St Leger Homes of Doncaster was established in 2005 - we've been managing the council housing stock for the City of Doncaster Council ever since, extending our contract just last year in 2023.

We carry out a range of housing and property related services to the tenants and the city of Doncaster, managing 20,000 homes as part of the management agreement. The homes include traditional houses and bungalows; high, medium and low-rise flats; maisonettes; and properties on gypsy and traveller and residential sites. We also manage a number of leaseholder properties and shops.

At St Leger Homes, we have a drive to provide the best repairs service we can to our tenants and also want to ensure that we design a repairs service that our tenants value. We want the service we deliver to meet expectation, and for all repairs to be completed quickly and efficiently.

In the first instance we asked our Tenants and Residents Involvement Panel (TRIP) to review our current service and importantly asked the vital question of 'how we could improve the service'. The work that TRIP completed reviewing the service, and engaging our tenants through face-to-face engagement and surveys, really helped to set the priorities for the initial phase of our repair’s excellence programme.

The key findings from the review offered an opportunity to really shape the service around several key priorities.

Addressing no access appointments

The first priority was to address no access. In our industry not knowing if our tenants are at home and subsequently leaving the obligatory no access card, needed to be changed. We consulted widely with our tenant groups on the issues of vulnerability, barriers to communication, and difficulties that some of our tenants may have when considering the changes. It was clear that we needed to have accurate and up to date information for all tenants, with clear information about vulnerabilities to enable this to work for everyone.

Tenants were made aware that we required their correct and most up to date contact details; in addition to this any issues of access or specific vulnerabilities that the tenant needed to share with us were collected when the tenant reported the repairs.

We communicated the changes across all platforms, including our regular tenants magazine and our social media platforms in addition to the updates we gave our tenant groups.

Appointment communications

As part of the review and our second priority, tenants were also made aware of the texting process, informing them of an appointment, and then reminders leading up to the day of the repair. On the day of the appointment the trade operative calls ahead to make contact with the tenant, again consulting with tenants to ensure this process would work. A positive outcome noted from this process change is that we have been provided with correct contact information by tenants, resulting in 100 per cent access on the first pilot.

The decision to deploy the text messaging process as part of the pilot, clearly demonstrated a measurable improvement in access first time, which has substantially reduced levels of no access providing additional time to attend to other tenant repairs.

Repairs excellence programme

A regular feature on the tenant group agenda has been the repairs excellence programme. This collaboration established the processes and procedures, ensuring that we continue to focus on feedback from complaints, and importantly our tenant groups.

We established trade groups alongside trade union engagement. The expert knowledge from our trade operatives process demonstrated a positive effect of onboarding our trade groups, which established ownership and responsibility for a successful programme. This has embedded a culture of continuous improvement.

Gaining feedback

During the pilot customers were asked to respond to a customer satisfaction text message survey. Response to this was limited, however the results received were positive. As a follow up action, over 400 customers were contacted to share their experience of the pilot. The feedback gained from this was overwhelmingly positive.

The roll out of the repairs excellence pilot has really been a success for us, we have developed the programme even further through feedback sessions, and have better shaped the service for our tenants.

Feedback from our transactional surveys has been very positive, our tenants tell us that the service is good and the only improvement they would make is to the time taken to complete a repair. We are working on this, in what is a challenging environment for all service providers with competing priorities to allocated resource to.

Using customer involvement

One point to note is, the involvement of tenants from the beginning has made navigating some of the changes easier as they have taken ownership - it sounds simple but was really effective. Some of the suggested changes were not practical to complete (or couldn't be implemented how the tenant would like), so an open dialogue and honest responses did serve to focus minds on what we could achieve together.