YORK’S housing chief has defended her record after being accused of making council house tenants’ lives “a misery”.

Councillor Michael Pavlovic said City of York Council’s executive member for housing Denise Craghill and the council were treating tenants like “second class citizens”.

It has emerged this week that there is a backlog of repairs to council properties of 6,000 and that the number of unliveable council homes lying empty has more than doubled.

A combination of Brexit and the pandemic delaying work has been blamed.

Cllr Pavlovic said at a full council meeting on Thursday: “Despite the sterling efforts of the teams and the managers who have worked tirelessly tirelessly with one hand tied behind their backs, we’re seeing council house tenants left for months living literally in their own filth, with leaking toilets, damp on the walls and a mother with young children being told they would be left without water for five days.

He said: “Council tenants’ lives are being made a misery, and you’ve then had the gall to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from the housing repairs budget this year.

“Given your lack of care for residents and your poor financial judgement, can you explain to me why you deserve to keep your job as an executive member?”

Cllr Craghill said she accepted there had been “some neglect” in housing services stretching back years, including when Labour controlled the council, and said the cases Cllr Pavlovic referred to were “not acceptable”.

But she added: “I really do take exception to this continued insinuation that as executive member for housing I’m purposely going out of my way to undermine the conditions of the tenants in our council housing.”

Cllr Craghill said a £200,000 budget cut represented just three per cent of the general repairs programme budget.

She said: “We are now putting in place an action plan to deal with those delays. We are using external contractors, we are putting more staff into the team that manages voids so they can manage the external contractors, and so we can catch up with a lot of the backlog of repairs.

“Given the extent of the pressures on housing, there will be some delays to the active repairs. It seems to me that is the right approach to take in the short term so we can get the service back on an even keel.”