As housing associations plough forward with their Decent Homes improvement programme, is anyone paying attention to planned maintenance or can it be argued that the two are almost interchangeable?

Planned maintenance is a long hard slog for many RSLs working to bring their housing stock up to scratch after decades of neglect and under funding.

And the introduction of the Government’s Decent Homes Standard, which will see the improvement of 3.6 million homes by 2010, took the concept of planned maintenance to a new level.

Indeed for many organisations the planned maintenance programme and Decent Homes improvements programmes, run hand in hand with each other.

After all the massive refurbishment programme, which endeavours to bring social housing up to a decent standard by the deadline set by the Government, is a grandiose version of the former.

Generally the work carried out under the Decent Homes improvement programmes covers new kitchens and bathrooms, the installation of U-PVC double glazed windows and new doors, roof repairs and the installation of new central heating systems.

But for some housing organisations such improvement programmes were already underway when the concept of the Decent Homes Standard was first mooted.

A typical example is Arms Length Management Organisation Derby Homes, which was created by Derby City Council in 2002 to manage, maintain and improve its council houses and estates.

When work started on its Decent Homes programme the ALMO’s U-PVC window replacement scheme, was already underway, as part of its normal programme of repairs.

Director of regeneration and development at Derby Homes, Shaun Bennett, said that it worked out in the ALMO’s favour to carry out the works separately as it allowed them to minimise the disruption and amount of time spent in tenants’ homes.

“The U-PVC programme was already in place following its normal course, so that tenants had a number of short, sharp shocks as it were, rather than a number of weeks of major disruption”, says Bennett.

He added: “To be fair, in Derby, down to the previous managers, we had always had a very strong programme of planned maintenance, so we had wrapped up most of the work that we needed to do already.”

Bennett believes that partnership working with contractors is key to any successful improvement programme, as is tenant involvement.

He added: “Communication is a real challenge when managing a programme of this scale.”

However, while the fine line between planned maintenance and Decent Homes may appear somewhat blurred at the moment, keeping their properties up to a quality standard is still high on the agenda for most organisations.

At Derby Homes there is a planned maintenance team, which addresses the future investment needs of the housing stock by scheduling refurbishment work and records information about the condition of all of the ALMO’s homes, which is used in reports to both Derby City Council and central government.

For The Riverside Group, which provides affordable properties for rent and shared ownership, and homes and support for vulnerable and older people, across England, planned maintenance is also a key issue. A spokesperson for the group said: “The Riverside Group believes it’s extremely important to have a proper planned maintenance programme that pro-actively manages the group’s property base assets.”

Ensuring efficiency and value for money has been a challenge for the group as is implementing improvements within the budgetary constraints and once again partnership is seen as the key to success. The company says: “This is always a challenge and one which we know we must meet so we continually seek innovative ways of procuring our programmes, such as working with Fusion 21.”

Fusion 21 is a joint construction procurement partnership, set up in Merseyside in 2002, to address issues such as rising construction costs and labour shortages.

Work carried out as part of The Riverside Group’s repairs programme has included kitchen renewal, new, extended, and replacement central heating, bathroom fitting renewal, electrical system rewires, window renewal, door renewal, roof replacements, fire alarm installations, adaptations and environmental and energy efficiency measures.

However, whether it is planned maintenance or Decent Homes that an organisation is working toward, a recent survey report from consultants Tribal suggests that many housing organisations are not using an effective system to manage all of the information for their improvement programmes and, as a result, could be losing time and money.

Key findings of the report show that 26 per cent of organisations had no system in place to manage improvement programmes; 25 per cent had no system in place to manage documents; 20 per cent believed that they did not need a system at all and 23 per cent had no system to report on the programme’s performance.

Yet over 40 per cent of the organisations said it was difficult or very difficult to track the progress of their programme.

So what is the answer to this lack of system management? Well, according to Tribal, housing organisations need a single, accurate and up-to-date information source about the delivery of the project. This should include all documents, both electronic and hard copy scans, leaving a clear audit trail; integration with all asset management, finance and housing systems; the ability to produce accurate performance information instantly; access for a range of stakeholders including contractors and tenants and a clear vision of the programme’s strategy and how it will work “on the ground”.

And, according to Tribal, the housing organisations which have already begun to use this kind of system named its key benefits as producing accurate performance information instantly; easily managing the performance of contractors using up-to-date information; having confident financial control of the project and being able to identify problems quickly and sign off invoices easily; saving staff time by eliminating the duplication of data entry and a reduction in the use of paper following the move to an electronic system.

John Stuttard, director of Tribal’s information systems consultancy, said: “Our job was to identify the crucial criteria for information systems that could be used to help housing improvement programmes deliver on time and on budget whilst meeting their quality standards.

“The survey showed a clear need for purpose-built information systems to manage these sorts of programmes. It also highlighted that staff of housing organisations need to know that having an integrated system to manage all of their information could save them time and money.

“For example, how many housing organisations have paid out unnecessarily for reactive repairs because they did not have the documents that show that the work is still under warranty? These are the sorts of problems we hope to see eliminated with more of these systems being developed and used in the sector.”

Derby Homes investigated the possibility of a web-based project management scheme but decided that the answer lay in developing their own system to suit their needs, as Bennett explains.

“We did evaluate webbased project management systems when we set up the programme and went quite a way down the road to purchase one but found out quite far down the line that it wasn’t going to provide what it had promised. So during that time we devised our own in-house project management system that we shared with the contractors and made sure that we had got strong information flow between us and the contractor so we all know the state of play with regards to the
programme.

We also gave the contractors the power to manage their own work as well. We didn’t spoon feed them”, he says.

But of course, whatever route organisations go down to keep track of repairs to their housing stock the issue of planned maintenance will really kick in when all of the Decent Homes programmes are complete and the organisations are working to keep the newly improved homes at that standard.

Whether all of them manage to keep their homes up to standard in the future remains to be seen.