Arguably the biggest challenge to our business during the pandemic was making sure we could still carry out your repairs without putting any of our customers, our staff or our partners in danger.

Apart from the risk of spreading infection, there were also supply chain issues with sourcing parts, materials and PPE as well as significant Covid outbreaks within our contractors’ businesses. This slowed everything down for us and saw us deal with a lot more complaints in the past year as we had to extend our 28-day standard.

The decision to offer emergency repairs only was a difficult one for us and one which we knew wouldn’t be popular but it was necessary to keep people safe.

Having established safe working practices, we were able to carry out some of our planned programme works, trying hard to respect our customers’ views and checking with them whether they were happy for work to happen in their home.

Despite these setbacks, we have hit some of our most important targets. For example, 99.95% of our homes are gas safe and we completed 99.2% of our repairs having switched to an emergency only service.

We’ve also secured three new 15-year contracts with our repairs partners in 2020-21, helping us to build long-lasting relationships and scrutinise performance even further to make sure we keep improving this service for you.

Our Scrutiny Panel launched an in-depth review into our repairs service to see how, from a customer point of view, this could be better for you.

We owe a huge thank you to our customers who have been patient with our repairs service during this time as we have adapted to the ever-changing situation. We’re determined to have a great repairs service to help you feel safe in your home and we will keep listening to your feedback to help us create it.