Cutting calls and boosting online housing repair reporting at City of Lincoln Council

Challenge

Local authorities spend around £30 million annually handling housing repair calls, with about half of these calls being deemed ‘avoidable contact’. These are calls from residents to chase up an appointment or re-report a problem a previous visit didn’t fix. 

As the UK’s housing stock ages and the responsibilities of councils increase with the introduction of the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) and Safety and Quality Standards, councils need to create cost savings and drive efficiencies where possible. 

We saw ample opportunity to do this by creating a streamlined online repairs reporting process that eliminated the need to report and manage the repair by calling the council. A view that was shared by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) which funded the project on the basis that other councils could access Housing Repairs Online.

Our approach

One of the key parts of this project was to build a service that was easy to use and accessible to drive channel shift away from calls to Housing Repairs Online’s 24/7 repair reporting service.

To do this, we tested every aspect of the design, wording and flow with residents and mixed digital literacy groups – something we still do today with Made Tech Repairs and our other housing products.

As a result of their feedback, we removed pictures and icons from the interface and asked residents a set of questions instead. This made it easier for residents to navigate and allowed for more accurate reporting.

We also enabled residents to upload photos. This made it easier for repairs managers and maintenance teams to triage repairs and improved first-time fix rates because repairs teams could be sure they were equipped with the right tools and materials before setting out to each job.

Finally, to help improve access rates and reduce the burden on residents waiting in all day for a repair, we added the ability for them to choose a half-day appointment slot. We found that this contributed to reducing follow up calls from residents asking where their repair person was. 

We developed the service iteratively, using feedback from City of Lincoln Council, other councils, and residents who joined our regular ‘show-and-share’ sessions to put forward their thoughts and ideas.”

Our engineers built the service using the GOV.UK Design System so that Housing Repairs Online felt familiar to residents and used Microsoft Azure Cloud, which can integrate with the on-premises housing management and scheduling systems. 

Thanks to the hard work of City of Lincoln Council and the Made Tech team, we’ve developed a new service that improves services for our tenants in Lincoln. We’ve put user research at the heart of the service, and I’m proud of the work the teams have done to make this service accessible to those who need it.

Cllr Donald Nannestad
Portfolio Holder for Quality Housing at City of Lincoln Council

Results we achieved together

Since its launch in May 2022, Housing Repairs Online has delivered impressive results:

• Inbound repairs calls decreased by 67% within 3 months.
• Online repair submissions surged from 3% to 28% in the same period.
• Reporting a repair online takes an average of just 3 minutes and 54 seconds, compared to the 18-minute average by phone.
• The cost to handle a repair report dropped from £3.12 to £1.15, saving the council approximately £60,000 annually, with projected savings of £19 million across local government.

Our decisions, informed by stakeholder feedback enabled City of Lincoln Council to achieve their goals of creating cost savings by reducing calls, decreasing manual intervention, and increasing access and first-time fix rates. 

By working in the open we’ve helped other councils learn from our decisions and we’ve gone on to deploy Housing Repairs Online at Hackney and Newark & Sherwood District Council. 

We’ll be extending what the service can do, including cancelling or amending appointments, requesting repairs to communal areas, and, most recently, adding a Damp and Mould module to help manage and monitor these cases. You can find the most up-to-date version of Housing Repairs Online, now called Made Tech Repairs here. 

Housing Repairs Online, which is available on GitHub has been funded by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’s (DLUHC) Local Digital Fund and is accessible to other local authorities who may wish to reuse and adapt.

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