Agenda and minutes

Apologies were received from Councillor Gallagher.

There were no declarations of substitute members.

If you have a Disclosable Pecuniary Interest* in an item of business:

§  if it is not yet on the council’s register, you must declare both the existence and details of it at the start of the meeting or when it becomes apparent;

§  you may choose to declare a Disclosable Pecuniary Interest that is already in the register in the interests of openness and transparency. 

In both the above cases, you must leave the room without participating in discussion of the item.

If you have a personal interest in an item of business and you intend to speak or vote on the item you must declare both the existence and details of it at the start of the meeting or when it becomes apparent but you may participate in the discussion and vote on the item.

*(a)     Employment, etc - Any employment, office, trade, profession or vocation carried on for profit or gain.

(b) Sponsorship - Any payment or other financial benefit in respect of your expenses in carrying out duties as a member, or of your election; including from a trade union.

(c) Contracts - Any current contract for goods, services or works, between you or your partner (or a body in which one of you has a beneficial interest) and the council.

(d)      Land - Any beneficial interest in land which is within the council’s area.

(e) Licences- Any licence to occupy land in the council’s area for a month or longer.

(f) Corporate tenancies - Any tenancy between the council and a body in which you or your partner have a beneficial interest.

 (g) Securities - Any beneficial interest in securities of a body which has a place of business or land in the council’s area, if the total nominal value of the securities exceeds £25,000 or one hundredth of the total issued share capital of that body or of any one class of its issued share capital. 

This applies to all members present at the meeting.

There were no declarations of interest.

RESOLVED:

That the minutes of the meeting held on 11 September 2018 be confirmed as an accurate record of proceedings and the Chair be authorised to sign them.

The Chair also highlighted two forthcoming events , the home and build exhibitions which was being held in October in London as a very good resource for anyone interested in housing related issues .

The Chair informed Members that the Council is awaiting further development in light of central government’s announcement that it intends to relax its rules about prudential borrowing for house building.

The order of business would be as per the agenda.

For members of the public to ask questions relating to any subject on the meeting agenda under Procedure Rule 70.5. Alternatively, the Chair may opt to accept questions from the public during the discussion on each agenda item.

The Chair set out the procedure for public questions and the filming of meetings.

Members received a presentation from both Anthony Jonas, Repairs Group Leader and Azim Urfan, Housing Direct Business Analyst on the operations, functionality  and challenges of the Housing Services Repairs IT. A copy of the presentation is interleaved with the agenda.

The following main points were noted in the presentation and in the discussion:

·         Members were informed that following Council’s decision to bring housing services back in-house, there was a recognition that the IT repairs system would need to be upgraded to manage in house resources and improve efficiency and customer service.

·         The IT system was procured in 2015, and went live in 2017. Phase 2 of the project aims to fine tune and incorporate a number of functionalities which will be completed in the winter of 2018/19.

·         The IT system is made of two elements to it, the One Serve and Synthesis with the latter focuses on job management while Synthesis manages customer relations.

·         The online repairs system will take calls and diagnose repairs, is  an online portal for customers to request and manage repair jobs via their smart phones or desktops ; schedule works to operatives and order parts via a PDA. In addition the online system will allow invoices to be submitted and payments be made to operatives.

·         At present there are about 190 users of the mobile version of One Serve and 350 users of the desktop version, the public take up is still low, this could be as a result of the free 0800 telephone repair line.

·         At present One serve covers over 40 areas of work such as day to day repairs, planned maintenance, gas repairs and servicing, estate inspections, communal heating repairs , testing and compliance etc.

·         The Online repairs allows residents to raise repairs online, easy to use and accessible to residents 24hrours. Also an audit trail of works and issues can be easily tracked and vulnerable tenants would have more options for repair works.

·         The dashboard, an interactive management tool will visually track, analyse and measure performance and as it connects to multiple data sets and displays the data as statistical charts, it will be useful for management. Most importantly dashboard provides real time monitoring and reduces time spent analysing data.

·         Members were advised that future plans include making further improvement to the PDA version with workflows, extending online repairs portal for customers, extending the online repairs service to leaseholders and customers in the private sector and introducing an improved SMS and web chat for customers.

·         In response to a question on how IT could specifically address the 15% dissatisfied  residents with regards to first time fixes, Officer advised that the introduction of the dashboard would enable all these areas of concerns to be analysed.

·         In response to a question on work load and uncompleted works, members were informed that the system is flexible and allows a repair operative unable to complete the works to record a reason why a second visit would be required and rebook an appointment so as to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 37.

RESOLVED:

That the work programme be noted