We know it’s important for our residents to be able to contact us easily to report any repairs or issues they may be having. We've worked through lots of challenges to continue to deliver our services throughout the year.

Housemark benchmarking data shows that across the sector, average satisfaction with landlords has dropped 8-10% across the year, with our results remaining stable meaning we are delivering our services more effectively than many other social housing providers.

Our main repairs contract was up for renewal, so we carried out detailed consultation with residents to identify the changes you wanted to see. We also involved residents in the tender and selection process. The result was a new repairs contract with Gilmartins, which will mean improvements to the way services are delivered.

Alongside the new contract we have introduced new policies, strengthened contract management, provided additional training for our staff, brought in qualified surveyors and introduced specialist disrepair and damp and mould teams to ensure we can deliver services to our residents in the most effective way possible.  Repairs completions ‘on time’ across the housing sector have fallen to an average of 85%, based on Housemark data, so we’re pleased that we’ve been improving satisfaction for our repairs service in lots of areas since 2021/22:


 

What our new partnership with Gilmartins will deliver

When you report a repair, you’ll now get an SMS message to allow you to track the status of your repair, the location in real time of the Gilmartins operative coming to do the work and the ability to message and re-arrange repairs appointments, amongst lots of other improvements. You can find out more about what you can expect from the new and improved repairs service in the animation below:  

Our colleagues like our Caretaker, James, works to ensure our estates are kept clean and tidy. Check out the 'a day on the life' video below to see how!

 

Making sure we continue to improve and learn from your complaints

We’ve introduced a range of new measures to make sure we learn from and act on any complaints we receive. This has included more training for our Customer Resolution Team on identifying and understanding the root cause of an issue or complaint. We’re now sending lots more proactive email updates to our residents as soon as we know something is wrong, to outline what we’re going to do to resolve it and when, providing any additional information or detail in updates as it becomes available.

We’ve also introduced new Neighbourhood Action Plans to ensure we work more effectively together and more closely with our residents to address complex issues and complaints. The plans help to ensure there is more collaboration and efficiency from the teams within Origin, better ways of working alongside our contractors and where needed, for things like anti-social behaviour, the Police and local Safer Neighbourhood Teams. The plans are used to capture residents’ concerns, support a joined-up approach to resolving them and hold us accountable for making sure that action is taken and is effective.

We also identified a need to do more to make sure there is continuity of service if there are staff absences, or changes in staff, so there are no gaps in resident communication on any queries or complaints.
Where issues are raised on our Neighbourhood Walkabouts we’re doing more to identify the root causes working with our residents and, where necessary with other agencies such as the Police to help ensure our buildings and estates are made safer and more secure for our residents.

These changes have meant a positive improvement in the length of time it takes to resolve complaints and since January 2023, we’ve been six days quicker on average in getting complaints resolved. Customer satisfaction with complaint handling has also improved this year and we’re committed to further improvement in 2023/24.

During 2022/2023 we received: 499 formal complaints. This amounted to 455 stage 1 complaints and 44 stage 2 complaints. Of these, the most common reasons for complaint were: First, delay to repair - 148, second, quality of service delivery - 78, third, lack of communication/failure to keep informed or consult with residents - 69.

Complaints upheld or partially upheld

	Number of complaints	Complaints upheld or partially upheld	As a %
Stage 1	455	355	78%
Stage 2	44	36	82%

 
Stage 1 complaints took an average of 46.7 days to resolve, and stage 2 complaints an average of 86.2 days.
 

Improving how we manage your complaint

We want to deliver services in a way which means you don’t have the need to complain. However, we recognise that sometimes things go wrong and it’s a valuable opportunity for us to listen, learn and put things right. This includes, how we manage your complaint. 

Over the next 12 months, we’re focusing on improving how we learn from the complaints we receive, and we currently conduct quarterly learning from complaints sessions to review how and why a complaint is received. We then review what action(s) we need to take and what learnings we can gain from the complaint to further evaluate what steps we can put into place so it doesn’t happen again.
 

How we respond to your feedback to improve our services