St Georges Community Housing Reaches Decent Home Milestone

Published by JenCooke for St Georges Community Housing Ltd in Housing and also in Communities

A Major milestone was met in Basildon this week as St Georges Community Housing completed its 1000^th Decent Home, two years after the programme to improve the standard of Basildon’s council homes began. 

St Georges Community Housing has a spent an additional £15million on new kitchens, bathrooms, roofs and windows. A further £66.9million of Government funding has been confirmed to enable Basildon Council to continue bringing the remaining council homes around the borough up to the Government’s Decent Homes standard over the next four years. 

The 1000^th Decent Home tenants are Jim Laver and Maureen Gardner from 49 Dover Way, Pitsea who received a bouquet of flowers from St Georges along with their new kitchen. 

Maureen Gardner said: “I’m so pleased to have a lovely new kitchen, it’s really bright and matches really well with our décor throughout the house. I want to say a big thank you to St Georges and all the contractors for all their hard work. It’s made my day!” 

George Kreuder, Chair of St Georges Community Housing, said: “It is fantastic to see our 1000^th Decent Home installed and reach this important milestone in our Decent Homes programme. This initiative is all about improving residents’ quality of living by providing them with homes that are warm and weatherproof with modern facilities and it is wonderful to see residents like Jim and Maureen benefitting from the works.” 

Last month, St Georges Community Housing were one of the 46 housing organisations to have their bid for further funding accepted by the Government. The £66.9million additional funding will be released annually over the next four years, with the first instalment of £13.4m allocated for 2011/2012.

The announcement about the funding has also seen the ALMO publish a new indicative 4 year programme of works, which is available on the website www.sgch.org.uk 

St Georges was given a 2 star ‘good’ rating from the Audit Commission in October 2009 and was granted £5 million to start the programme and a further £10 million for the period from April 2010 to March 2011.