The last word How knowledge and accountability meant we were able to tackle our Covid repairs backlog By Daniel Miller, Head of Repairs and Maintenance, Eastlight Community Homes
“We temporarily moved staff who usually work elsewhere within Eastlight to focus on delivering the repairs recovery plan. The observations they made during those months led to service improvements”
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HOUSING QUALITY MAGAZINE MAY 2022
The Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 had a huge impact on housing repairs services up and down the country. By December 2021, our 12,500-home organisation had 3,000 jobs outstanding – significantly more than the 2,200 we’d usually expect in the run up to Christmas. We hadn’t been able to deliver the services our customers expected of us due to the pandemic, so we implemented a repairs recovery plan, which ran between November 2021 and January 2022. We were able to reduce the backlog by more than 1,000 jobs, despite the spread of the Omicron variant and the Christmas period having the potential to slow progress down. We were not only able to reduce the number of repairs waiting to be completed: we also upheld an excellent service, maintaining 4.7 out of 5 customer satisfaction levels throughout the repairs recovery plan. On 31 January we closed our repairs recovery plan at 1,958 repairs, which exceeded our target of 2,200. We temporarily moved staff who usually work elsewhere within Eastlight to focus on delivering the repairs recovery plan. The observations they made during those months led to service improvements. As a result, we’ve seen uplift in the proportion of “Right First Time” repairs, which increased from 75% to 86% between January and March. Eastlight’s teams are all accountable to residents; however, in repairs, we’re very aware our work shapes residents’ opinions of the organisation. Being directly answerable to our residents drove the success of our repairs recovery plan. Eastlight’s Home MOT is where members of the repairs team visit a resident’s home and systematically tick off items on our online MOT worksheets. The team complete small jobs there and then, but if they need to return to fix a problem, they set a date and time with the customer before they leave. This more proactive approach to repairs and maintenance has dramatically reduced maintenance callouts, with numbers falling by 50% in some areas, pre-Covid. It has improved relationships with customers and led to us holding more information about our homes, which enable us to tackle the Covidcaused repairs backlog more efficiently. Not one of us could have prepared for a global pandemic, but at Eastlight we’ve been able to see how dealing with problems before they become emergencies and being driven by doing the right thing by our residents, has meant we’ve been able to get back on track quickly.
