In our February review post, we shared some details of a project we’ve been working on with  Southwark, Lincoln and South Kesteven councils, exploring approaches for the design of a common pattern for reporting, diagnosing and scheduling of housing repairs.  Today, we’re taking a closer look at what that project has entailed, and the significant impact it could have.

This has been a different type of project for DG Cities to be involved in  - firstly because it looked specifically at a local authority service rather than a ‘big’ city issue and secondly because our role in it has been to represent our parent company, the Royal Borough of Greenwich. 

So how did all of this come about?  Well, last year we undertook some work for the Council’s Housing and Safer Communities Directorate where we explored how the latest technology and approaches could be utilised to improve the provision of Housing services to tenants, focusing on the Repairs and Investment service. 

During that work we became aware of a Southwark led project, that was looking at whether there could be a common blueprint for providing an online repairs services.  Despite having a sizable 25,000 properties, Greenwich doesn’t currently have an online repairs booking service, and we were keen therefore to understand what such a blueprint might look like. So when we were asked if we wanted to get involved as a partner in that work, we jumped at the chance!

Over the past three months we’ve been working with the other Councils, plus a digital agency called dxw digital, to explore approaches for the design of a common pattern for reporting, diagnosing and scheduling of housing repairs. This has all been funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) local digital collaboration fund which aims to address common local service challenges in common, reusable ways.

Why is this work important?

According to MHCLG there are 1.6 million socially rented properties in England and Councils are responsible for providing repairs to those properties.  But with some notable exceptions, the services available to report a problem and book a repair appointment have evolved in a pre-internet era. They are predominantly phone based and tend to have low satisfaction ratings. 

As you’d expect, there are lots of similarities in the way different local authorities deliver their repairs services, making housing repairs well suited to developing a common service pattern. Now this doesn’t mean that all local authorities need to do things exactly the same way or use a single or specific system.  But it does mean that it is possible to design a best practice guide for providing a service that meets user needs.  This best practice guide can then be picked up and replicated by any Council, and used to build a service for their own residents.

To help bring this to life, dxw came up with an easy to understand analogy:   

A service pattern can be seen as a recipe to design and build a service.  A successful service pattern can be picked up by a service designer, service owner, or digital development team in any council and then used to build the service itself.  Think of the service as your meal. 

Each council (the kitchen in this scenario) is different will have different tools that operate in different ways, and different ways of working - but the recipe gives them enough that they can still create that meal. The recipe can be adapted and changed, but the meal is fundamentally the same. And the best thing is, if one kitchen finds a notably better way of preparing the meal, they can update the recipe for other kitchens to benefit.

The Nuts & Bolts

Over the course of six weeks, the project has focused on finding out what repairs service users need to be able to achieve, and then determining how to best meet those needs through an online service. Dxw built website prototypes and tested them with both Council staff and users to get their feedback, and iterate and improve the design of that digital service. 

At the end of the six week period, we had a working prototype which allowed a resident to easily and confidently find information about how to resolve their issue, request and book a repair, and understand what would happen next, and by when.

We also gathered repairs and call centre data to help us understand the business case for further investment in this work. Taking just the financial benefits, across the four partner authorities, benefits are estimated at £2.26m - £5.97m over ten years (depending on the level of channel shift achieved).  And that’s only the benefits for the four authorities who participated in this part of the project - according to dxw “extrapolating this nationally, across a 50% of the remaining authorities in England with more than 1,000 units of accommodation, could realise £19.4m - £81m (high case) over ten years” - pretty exciting stuff!

What’s next?

The alpha phase of the project has come to an end but with numbers like those, we’re keen to press on and investigate this idea further. Along with the other Councils we’ve submitted a bid to MHCLG for further funding to look into the technical aspects of delivering a service based on the common service pattern and we hope to get started with that soon. Ultimately our goal is to use all these findings to build a working service for residents to use.  And of course, to keep on sharing all of the findings and outputs from doing that, so any other local authority can also come along for the ride and reap the rewards.

You can read the final report summarising what was done and the findings of the project here.

This is a great example of how purposeful urban innovation can sometimes mean evolution, rather than radical revolution.  If you’re interested in finding out more this work, or have your own challenge you’d like to tackle, we’d love to hear from you.  Drop us a line at [email protected]