Renfrewshire Council: the Audit of Best Value and ... - Audit Scotland

152. Customer service pledges allow customers to understand the level of service they can expect.
Performance against these targets has been met or exceeded in 2004/5 for the homelessness
service. These pledges are monitored through customer satisfaction surveys as part of the service’s
charter mark approach.
Building services
153. The building services division provides repairs and maintenance services to both the council housing
stock and council buildings. Around 80 per cent of the workforce would transfer to the housing
association should tenants vote in favour of a stock transfer.
154. Building services operations have not been competitively tendered since 1997. The in-house contract
has been renewed each year on the basis of best value service reviews, which use benchmarking
information and external consultancy reports to demonstrate competitiveness. The service has shown
year-on-year improvements, such as the use of hand-held devices for reporting repairs and a greater
emphasis on planned capital works rather than reactive maintenance. However, the service could
better demonstrate its competitiveness by taking a more systematic approach to its market
comparisons and considering whether this service should be market tested in the future.
155. One example of an external review of service competitiveness is the report commissioned by the
shadow housing association to test the council’s building service’s capability as a potential service
provider. This review concluded that the trades profile and turnover requirement complemented the
housing association’s anticipated work programme. The report also included a dummy tender
evaluation exercise. This concluded that building services’ tender price was well within the programme
budget, and offered comparatively high quality. A comparison with successful tenders for similarly
sized contracts indicated that actual works costs of the in-house tender were competitive, although
on-costs were higher. This has prompted the service to develop a multi-trades approach to service
delivery.
156. The service has developed its approach to customer care through: customer feedback with follow-up
visits to all non-satisfied customers; training and quality assurance; extension of the service into the
early evening; customer access through the customer contact centre and the web portal; a tenant
handbook on repairs reporting; and better coordinating different trades when undertaking a job.
Customer satisfaction feedback indicates that over 90 per cent of customers are satisfied with the
service.
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