We are sorry for the recent issues with our repairs service which have meant that many residents may have had a long wait for their repair appointment to be scheduled and their repair issue to be fully resolved.
What has caused the issues?
Since early January the Barnet Homes Repairs team has not had the number of operatives required to complete the volume of repairs needed by residents. The main reasons for this are a high level of staff vacancies and higher than expected requests for repairs.
A third of roles needed to manage the delivery of responsive repairs were vacant at the end of January. Vacancies for repairs operatives have been an ongoing issue for Barnet Homes and the contractors that we work with due to difficulties recruiting and retaining operatives with certain trade skills such as plumbers and plasterers, in the context of a severe nationwide shortage of skilled tradespeople after the pandemic.
Alongside resourcing challenges, the volume of repairs requested in December and January was higher than we expected by about 1,500 repairs. The higher than expected volumes have continued into February and March. Factors that we are aware of which have caused the increase in repairs needed are an increase in reports of damp and mould and repairs identified from proactive checks and surveys that we have recently completed in residents’ homes.
Impact on customers
We are still able to prioritise repairs of an urgent nature. In January 2023 there were 416 emergency repairs and these took an average of 1.3 days to complete (the target is to complete them within 1 day).
Non-emergency repairs are taking longer to resolve for customers. In January 2023, it took us an average of 35.7 days to complete nonemergency repairs, against a target of 28 days.
What are we doing to address the issues?
We are progressing a range of activities to resolve the current resourcing issues including working with both existing and new repairs subcontractors and temporarily increasing the number of agency operatives working for us.
We are also taking steps to plan ahead to make sure we have sufficient resourcing to meet our repair service standards for residents on an ongoing basis in the future, including in the colder months when we are likely to have higher demand. This includes refreshing our forecasting about the volume and nature of future repairs to inform our recruitment activities and exploring options to improve the retention of operatives.
We expect that the action that we are taking will mean that we are better able to assist with residents’ repairs by the end of May 2023.