Resident Questions for Housing Area Panel

Reference Number: 3.2

Department

Housing 

Date question raised

22/10/2022

Week of Area Panel

12/12/2022

Area in city

North 

Star rating applied by residents

3

Deadline for officer response

16th November 2022

Name of officer responding

Grant Ritchie

Officer job title

Head of Repairs & Maintenance

Resident Question

Title of Question

Repairs

Issue:

Repairs are not being dealt with and fixed fast enough.

Background:

Residents are very unhappy about how long they have to wait for a repair to be fixed.

 

At Newick Road, a resident reported a repair needed to a continuously running toilet. She was told someone would be in touch but has not heard back after two days.

 

At Newick Road, a resident reported both a leaking tap in the kitchen, and windows that wouldn’t close. She was told a contractor would be in touch but did not hear back until 1 month later.

 

There have been further cases of residents reporting broken boilers (and living with no hot water or heating) for months before a repair was carried out.

 

Hollingdean residents have previously reported repairs not getting done for months, in spite of repeated calls, and have raised the issue at Area Panel.

 

It was reported that the Out of Hours Repairs team are far more efficient and effective than the main Repairs team.

Action requested by residents:

·         The current turnaround time for repairs is not acceptable.

·         What are the Council doing to ensure that the Repairs service is being improved and that repairs are undertaken more quickly?

Officer Response

Officer contact details:

Thank you for your question. I understand that the current time taken to respond to a repair enquiry is not as good as it should be and as we reported in our Quarter 1 stats it is currently taking an average of 71 days to respond to a routine repair where our target time is 15 days.

 

Emergency repairs are much better with 98% completed within 24hrs. The delay in completing routine repairs is being caused by the backlog of repairs resulting from the pandemic. We have increased the number of repairs we do each quarter. However, we are also likely to see an increase in repair requests as the weather changes.

 

The impact of the pandemic and the current financial instability is still having a significant impact on the volume of repairs and the availability of contractors.

 

We have employed additional staff to focus on backlog repairs and they will be joining us shortly.

 

I apologise for the frustration that the situation with repairs causes and whilst we are dealing with emergency repairs in a reasonable time the routine repair response time is not acceptable.

Officer Response:

 

Grant Ritchie

 

Action:

 

No further action

 

Start date:

NA

 

End date:

NA