Hyde’s Repairs and Maintenance Service
Angry tenants at November’s TA meeting made their feelings clear about the poor repairs service and passed no confidence motions in Hyde Southbank Homes’ management of the repairs service and the Hyde Group’s customer service centre, as well as registering grave concern at the lack of a planned maintenance programme across the estate.
Our representatives on the Southbank Residents Forum have recently received an update from Hyde which blames the problems with the repairs service on IT systems, tenants reporting too many repairs (like too much sewage coming up through our kitchen sinks?), and the former contractor’s workers.
Sounds to us as though Hyde is using the same spin doctors as the Coalition Government!
But decide for yourself. Here’s the letter from Hyde Southbank’s Resident Services Manager:
“As you will of course be aware, 28th October signalled ‘Go Live’ for the new repairs and maintenance service following extensive preparation and planning, with residents at the heart of service design and contractor procurement.
Hyde staff worked with our new contractors in the lead up to ‘go live’ to ensure mobilisation of our new repairs service took place as planned. Some early obstacles were expected, and are quite typical with the delivery of a project of this huge scale and complexity, and we wanted to make you aware of a few issues that have arisen that we are working hard to overcome.
1. The initiation of the new repairs appointments and scheduling system, Optitime, did not take place as planned as a result of issues identified in system testing. We are working with the software specialists to resolve this at the earliest opportunity. We do have a manual system in place, but there is an impact on surveyors’ pre-inspection work and the availability of contractor appointment slots. We are working at keeping all affected residents informed.
2. The London responsive repairs contract with Mears suffered an initial staff shortage on the Monday of Go Live due to a large proportion of their staff not turning up on the first day, as a result of the previous contractors finding work for them and failing to transfer staff over. However Mears are acting as quickly as possible to recruit and train staff and in the meantime have brought in a arrange of temporary sub-contractors. We are managing Mears tightly on this and are in daily contact with their senior managers to resolve issues.
3. The shortages in contractor administrative staff and operatives has been compounded by unusually high volumes of repairs orders: up 45% on the previous rate, and with 30% of these jobs being designated as “emergencies” as opposed to the usual rate of 15-20%. In order to ensure that we are properly categorising repairs we have senior staff reviewing all requests so we can identify high priority emergencies and eradicate duplication from repeat calls.
4. We have some gaps in the property services staffing structure which we are in the process of filling, and staff across all teams are working hard to ensure that staff shortages do not impact on our residents experience of our service.
You will appreciate that with change of this magnitude, there will be challenges to overcome.
We are very confident that once these glitches are resolved our residents will experience the excellent service we have promised. We will of course continue to keep you informed of progress, and would welcome any feedback or thoughts you might have.”
Do you think things have got better? Are operatives turning up when you have been told they will and doing the work to your satisfaction? Is the Call Centre being helpful? Let us know!