One of the major objectives for us at LiveWest is to increase our capacity to deliver works and services in-house. This will allow us to deliver better service and value for money for our customers. Our strategy is to gradually insource key services including repairs, voids and servicing, and we started the project in July 2019 with repairs and voids (under the Spectrum Property Care contract delivering works to 1,800 properties).
All contracts being insourced were formerly delivered works through the Knightstone Housing Association Maintenance Partnership in the areas of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and Gloucestershire.
The project continues to support our vision of services to be self-delivered by LiveWest, and we are happy to provide an update for you on progress to date.
In January 2022, we insourced services formerly from MD Group, who had been delivering a day-to-day repairs and voids works service since 2014 to 2,700 properties.
As of 1 April, we have insourced the following:
- Kitchen and bathrooms planned programme. NKS have been delivering a programme of approximately 400-500 replacement kitchens and bathrooms annually since 2014 to 11,000 properties across Bristol, Bath, and Somerset areas.
- Electrical Testing. EmmDee Electrical have been delivering inspection and testing of electrical installations, along with installations of smoke and co alarms since 2014 to 11,000 properties in the Bristol, South Gloucestershire, and Gloucestershire areas.
To support the insourcing, we are also recruiting Day to Day Repairs Multiskilled Technicians, Electricians and Gas engineers to join our In-House Maintenance Services (IMS) team. This is an exciting time for LiveWest, and we are really looking forward to welcoming our new colleagues into our IMS team at LiveWest.
We will be undertaking an extensive induction with the new teams. Through this, both the new and existing LiveWest colleagues will have the opportunity to meet and get to know one-another, as well as introducing and embedding our ways of working with our new colleagues.
This is the next step towards providing a single in-house service across LiveWest which, once complete, will ensure that we are providing the same high-level service across all the areas in which we operate.