Improving our repairs service – update June 2025
We know that repairs are one of the most important services we provide. We benefit from an in-house repairs team at Settle and often see higher resident satisfaction when repairs are carried out by these colleagues.
We consistently meet our targets for completing emergency repairs, ensuring these are responded to with 24 hours.
We know residents want to see improvements to the repairs service, especially to the time we take to complete non-emergency repairs, to get more of the jobs we carry out right on the first visit, and to improve how we communicate with residents about the repairs we’re carrying out.
We’ve continued making improvements during recent months based on this feedback and wanted to provide an update for all residents now.
Repairs Service Improvement Plan
We have a Repairs Service Improvement Plan in place through which we are working to deliver a more efficient service. The plan has three main aims:
- Helping our colleagues to fully complete more jobs more of the time, right first time.
- Reducing (where appropriate) reliance on external contractors, so that more of the repairs that are needed are carried out by Settle colleagues.
- Improving quality and ensuring we deliver the Settle standard for repairs.
To support delivery of our improvement plan, we have:
- Completed an extensive review of the repairs service, including by independent consultants.
- Reviewed and republished our Repairs Service Standard to be clearer on the services we provide and timescales we will work to.
- Introduced new measures to improve the productivity of our teams, including better ways of scheduling work, more geographically efficient appointment booking meaning a reduction in travel times between visits, and improved works order management.
- Improved our online repairs booking system.
- Improved the communications we send to residents about repairs, particularly our use of text messages.
Impact of the progress made
We are already seeing good progress, including more repairs being completed by our in-house teams and a reduction in complaints thanks to clearer communications with residents helping to manage expectations and increasing satisfaction.
- We are working to reduce the number of jobs we have open at any one time. The fewer jobs we have open, the more quickly we can book in new repairs. We have reduced the number of open jobs by nearly 28% from October 2024.
- We are handling more repairs through our in-house teams. We saw the average number of repairs jobs completed per person increase by 30% per day from October 2024 and we will continue to have plans to increase this by a further.
- Just under 20% of our work is now carried out by contractors (June 2026).
- We are seeing residents’ satisfaction with the service improving. Complaints linked to wait times have reduced significantly from 62% of all complaints in May 2024 to 16% in May 2025. We also closed the year seeing increased satisfaction with the repairs service as monitored through the Tenant Satisfaction Measures.
Our overall target is that we complete 90% of non-emergency routine repairs within an average of 28 days. We calculate this average over a 12 month period between April and the end of the following March. We finished our reporting year to the end March 2025 having completed 69.5% of repairs within target. Our aim by the end of March 2026, is to complete 90% of repairs in target.
Next steps
- We are making further changes to the way we work to increase our ability to fix jobs first time.
- We will be changing the way the teams are structured. This will help our teams to focus on day to day repairs, whilst a specialist team focuses on the larger / more complicated works, which should further improve the time taken to complete repairs.
We will continue our focus on making the improvements needed to our repairs service and we are confident that we will achieve the targets we have set with the improvements we are putting in place. We will also provide updates on our website on the progress we are making and include these in the services updates we send to all residents.
