Repairs service update – performance at the end of September 2024
We know that repairs are one of the most important services we provide.
We often see great feedback from residents for members of our team and the quality of work they complete. But we know there are improvements residents want us to make to this service. Especially to:
- Provide repairs more quickly
- Increase the amount of repairs we get right at the first visit
- Improve communications, particularly when there are delays to completing a repair and keeping residents better informed about what will happen next.
We included these as areas we need to improve in our report on the Tenant Satisfaction Measures and our annual complaints performance improvement report, both published in June this year.
What are we doing to improve repairs?
[Executive Director for responsibility for repairs and maintenance provides and update in this video on our repairs service.]
We have a repairs improvement plan in place. We are now one year into that plan and our teams continue working hard to make the improvements needed. Our original plan had 100 actions and we have completed 58 of them. We have significantly increased investment in the service and continued to use contractors to enable us to complete more repairs, tightened controls over our work planning, and improved our use of technology to help us work more efficiently.
As a result of these improvements, we have consistently been completing more repairs since we launched the plan. But we know that there is more we need to do.
We’ve taken some time over the summer to reflect on our actions in the improvement plan and what our next priorities should be. This article includes an update on where we have got to and next steps. We want to make sure resident feedback guides the improvements we take forwards, so we can be clear on your expectations, what we would need to do to meet them, and how long this would take us.
We want to hear from you!
We plan to share the repairs improvement plan with residents later this year for your feedback through our online community, Settle Connect. We want to hear your thoughts on the work we prioritise in the improvement plan and how we keep you updated on this.
Sign up to Settle Connect so you are ready to give feedback when we post the repairs plan, and you can see lots of other projects you can already give your feedback on. We will also provide ways for residents to provide feedback on our repairs plan by phone or post.
Repairs improvement – focus areas:
Our target is to complete 90% of repairs in 28 days. We measure this during the year to the end of March, and ended last year at 72%. During this summer we said our target was to get to 78% by September. By the end of August this year we had achieved this, for repairs raised since April this year. At the end of September this figure was 77%. For all repairs raised during the past 12 months, we had completed 73% in target by the end of September.
An important part of providing repairs more quickly is for us to keep down the number of jobs we are working on at any one time. The fewer jobs we have open, the more quickly we can complete new jobs. We have kept the number of open jobs down – reduced from around 3300 at the start of the plan, at the end of June 2023, to around 2400 at any one time since April 2024. This is now within the amount we would expect for a housing association managing a similar number of homes to us.
But, we aren’t yet at the 90% target and there are some areas that make it more difficult to reach this.
We continue to see higher demand for our repairs service than we have previously. This is partly caused by ongoing bad weather, particularly recent flooding, as a result of this in September we had the highest number of repairs requests so far this year. We also see some of this demand coming from our older properties – 75% of our homes were built before 1980 and need higher levels of maintenance.
The overall number of repairs we complete in target is affected by repairs jobs that have been open for a longer time. We can see for example that of repairs open in September, around a half had been raised in the previous 28 days [newer jobs]. About a quarter had been raised between 30 and 60 days previously and another quarter had been open for more than 60 days. Those open for longer are often more complicated repairs jobs that require more works to complete. We know it is frustrating for residents when repairs are open this long. We need to focus on completing those jobs that have been open longer, and look at how we report on these more complicated repairs along with those that we are able to complete more quickly.
During the summer we introduced new tools to improve how repairs are reported. These are used by colleagues and available to residents when you report a repair online. By better diagnosing the repair needed, we are better able to have the right colleagues, equipment and materials when we visit to carry out the repair, and more likely to complete it on the first visit. We can see there is still more we need to do here to make sure more jobs are completed at the first visit.
We have introduced improvements including increasing our use of text messages to provide updates, but we know we’re still not getting all of our communications around repairs right enough of the time. We are going to be particularly focussing on this area during the next few months, including communications by contractors we have appointed to help us work on repairs. We particularly want to hear from residents about this, and what good communications look like.
Several actions in our plan will support all of these focus areas. In particular, we will continue improving our inspections process to quality check work completed, and explore appointing a preferred subcontractor to provide consistency across the quality of work delivered by external partners working on our behalf.
Emergency repairs
We continue to complete 100% of emergency repairs within 24 hours. Please always contact us whenever you need a repair and we will continue doing all we can to book in routine repairs as quickly as possible.
Report a repair
Please continue to contact us when you need a repair to your home, letting us have as much information as possible about the work needed and your personal circumstances.
You can report your repair through our website and pick your own appointment date and time when reporting a repair. You can also call us on 0330 343 0016.
