Member Article

Housing Association Reports £10M Saving Only Three Years After Commissioning Repair and Maintenance Review

One of the UK’s largest housing, care and support businesses – Midland Heart – has announced a £10m saving to its repairs and maintenance, only three years after commissioning a review of its delivery.

Working with East London based housing and support services business, Just Housing Group, the review was commissioned by Carl Larter - Director of Assets, and set out to compare Midland Heart’s Repairs and Maintenance performance against benchmarked industry best practice.

Together with the review, Midland Heart also took the unusual step of merging two functions of Development and Asset Management into one - giving end to end responsibility to a newly created Director of Assets, Carl Larter.

Speaking about the changes, Carl said: “We think this had a significant impact on the success of this project as, for the first time, one person was responsible for everything to do with new properties, asset management and repairs and maintenance. From there we were then able to look at how we could undertake a comprehensive review that would determine accurately how the service was performing and what – if needed – could be done to improve it.”

Midland Heart is focused on providing the best service they can for their customers. The review of their repairs and maintenance offering presented the opportunity to make changes leading to more rounded, better value services for their customers.

The result of the review has been a comprehensive shake up of the Midland Heart Repairs and Maintenance function, which reviewed the following:

A restructuring of the existing £2m a year DLO An internalisation of the £10m repairs contract TUPE of staff and operatives together with new T&Cs The implementation of a new payment incentive scheme The introduction of a new E-procurement and Contract Management software Improvements to training, technical understanding and financial reporting The recruitment of new staff and the development of a new works depot.

And 18 months on from implementation, the service is seeing significant improvement with – for the first time- reduced sickness, productivity up by, on average, three jobs per employee and substantial reductions in the budgets for both repairs and voids.

Speaking about the review, Just Housing Groups, CEO, John Swinney said: “Undoubtedly Midland Heart were very brave in firstly placing all its asset management and development services under the direction of one individual, effectively commissioning a in depth internal review and then forming an internal contracting business based on the findings. The upshot of this, though, is a completely transformed repairs and maintenance function – and one of the best in the sector - that has remarkably saved £10m in only 36 months and looks set to make even further significant cost savings through the development of best practice working methods.”

As part of the restructuring of the service, Just Housing worked closely with the Midland Heart team to identify duplication, implement plans to reduce waste, improve overall processes and increase skill levels.

“Just Housing have helped create one of the best repairs services in the Midlands,” said Director of Assets, Carl Larter, “the reduction in our spend combined with the increase in both understanding and performance has been very rewarding and I look forward to building on this.”

Midland Heart provides 33,000 affordable homes to over 70,000 customers across the Midlands. Just Housing is based in Canning Town and works with social housing providers across the UK to improve performance and drive efficiencies across the management and maintenance of housing stock.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Scarab4 .