Life after a bad inspection

But if Wear Valley District Council in County Durham died when its repairs and maintenance service received a no-star report from the inspectors last November, it has since risen from the grave. Far from remaining demoralised after being told it provided a poor service that was unlikely to improve, Wear Valley, like other councils that received poor reports (see page 40), sees the inspection process as a positive one. It has seized on its report as a catalyst, and has reviewed everything from operating procedures to the woolly hats worn by its maintenance workers.

Michael Laing, its director of housing services, now spreads the gospel of change with evangelical zeal and the vocabulary of a modern management guru.

"What we've done is gone through business process re-engineering," he says. Before he can be asked to explain this jargon, he adds, "but what that means is really just common sense."

When he points out that the old procedures meant each repair report generated 17 pieces of paper, you get an idea of how a healthy dose of common sense could be applied to make improvements.

"Staff had been asking why there were so many pieces of paper. They were burdened down by bureaucracy, and we have now lifted that from their shoulders," Laing says. "We expected morale to go down after the inspection, but staff had been able to see that things were not going right and there was actually a desperate hunger to change."

Putting things right
Laing came into his job at Wear Valley, which has 6000 homes in management, a month before the inspection was carried out last August. He was not surprised by the report (see panel). "I knew the position that the council was in before I joined it," he says. "It was a perfectly accurate report. The two things that you have to do after the report is accept that the inspectors are right, and make a statement that you will put it right."

Putting it right has been the priority for Laing and his staff ever since, and the strategy has involved a lot more than simply cutting down on paperwork. Laing called on expert advice to aid the change process, asking the inspectors for more feedback, using Change Here!, the Audit Commission's change management guide, and inviting Newcastle-based Home Housing Association to share some of its knowledge. "Home gave us one thing that we were lacking," explains Laing. "We didn't have a broad external frame of reference, to look at how services could be delivered in a different way. They showed us we could handle repairs differently, that we could give customers choices in kitchen units."

Council tenants, staff and councillors are all participating in the improvement process.

Some changes were generated through brainstorming sessions with the staff themselves. One example is the new staff uniforms, which for maintenance workers now include woolly hats for winter and baseball caps for summer. "We have had specific sessions with residents, councillors and staff, looking at both quick wins and long-term gains," says Laing.

Tenants are now represented on a range of working groups and committees, including those planning the capital programme and with responsibility for the housing strategy and business plan. Training courses on best practice are now attended not only by council staff but also by residents and councillors.

Perhaps the most radical of all the changes to date has been the council's scrapping of the old bonus system for its workforce – a move carried out with trade union acceptance. The council is looking at a replacement bonus system based on customer satisfaction, which it hopes to introduce by the end of the year. There is now a formal consultation system for staff, something that did not exist before.

Growing satisfaction
The council's aims and objectives, and the fact that it now surveys tenant satisfaction, are set out in its agreements with its contractors, spreading the new culture throughout the system. Customer satisfaction is improving, particularly on the repairs side where it has grown from 75% to 82% in a matter of months.

At the time of the inspection, the repairs and maintenance service accounted for 15% of the Labour-controlled council's net expenditure of £28m. To implement the changes, the service has been allocated a £300,000 improvement budget, but in the longer term Laing expects to save money.

"It needs kick-starting, but in the medium term this is cost neutral, and in the longer term we should see cost benefits," he says. "It is about releasing ourselves from what customers don't want and doing what they do want. We still have a long way to go, and it is not a matter of 'in April we'll be there'. Customers' expectations keep on going up, and you have to meet them. It is a moving target. You never stop."