More than £50m in repairs to Swindon Borough Council’s social housing stock were left out over the last six years.

It means less than 60 per cent of the repairs scheduled to the borough council’s 10,000 homes since 2018 have been carried out members of the authority’s audit committee learned.

A report into the issue by auditor Lorraine Sarson said: “For each of the six financial years from 2018-19 to 2023-24 there has been a significant under-delivery against the agreed housing capital planned maintenance programme of works.

“This has amounted to a cumulative under delivery of £50.8m - 42.4 per cent - against budgets totalling £119.6m over that period.

"In quarter four of 2023-24 improvements are being made to mobilise new component contracts to build delivery of investment from 2024/25, but there is a significant backlog of procurement work pending to achieve the award of new contracts.”

Councillor Neil Hopkins said: “One of the problems with turning this around is the contractor base. We can either do things in-house, or set up a subsidiary company, but we have had issues with those, or contract to outside partners. But there may not be outside partners with the resource to address this.”

The outgoing director of housing Mike Ash told the committee that things were being improved: “We have let long-term contracts for repairs to roofs, bathrooms and kitchens, and they all run for two to three years, and it is these large contracts which will help us catch up.

“Work can be added to such big long-term contacts and we will be mobilising ore and more such big contacts like this.”

Mr Ash also added that the housing department has been reorganised to address the backlog of repairs needed.

Another member Councillor Matt Lodge, who is a doctor, asked about the correlation with Covid-19.

He said: “The underspend in 2018-19 wasn’t very significant and became much bigger in 2012-20 and then in 2020-21, and 2021-22.

“The underspends have remained high since then – did the pandemic and lockdowns have a material affect in those three years?”

Mr Ash said: “It did add significant difficulty. We were not able to get into people’s houses to be able to do the work.

“It meant companies were struggling to complete the work for us. There were major market difficulties, then there was a huge hike of material costs and struggles of getting materials into the country. There have been a lot of external factors against us.”

The committee noted the auditor’s report.