Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) is a social housing provider established in 2012 to receive the transfer of housing stock from

Rochdale Borough Council Rochdale Borough Council is the local authority of the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale in Greater Manchester, England. It is a metropolitan district council, one of ten in Greater Manchester and one of 36 in the metropolitan counties of England ...

Greater Manchester Greater Manchester is a metropolitan county and combined authority, combined authority area in North West England, with a population of 2.8 million; comprising ten metropolitan boroughs: City of Manchester, Manchester, City of Salford, Salford ...

, England. It has a subsidiary, RBH (Design and Build) Limited. It owns and manages about 12,700 properties. In March 2020, it employed 545 full time equivalent staff.

History

RBH has a charitable development subsidiary, Brighter Horizons, which in 2009 was allocated £300,000 from the

Homes and Communities Agency Homes England is the non-departmental public body that funds new affordable housing in England. It was founded on 1 January 2018 to replace the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). HCA in turn was established by the Housing and Regeneration Act 2 ...

to purchase five former local authority houses which it then brought up to

Decent Homes Standard The Decent Homes Standard is a technical standard for public housing introduced by the United Kingdom government. It underpinned the Decent Homes Programme brought in by the Blair ministry ( Labour party) which aimed to provide a minimum standard ...

. In 2017, the In-Depth Assessment carried out by the Homes and Communities Agency upgraded it to the highest governance rating and it remained on the second-highest viability rating. In 2019, the top five executives were to receive a collective salary increase of £158,000 over the next three years, to be funded through 'efficiency savings'. There were complaints from councillors, but they had no power to intervene.

Activity

It plans to build 496 housing units between 2021 and 2026. They will be allocated between social or affordable rent, supported housing, shared ownership and rent to buy. RBH plans to demolish some blocks of flats in the town and replace them with new housing of various types. It launched its own

BAME A number of different systems of classification of ethnicity in the United Kingdom exist. These schemata have been the subject of debate, including about the nature of ethnicity, how or whether it can be categorised, and the relationship betwe ...

employee network group for the 2021 National Inclusion Week.

Death of Awaab Ishak

In December 2020 Awaab Ishak, a two year-old child, died in a flat owned by the company. In 2022, following legal action by the family, a

coroner A coroner is a government or judicial official who is empowered to conduct or order an inquest into Manner of death, the manner or cause of death, and to investigate or confirm the identity of an unknown person who has been found dead within th ...

ruled that the respiratory condition that caused the child's death was caused by prolonged exposure to toxic black mould in the flat. His father had complained to RBH about the mould in 2017 and was told to paint over it. Following the coroner's verdict, RBH's chief executive Gareth Swarbrick said that he was "truly devastated about Awaab's death and the things we got wrong. We didn't recognise the level of risk to a little boy's health from the mould in the family's home. We allowed a legal disrepair process, widely used in the housing sector, to get in the way of promptly tackling the mould."

Chris Clarkson Christopher Clarkson (born 7 April 1990) is an English professional rugby league footballer who plays in the forward for the York Knights in the Betfred Championship. He is an England Knights international. He has previously played for Hull ...

, the local MP, called the company "modern day slum lords". He said he had been sent photographs from a RBH-owned house in Middleton "caked in black mould and rising damp", showing that the conditions seen in Ishak's home were "not an isolated incident". The

Housing Ombudsman The office of the Housing Ombudsman is an executive non-departmental public body of the government of the United Kingdom, sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Housing Ombudsman Service looks at complaints abo ...

, Richard Blakeway, is exercising his powers to carry out a further investigation to see if this complaint is indicative of wider failure within RBH. On 19 November 2022, the board of RBH sacked Swarbrick over the failure to protect Ishak.

References

{{reflist British companies established in 2012 Housing associations based in England 2012 establishments in the United Kingdom Organizations established in 2012 Companies based in Rochdale