The most important service we provide to our tenants and leaseholders is our repair service.  We carry out 50,000 repairs each year and this combined with the painting and improvement programmes mean an investment of £50m each year.

And so changing the existing service is a big decision and one that will have taken us over 12 months to conclude.  We have made sure residents have been involved in the designing of the new service, choosing the new contractors and will be involved in monitoring their performance, and we will benefit from their advice.

The assessment process has been incredibly thorough and after the final consultation with Leaseholders, it will go live in August.

Out with the old...

This change, explained in other articles in Connections newsletter, gives me two headaches.  Firstly, will the existing service get worse before the new service starts? And secondly will the new service deliver on its promises?

Keeping the existing levels of service will be down to the commitment of the outgoing contractors and our ability to monitor them plus the skills of the new contractors to set up systems etc. In Hackney and Islington, there is no change to the Repairs contractor but to be fair to Osborne (who serve the rest of London) they have done their best to date (and this is based on resident feedback, not anecdote).  We will do our best to make sure that continues.

And in with the new...

For the longer term, the new services involve a new contact centre for repairs, Mears getting to know the homes beyond Islington & Hackney and new standards.  Some of the new staff from the existing contractors have the right to transfer to the new companies, rather than being made redundant, and this does create challenges for us.

In the past, I have written about the difficulties, we have in getting good workmen to carry out repairs to my own home.  Achieving this over 22,000 homes is not easy but we are aiming to move from getting it right eight out of ten times to nine out of ten within three years.  Ten out of ten is the ultimate goal.

Brendan