Estate Services
We want our neighbourhoods to be great places to live. Over the past year, we’ve made big improvements to how we manage and deliver estate services – thanks to your feedback!
You told us:
“Grounds maintenance could be better.”
So, we:
- Made it easier for you to report problems to us online.
- Improved how we check the work our contractors, who deliver your estate services, are doing.
- Reviewed our data to make sure no areas were being missed.
- Put improvement plans in place for contractors not meeting the standards we expect.
An easy way to report
In April 2024, we launched a new reporting tool to help you tell us when something isn’t right, like overgrown grass or missed visits.
This easy-to-use tool allows you to report issues to us at any time of day or night, making reporting easier and saving you time. It also helps us fix problems quicker, keep better records, and update you as we sort things out.
When you make a report, it’s shared directly with our teams and our contractors, so that issues can be tracked and sorted quickly.
In November 2024, we also added a self-serve schedule tool, so you can easily see when we're due to visit your area, and report issues using your postcode or location.
Our Community Champions
Community Champions share feedback with us to help us improve our services, let us know about estate services issues in their area, and help to build stronger communities.
Community Champions
Working closely with our contractors
In 2024-25, we made big changes in how we work with our contractors delivering your grounds maintenance services. Including:
- More regular check-ins to see what’s going well, and what needs to improve.
- Better systems which allow us to check work being done by our contractors, including before-and-after photos and details of visits.
We also:
- Introduced a new team to focus on improving the service.
- Held workshops and delivered ongoing training for our teams.
- Launched a collaborative working group to hold ourselves accountable and deliver changes.
- Checked and cleaned up the data we had for our grounds maintenance service. This included removing items that were no longer needed and adding any missing items to the right contracts, so contractors could be confident about which services and areas they’re responsible for.
Your feedback helping us to make changes
When renewing the contractor to deliver estate services in the West Urban area, we took the chance to improve how the service is delivered by using feedback directly from you.
We invited customers to join the process of choosing the new contractor and help shape important decisions through sharing experiences, talking about what was working and what wasn’t, and helping us explore possible changes and improvements.
This project created a new way of working, putting customer involvement at the heart of all future contracts.
This successful project has helped us prepare for renewing all our estate service contracts, with careful plans, accurate information and strong customer involvement from the start.
Receiving a good grounds maintenance service is something that our customer Scrutiny Panel know is important to you. That’s why, back in February, after reviewing lots of performance data and customer feedback, they decided to complete a deep-dive review of Grounds Maintenance in the Somerset area.
During the review, the panel were delighted to receive over 200 pieces of customer feedback and hosted a customer-led focus group to get deeper insight into their views. This feedback has already helped to shape improvements, including enhancing the estate services reporting tool.
The review resulted in 10 recommendations from the panel, with a strong focus on improving customer communications. We’re currently working with colleagues to implement all 10 recommendations.
What’s coming next
We’re continuing to work closely with our contractors and make changes to improve estate services. This includes:
- Working towards bringing in new contracts with smaller, more local areas.
- Reviewing tree maintenance and cleaning services to make sure they meet your needs.
- Continuing to revisit areas where we can do better.