Resident Questions for Housing Area Panel

Department				Housing
Date question raised				30/06/2022
Date of Area Panel				17/08/2022
Area in city				West
Star rating applied by residents				3 star- city wide issue
Deadline for officer response				25/07/2022
Name of officer responding				Grant Ritchie
Officer job title				Operations Manager, Property Maintenace Services
Title of Question:		Long delays in repair work
Issue: There are long delays in some major repairs, causing inconvenience and the potential for more expensive work becoming necessary.
Background:  A property in Godwin Road has had a badly leaking roof since the start of the year, so have been waiting almost 6 months for this to be repaired. Scaffolding went up 3 weeks ago, but work has still not started on the repair, and they haven’t been given any indication of when it will.
Action requested by residents: Residents asked if this reflected the average time people are waiting for major repairs, or if there were exceptional circumstances in this instance
Officer Response: Grant Ritchie
Officer contact details:			Grant Ritchie@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Response: Currently our average time to complete a repair is 44.6 days (taken from July ’22 KPIs). This exceeds our target of 28days, however is heavily affected by the fact that we are now clearing older jobs that have been waiting a considerable amount of time due to knock-on effects of Covid and resourcing over the last two years. Roofing has been particularly hard hit with delays as we only have a small team of four directly employed roofers and during storm Eunice in February ’22 over two hundred orders were raised in just a couple of days, many of which requiring urgent attention to make situations safe. We have recently procured a contract with two new roofing contractors and two scaffolding contractors, and this is currently being mobilised to start in August and this will help us deal with older jobs and improve response times going forward on new works. I am pleased that scaffold has been erected to complete the necessary repair and I do apologise that you have not been kept informed of progress and the likely date for works to commence. Scaffold is usually erected a week before the planned start date, but this can sometimes vary if other jobs overrun or emergency repairs to other properties become a priority.
Specific Action:
Action: No further action.
Timeline:
Start date:	N/A
End date:	N/A