-due safety checks, especially electrical inspections.
The restructure made an already serious backlog worse, pushing overdue electrical safety inspections from 15,000 to 18,000 homes.
Officers admitted the backlog “rose significantly” because of the restructure itself and its impact on operational capacity, and Hackney’s in‑house teams have only been completing 1,300 electrical checks per year since 2024 — scarcely enough to meet the new 5‑year statutory cycle, let alone clear historic failures.
Thousands of homes had never been inspected, and around 7,000 properties had never received an electrical safety inspection at all.
The Regulator of Social Housing had previously found serious failings across gas, fire, asbestos, water, and lift safety checks.
18,000 homes presently lack legally required electrical safety certificates, and numerous families have been living in properties without confirmation that their electrics are safe.
The council had been warned almost two years earlier by the regulator, but the restructure worsened, rather than solved, the crisis.
To dig themselves out of a hole, Hackney Council are now spending £2.2 million on specialist private contractors to carry out 5,000 inspections over two years. An additional 6,000 inspections will also be outsourced, and internal teams will attempt the remaining 7,000.
This is a direct cost of the failed restructure.
Hackney Council has blamed the 2020 cyberattack, which wiped out enormous amounts of housing data. They also blamed COVID-19, which disrupted inspection cycles, and access problems where tenants could not be reached. However, officers still conceded that the restructure itself was the direct cause of the surge in overdue checks.
The council have said that it has reached 100 per cent fire safety compliance, and 99 per cent gas safety compliance, but electrical safety, the area with the most extensive backlog, is not anticipated to reach full compliance until March 2027.
The legal position for tenants is much stronger now than it was even a year ago, because electrical safety in social housing is no longer ‘best practice’ — it is a statutory duty. When a council like Hackney fails to carry out required checks, it triggers specific legal consequences and gives tenants clear rights to enforce action.
Electrical safety checks are a legal requirement; clearly, Hackney Council didn’t get the memo on this.
Every social landlord, including councils, must carry out electrical installation inspections at least every 5 years and supply tenants with an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR). They must also test any electrical equipment they provide, e.g., cookers and fridges, in furnished tenancies.
Hackney admitted that 18,000 homes lack up‑to‑date electrical safety checks. This means that thousands of tenants are in legally non-compliant homes – Hackney is breaching its statutory duties on a mass scale, and tenants have grounds to escalate complaints and seek redress.
Unfortunately, complaining usually falls on deaf ears, and they simply repeat the same mistakes over and over again and fail to learn anything. The pattern of councils repeating the same failures is real, documented, and widespread, and it’s one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with local government in the UK.
They don’t learn, not from complaints, not from Ombudsman rulings, and not from their own internal reviews.
Residents complain, then the council brushes it off, delays, or gives a generic ‘we’re looking into it.’ The Ombudsman gets involved, and then they find the council at fault, once again. The council then apologises, pays compensation, and promises to review procedures, but never does, and here we have the vicious cycle.
Nothing ever changes; the same failures happen to the next person and so on. This isn’t cynicism, it’s documented reality, and this is personal to every person this is happening to because when a council ignores you, they’re not just ignoring the complaint, they are ignoring your time, your stress, your safety, your family’s well-being, and your right to fair treatment, and when they keep repeating the same mistake, it sends a message ‘We don’t care enough to fix this.’
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 