In January we placed a spotlight on our tenants’ experience of the Council’s Repairs service.
The Council have two targets:
- To complete emergency repairs within 24 hours
- To complete routine repairs within 28 days (20 working days)
The Council has been performing well with their emergency repairs but have a huge backlog of repairs that began to build up at the start of the Covid pandemic. This backlog means that some tenants have experienced a long wait for their routine repair to be completed. In June 2024 the Council brought in two external contractors to work on reducing the backlog.
The Council are committed to getting back on track with routine repairs but in the meantime we wanted to ensure that tenants have an opportunity to feed back their experiences to the Council. We thought it would be useful to identify whether there is anything that we or the Council could do to make the experience less stressful.
We invited all tenants to our Tenant Panel meeting via SMS and suggested that tenants could email us their comments about repairs to tenants@seaside.homes.org.uk We received a handful of emails, four tenants attended the meeting in person and one joined us on Zoom.
At the meeting we discussed ’the customer journey’ from the perspective of reporting the repair, having the repair carried out and the outcome of the repair.
Here are some of the views that were shared at our discussion:
- Tenants felt that their experience of contractors was positive, especially when a job was straight forward.
- Sometimes complex jobs (involving more than one contractor or more than one household) seem to come to a standstill as there doesn’t appear to be anyone managing the project and making sure that everything stays on track.
- A tenant mentioned that he’d waited at home for a contractor who didn’t turn up. The appointment was rescheduled but the tenant would have liked to have known sooner that the contractor couldn’t make it.
- A tenant commented that a repair was made but the work didn’t fix the issue in the longer term. It was questioned whether anyone follows up to check that a problem has been resolved.
We shared our Tenant Overview feedback with the Council’s Repairs team.
The Repairs Team commented that they’re reviewing the way jobs are managed and this includes the installation of a new IT system later this year. This new way of working should ensure that complicated projects are monitored more effectively. Their aim is to improve how communication flows between tenants, the Council Repair team and external contractors.
In terms of following up on whether an issue has been resolved, the Repairs team confirmed that their call handlers contact a proportion of tenants chosen at random to ask for comments and feedback.
Next steps
We’ve included an additional question around repairs in this year’s annual satisfaction survey. At the Tenant Panel we’ll be reviewing whether our initial Tenant Overview findings are reflected in the wider feedback.
The Council Repairs team have asked to see the survey feedback so it can inform their plans going forward.
You can find out up-to-date information on Tenant Overview projects on the ‘News’ section of our website.
