Trust Wins National Award for Innovation

Published by Jo Gadsby for Wrekin Housing Trust Ltd in Housing

The Wrekin Housing Trust has won the Best Innovation category at The National Housing Maintenance Forum (NHMF) Awards 2013, for its continuous improvements to customer repairs and the introduction of its rapid response service. The Trust was also shortlisted in the Best DLO (Direct Labour Organisation) category.

Each year, the NHMF recognises best practice in the maintenance of social housing. 

The Trust has over the last 5 years built its reputation as one of the country’s leading in-house maintenance teams, and this has helped it to grow its business so that now, as well as maintaining its own stock, it delivers maintenance services to an additional 8,000 units owned by other Housing Associations or Local Authorities across Shropshire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands.

The accolade comes as a result of the Trust working with its customers to improve the speed of repairs whilst maintaining the existing high quality.  It implemented a same day repairs service whereby tenants’ repairs are completed on the same day that they are reported since starting this approach, over 15,000 repairs have been reported and 91% of these have been done that day.  The Trust now compares favourably against the best private and public sector companies in the UK offering responsive maintenance services. 

As a result of the process improvements, the team has managed to increase customer satisfaction, find efficiency savings and use those savings to re-invest back into more improvement work for Wrekin Housing Trust tenants.