In March 2023, Richmond Council wrote to RHP, along with three other housing associations with the largest number of homes in Richmond upon Thames, calling for landlords to address neglected repairs, missed appointments and long delays in contact experienced by housing tenants.
A summary of our response to this letter (which we sent in early April) is below:
Context
Over the past twelve months, our service has not been at the level we aspire to deliver. Like other housing associations across the sector, we’ve faced unprecedented demand for our repairs and maintenance service. We’ve had challenges meeting this demand due to the ongoing impact of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic on labour and materials.
In turn, this has driven a rise in customer contact and an increase in complaints, which has impacted our ability to respond in a timely manner.
Resources
We’ve brought more resources into our customer service centre, and seen satisfaction improve as a result. We’ve also employed two more surveyors to support with the increase in damp and mould enquiries. Finally, we’ve reallocated existing resources in the organisation to support our complaints team.
New repairs service
On 1 June 2023, we launched RHP Home, our new repairs service (in partnership with Kier Places).
Benefits of the new service include:
- More flexible appointment times (including Saturdays)
- An increase in employees working on our repairs contract (including more operatives)
- Improvements to our online booking tool to help us diagnose repairs more effectively.
Although we’re still dealing with high volumes of repairs, we are starting to see improvements to the service, including an increase in tenant satisfaction with repairs.
We’re confident that once we embed the service further, we’ll also see improvements in the time taken to complete repairs.
Investing in existing homes
Investing in our existing homes is just as important as building new ones. Last year we invested £26.6m in improving and maintaining existing homes.
In the current year, we’ll invest an extra £2m (19%) in major programmes to deal with damp and mould, and energy efficiency.
Relationship with Richmond Council
As the largest provider of affordable housing in the Richmond Borough, we value our relationship with local councillors and MPs and will stay in close conversation with them about the work we’re doing to improve our service.
Get involved
We can only deliver brilliant service if we listen to you and learn where we need to improve. There are plenty of ways for you to tell us what you think, including:
- responding to a text survey if we send you one.
- contacting us about joining our Customer Scrutiny Group – we meet every few months to talk about our service and policies.
- contacting us about becoming a Community Inspector. We’ll train you on key safety matters relating to your building, and you’ll carry out regular checks to make sure it’s well-maintained.
- an independent market research company called IFF Research may call to ask questions about our service, like repairs, antisocial behaviour, and communal cleaning. The call will take around ten minutes. From April 2023, all social housing landlords in England and Wales will carry out these surveys and report their results to the Regulator of Social Housing. Results will be published online in Summer 2024, making performance more visible. Read more here.
We want to be honest with you about how we’re doing, so we let you know how we're acting on your recommendations here.