How to procure, deliver, and continuously improve your repairs and maintenance service in partnership with residents and the market | Better Social Housing Review

(Re)procuring a repairs and maintenance service is one of the most important opportunities you have improve outcomes for your residents. Our research has found significant examples of good practice in procurement and contract management, but also instances of things going wrong.

Based on our engagement with residents, housing providers, contractors, and service providers, we have devised ten good practice principles to follow when you are designing and procuring a new repairs and maintenance service.

These principles are split into three groups: 1) early market engagement and procurement, 2) building a sustainable relationship with good working practices, and 3) practicing continuous improvement.

Not all of these principles will apply in all cases. For example, engaging the wider market may not be appropriate if you are transitioning to an in-house repairs and maintenance team, and the principles of monitoring the market and designing your contract structure are less likely to be relevant to in-house repairs and maintenance teams. Nonetheless, there are learnings from this work that are applicable to the delivery of repairs and maintenance services however they are delivered, and we would welcome examples of how you are putting these principles into practice in your own organisation.

As well as applying these principles in your own work, you should also be mindful of the changes that will be ushered in as a result of the Procurement Act 2023. Below we have linked to some helpful explainers that will tell you what you need to know about the upcoming changes.

Early market engagement and procurement

1) Give a greater emphasis in your procurement activities to communicating and aligning your core values, vision, and purpose with a service provider

Social landlords are increasingly placing greater emphasis on making sure that the operatives delivering their repairs and maintenance services (whether external service providers or in-house teams) are aligned to their core vision, values, and purpose.

If you are setting up an in-house team, you can actively shape its core vision, values, and purpose to align it with your organisation. When procuring for external service providers, taking the time to explain your vision, values and purpose to prospective bidders can help you both make decisions as to whether you can work effectively together.

2) Engage the market before finalising your specification when procuring

When procuring for external service providers, engaging the market before finalising your tender specification is a critical step to ensuring it is realistic, costed appropriately, deliverable, and attractive to prospective bidders. Research by the National Housing Maintenance Forum (the NHMF) found that service providers can and do provide feedback on elements of a draft specification that are risk, challenging to deliver, or misguided.

Furthermore, because pre-market engagement can lead to better specification design and the most appropriate kind of contract being utilised, it can receive more interest from service providers, not least because they are aware of it and have been involved in its development.

3) Ensure that residents and colleagues from across the organisation can be centrally involved in the procurement process

Involving a wide range of residents and colleagues in the procurement process from the beginning can be enormously beneficial to delivering good outcomes for residents. This applies whether you are procuring for an external service provider, or bringing your repairs and maintenance services in-house.

When including colleagues from across the organisation, it is especially important to involve not only the teams who will be managing and facilitating the contract, but also relevant colleagues from areas of the organisation with responsibility for safeguarding; equality, diversity, and inclusion; contact centre operations, and more widely. Including a wide range of colleagues can help you ensure that the service provider(s) you appoint are sufficiently experienced to understanding safeguarding, resident needs and vulnerabilities, and other crucial aspects of delivery that are important to achieving good outcomes for all residents.

Residents should also be involved right at the start of this journey, and the most effective part of the process that residents can influence is the specification of the service and how different elements of tender responses should be prioritised and scored. Critically, residents will require training to understand what procurement is and how they can be involved.

There are different approaches to doing this, which will vary across different social landlords. Some landlords we have engaged with have involved residents in setting the specification and scoring criteria, but then found their residents did not feel the need to be involved in the actual interview and scoring process itself.

Others have invited groups of residents to attend pre-specification market engagement workshops, so prospective bidders can understand their views and how they should aim to meet them when they respond to a later tender. Others have involved residents in contract negotiation meetings, noting that this gives them a clear understanding of whether the vision and values of the contractor aligns with the needs of their residents.

However you do this, establishing a process for involving your residents in the procurement and appointment of contractors is critical, and this is also true if you are redesigning your in-house repairs and maintenance services.

4) Build your partnership for the long-term

The establishment of long-term relationships, whether they are with an external service provider or an in-house repairs and maintenance service, offer multiple opportunities to continually improve delivery and value for money.

For service providers, a commitment to a long-term relationship encourages inward investment in areas that are a priority to the client (e.g. safeguarding training for operatives) and encourages the germination of genuine partnerships, rather than adversarial or ‘parachute’ relationships, whereby service providers ‘drop in’ and deliver a short contract with the minimum endeavour. It also provides welcome financial certainty.

Focusing on the establishment of a long-term partnership also allows external service providers and in-house teams to develop a deep, detailed understanding of the homes and residents they are serving, enabling added value to be realised by applying their expertise and experience in certain situations (for example, being able to predict issues in certain home archetypes based on previous work).

Building a sustainable relationship with good working practices

5) Balance risk and reward fairly in your contract structure

Research by the NHMF has investigated the underlying reasons behind the collapse of several longstanding service providers since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The NHMF noted that when procuring works and services, there are opportunities for social landlords to structure contracts in a way that spreads the risk and reward fairly between landlords and service providers. Specifically, landlords should look to practice the following when putting together a contract:

Thinking carefully about tender validity periods, specifically how long a price must be held by bidders. The NHMF noted that fixed price contracts were a significant factor in the collapse of many service providers in recent years.
Using collaborative contractual models that provide transparency of costs, and which offer discreet mechanisms to address difficult issues when they are encountered.
Practicing fair risk transfer, especially avoiding legal terms that transfer risk unfairly, without liability caps and with unreasonable penalties.
Putting in place an agreement to collaboratively monitor the market to understand any potential market conditions that might affect the delivery of the contract.

6) Agree the outlines of your working relationship prior to the commencement of a contract, and agree to review this on a pre-defined basis

Our research with contractors and service providers has highlighted that many of the common issues that arise in a contract are ‘baked in’ from the beginning, or partly arise from inadequate planning after a tender has been awarded, but before the commencement of the contract. There are several things that social landlords can do to address this before contract commencement, in partnership with their service providers:

Agree communication protocols and practices and commit to reviewing how they are working across the duration of a contract.
Have a plan in place for business continuity, to ensure that staff churn or key members of staff leaving their posts does not affect delivery.
Agree a collaborative approach to how challenges and problems will be considered and addressed.
Discuss whether there are any areas of service delivery that the contractor or service provider has specific expertise, and which could be used to positively shape delivery in the future.
Collaboratively agree respective roles and responsibilities on data collection, analysis, and reporting.

7) Ensure contract managers have the right skill set

Once a procurement process has concluded, the commencement of a contract and its transition to a contract manager is critical for success. Contract managers need to have the right skill sets to have the technical, legal, and financial knowledge to understand and report on contract management and performance, but they also need to be able to manage relationships and develop rapport with service providers.

Providing appropriate CPD opportunities and supporting contract managers to develop these skills will undoubtedly lead to the better management and delivery of repairs and maintenance contracts, improving outcomes for all parties, not least your residents.

Practicing continuous improvement

8) Give your service providers the opportunity to learn from each other about how to best serve your residents

Housing providers deliver multiple different kinds of property services. This includes repairs and maintenance, gas works and compliance, building and fire safety works, retrofit works, and more general estate maintenance and management. These services are often delivered by a mosaic of different service providers, including external contractors, smaller specialist providers, and in-house teams.

However, although they perform different services, they all work in the same communities with the same residents. You should therefore give your different service providers a space to share good practice and exchange information about how they can best serve your residents and communities. This can be especially valuable for new service providers joining a landlord for the first time, as it enables them to learn from incumbent providers working across different services.

9) Work together to understand how internal processes affect service provider performance on the frontline, and how it might affect your KPIs

Processes, systems, and procedures internal to a landlord can unintentionally affect the ability of service providers to deliver efficient and accurate repairs and maintenance services in individual homes. Our research has found that this can affect core KPIs, especially pivotal indicators such as first-time fix rates and instances of no access. For example, unclear or incomplete diagnosis at call control can result in repeat visits for operatives as they discover they do not have the tools or parts to fix the exact issue once they reach the home.

Landlords, service providers, and in-house teams should therefore work together to review and better understand how internal processes filter through the chain to affect the delivery of repairs and maintenance services on the ground. They should then work together to devise pre-agreed mitigations and steps to ensure that a) the possibility of this happening is minimised, and b) any instances that do happen do not detrimentally affect the key metrics the service provider is held to.

10) Work collaboratively with your residents, colleagues, and service providers to review your service performance openly

The BSHR concluded with a call for social landlords to work with residents and colleagues to undertake an annual review of progress made against each of its six core recommendations. It highlighted that for the recommendations to drive meaningful change in social housing, landlords should enable and empower residents and colleagues to examine how well they are doing in terms of implementing them, including pinpointing how any challenges or barriers can be overcome.

Contractors, service providers, and in-house repairs teams should also be centrally involved in annual reviews. They bring a unique perspective, and giving them the space to speak openly about what is working well, and what is not, can support continuous improvement on an annual basis.

Additional resources

Back to Rethinking repairs and maintenance project