Northern Counties housing Association has hit back at an Audit Commission report that said there was scope for improvement in the association's service delivery.
In the first public spat between an association and the commission, which took over inspection duties from the Housing Corporation in April, Northern Counties called the report "unbalanced".

It also lambasted the commission for editing its official response to the inspection verdict in the final version of the report.

Brian Waterson, chairman of Northern Counties, said: "Our dissatisfaction is chiefly around the negativity of the overall judgement 'scope for improvement', the weakness of the evidence this was based on and the inconsistency of this grading with the report's other judgement that the association is 'raising the standards in service delivery'."

He added: "We felt that the evidence gathered about resident satisfaction was too lightweight and anecdotal."

A spokeswoman for the Audit Commission said associations could use their response to set out how they intended to act on the inspection findings, but not to challenge methodology. The commission reserves the right to edit comments, but does have an official complaints channel.

Source

Housing Today