WAVERLEY'S housing department has been heavily criticised by councillors for failing to come up with any answers to the borough's ongoing housing crisis.

Both Liberal Democrats and Conservatives attacked a review of the council's housing service, which has revealed that many tenants are unhappy with the standard of maintenance Waverley provides.

The comments came during a discussion of the "best value" fundamental service review of housing by members of the community overview and scrutiny committee on Tuesday.

Lib Dem Marie King-Hele branded the report "bland and vague" and said it did not explain how the housing department intended to address its failings.

"I'm not happy with this at all," she said. "We've had a lot of these problems for a long time now, but we've not been told what action is going to be taken."

Mrs King-Hele suggested that the housing service should have been reviewed by an independent body, not the department itself.

"The report is vague and lacks substance. The wording doesn't give you any real answers," she added.

Declaring that housing was one of Waverley's major services, she added: "A lot of people's lives depend on the decisions made by this council. They have an effect on the tenants who place their trust in us for repairs and other matters."

As reported in last week's Herald, Waverley needs to invest £20 million to deal with the backlog of repairs to its 5,700 properties.

Jacquie Keen said that she had first-hand experience of the council's repair work, and that in the past it had not been of very good quality.

The report highlighted the council's difficulty in both recruiting and retaining suitably qualified staff to carry out the repairs.

John Wootton asked: "If we can't recruit and retain the appropriate staff, how are we going to achieve our objectives?"

Mr Wootton said he was "astonished" that the council appeared to have no strategy for dealing with the asbestos that is found in a number of Waverley properties.

"We have £1 million over four years set aside for this," he said. "How can we have such a large sum of money and no strategy on how to use it? It's really worrying."

In response, members were addressed by Waverley's assistant director of housing John Swanton.

Mr Swanton described the report as "a good and thorough piece of work".

"We have been self-critical and analytical and are doing a creditable job with the task we are facing, compared with other local authorities," he said.

Explaining that the role of the best value review was to improve council services, he said: "If there is one complaint to be made, it is that we have been over-ambitious in our action plan - we're damned if we do and damned if we don't."

Mr Swanton said that Waverley had to deal with the fact that while on one hand a lot of its properties were quite old, many people now had higher expectations.

"This fact is perhaps catching up with us faster than we expected," he said. "And it has come at a time when there is diminishing money for repairs from the government."

Dr Genny Lane blamed the previous Liberal Democrat council for the backlog that the Conservatives now had to deal with.

"You do not have a backlog of repairs as great as we have now overnight," she said.

"One of the first things we did was to commission a report into how bad the problem was, and this administration has done the best that it could with the situation as we found it."

The report will next be discussed by Waverley's executive committee on Tuesday, April 9.