Portsmouth puts the customer first

Author: The Guardian - Nov 25, 2009

Local government watchdog the Audit Commission will in two weeks' time release the first results from its new inspection regime, the Comprehensive Area Assessment. The new process is intended to "shine a light on people's experience of public services" in 152 areas of England, and enable them to ask how well they are being served by local services. It involves inspection not just of local councils, but also of police, probation, health and fire services.

But there is one corner of England where the new approach is likely to cut very little ice. The housing department of Portsmouth city council has opted for an approach that it believes serves its tenants well, but does not fit with either the old or the new inspection regime.

Owen Buckwell, the council's head of housing, says his department may meet a government target "by coincidence", but no longer focuses on them. "We learned that categorising jobs into 'emergency' and 'non emergency' to meet the government target led to incomplete repairs, missed appointments and poor-quality work," he says.

He cites an example of a broken toilet. "To meet the government target for a broken toilet, we needed to fix it within 24 hours because it is categorised as an emergency," he says. "But the tenant might not consider the repair an emergency if they have another working toilet in the house. In that case, it might suit them if we carry out the repair after six days, when they have a day off work. We now focus on what suits the tenant." This is more cost-effective, believes Buckwell, than setting appointments that don't suit tenants, because there are fewer missed appointments, where expensive contractors turn up only to find tenants not in.

Buckwell says that listening to what tenants really want and feeding that back into the supply chain has led to real improvements – at no extra cost. "Before, we had a 98% satisfaction rating, which we knew couldn't be true," he says. It was based on questions, such as whether workmen smiled when they came round and cleaned up after the work. While it gave the department a high satisfaction rating on paper, they were the wrong questions in terms of good customer service, he explains. "When we started to observe real interactions we learned something very different. I spent a lot of time sitting in contractors' vans and we found the real satisfaction rate was much lower."

As a result, Portsmouth has changed the way it serves the public. Now, when tenants ring in to ask for a repair, they are asked when they would like it to be done. "If a tenant wants a repair doing next Tuesday at 9am, we do the repair next Tuesday at 9am." But what if everyone wants the same time and there aren't enough staff? There's a genuine negotiation with tenants, says Buckwell. People understand they can't always have their first choice of time. But more often than not, they can because, behind the scenes, the service has been reorganised. "There is a lot of predictability: there are a lot of calls on Monday mornings, for instance," explains Buckwell. "So we have talked to our contractors and told them we need more people available at those busy times."

Rearranging services

It sounds simple, he says, but involves rearranging the way services are organised. "Before, services were designed around functional specialisms – some people worked on empty properties, while others did repairs for tenants. Now, everyone's available to help meet times of high demand."

This approach has led to Buckwell and his team opting out of the government's Choice-Based Lettings scheme and the Decent Homes Standard because they impose priorities on tenants. Although he fully accepts a public service has to be accountable and welcomes, in theory, the move by the Audit Commission to an inspection regime that takes account of local priorities, he remains wary of the regime in England. "All that sounds great," he says. "But I am concerned that it is the same people [at the Audit Commission] with the same thinking."

Where there is a choice between good customer service and keeping to the rules of any inspection regime, he says that he and his team will always choose the former.

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