Yes, Social Housing Can Be Better Maintained at Lower Cost
The social housing sector faces many conflicting pressures. Local authorities and housing associations are ever-conscious of the need to keep rents at affordable levels. Meanwhile, existing stock must be maintained and, in many cases, improved. Repairs must be carried out quickly and to a high standard. Homes must be more energy efficient, durable and pleasant to live in. Added to which, Grenfell is rightly bringing renewed focus on safety and compliance.
As if those challenges weren’t enough, we simply don’t have enough good quality social housing to meet the need. We need to build more homes urgently with limited funds.
To address this delicate balance of priorities there is no room for waste, inefficiency or duplicated effort in housing maintenance. It’s not just by coincidence that in areas where Osborne has been appointed as a single provider of housing maintenance services, cost savings and improvements in residents’ satisfaction with the service have followed. By eliminating wasted effort, we are able to improve the service and generate funds that can be reinvested in new or existing homes.
Streamlined Working
Cost savings and service improvement flow from having a single point of accountability and streamlined ways of working. A carefully planned and coordinated cycle of works will naturally be more efficient than piecemeal contracting and reactive repairs.
Sometimes, it can be as simple as taking a more holistic view of the housing stock. Several repairs can then be combined into a single maintenance visit or work programme. This is more convenient for residents and ensures that we reduce the total time travelling between jobs.
To shift the emphasis from being task-focused to being resident and property focused you need the right systems as well as the right approach. Our investment in IT allows planning and scheduling to be more efficient, decision making to be transparent, and for residents to ‘self-serve’ as much as possible. There’s a critical difference between a service like Osborne’s that is responsive and one that is merely reactive.
The times we live in call for different relationships between clients and service providers. A single provider in charge of the whole process can gather the required data on property condition and performance and then plan efficient work cycles that maximise productivity and saving. Find out more about our services for social housing providers here.
