Demand for our repairs service continued to increase from the previous year with 37,262 responsive repairs completed in total to homes. Despite this increase in demand, our commitment to providing you with convenient and reliable services has meant that 97.24% of repairs were completed right first time and 94.70% of emergencies were attended to within four hours and completed within 24 hours.

You, our tenants, have engaged with us regularly to provide feedback on the repairs service via satisfaction surveys. We know that most of you are happy with the service provided and we have used feedback received from you to improve. We have also worked with our InsightXchange to scrutinise the service, taking your feedback into consideration. This work resulted in us introducing new service standards and a revised repairs and maintenance policy in June 2024.

We have continued our proactive work to identify damp and mould in homes through our damp and mould campaign. A new damp and mould policy was approved by our Board during the year. This set a service standard to inspect and carry out mould treatments to all homes within 33 days of damp or mould being identified.

Gas servicing and other safety checks help to keep you safe in your home. At the end of 2023/24, 99.42% of all our homes had received all the required checks such as gas safety tests and electrical wiring inspections. We completed all fire safety inspections in our residential blocks of flats ahead of target, making sure that any issues were identified and addressed to maintain the safety of customers living in those homes.

During the year we continued to invest in reducing our carbon footprint with 86% of our homes now performing above energy rating C, ensuring new homes are built to be highly energy efficient. We invested energy improvement works to 1,260 homes, improving the thermal efficiency and making them cheaper to run.

Works are progressing on installing solar PV and smart air bricks to 199 homes to provide increased energy efficiency and thermal comfort, as well as savings on energy bills. This innovative method of reducing the energy required to heat homes and the generation of free electricity is partially funded by the government social housing decarbonisation fund but will see us investing over £1.65m.

We listened (Scrutiny review)

The InsightXchange conducted a review of the Repairs and Maintenance policy.  They were provided with all relevant data on complaints, satisfaction levels, and regulatory requirements. The group told us that we needed to improve communication about appointments and where there may be delays and that we needed to improve the quality of works.

We acted

We revised our Repairs and Maintenance Policy to include a range of service standards agreed with the group which focus on providing flexible appointments outside of our normal timescales, regular updates to customers where repairs are delayed, a commitment to tailoring the service and contacts about the service to meet the needs of our vulnerable tenants, and understanding and addressing the root cause of repairs not being completed to the expected quality standard.