The Labour-led council cabinet on Tuesday is expected to rubber-stamp a proposal to extend the contract of Homes for Haringey for 10 years after the current deal expires on 31 March next year. It also agreed to set up a development vehicle to refurbish stock and build new homes.

The decisions follow recommendations from a review by a cross-party panel of councillors and tennants.

The review recommended the council retains its arm’s-length management organisation (ALMO) and rejected other options, including bringing management in-house or transferring stock to housing associations.

The review said Homes for Haringey, which manages more than 20,000 council homes, had shown strong tenant satisfaction ratings, strong tenant involvement and the ability to “move quickly to deliver and can make decisions without the constraints of the lengthy local authority process”.

It also said the ALMO has a “significant record of financial savings and efficiencies”. The report said the ALMO had made savings of £3.2m in 2014/15.

By contrast, moving management back in-house had “no demonstrable benefit for tenants… based on performance, satisfaction, flexibility or financial reasons”.  It said savings from bringing management in-house would not improve the council’s housing revenue account position and that such a move risked a “drop in performance”. A large-scale voluntary transfer to a new housing association was found to be unfeasible without significant debt write-off.

The review recommends that the council includes performance targets in the new contract, including a condition that the ALMO reaches top quartile performance by March 2018. It would also be expected to make annual savings. The panel also recommended the council should set up a development vehicle, which could either be wholly-owned or through a joint venture, to attract funding for building new social and affordable housing.

The decision to retain Homes for Haringey goes against a recent trend in the scapping of ALMOS. we learned that in June that there has been a net reduction of 31 ALMOs since 2010, with the number of members of the National Federation of ALMOs falling from 70 to 31 during that time.