Supporting our customers through the pandemic

Ensuring our customers understand and support our approach to recovery is key to bringing our services back online in a planned and measured way following the gradual easing of lockdown measures over recent weeks.

To ensure the safety of our customers and our people, it’s important that we take the time to carry out proper risk assessments on the services we provide, which is why we aren’t just turning all services back on immediately.

Instead, we’re using a three phased approach to recovery which clearly sets out what services our customers can expect to see starting again over the coming weeks.

Now in phase two of the plan we’ve resumed urgent repairs inside our homes and from the end of June, we’ll start to work through the significant backlog of non-essential repairs that have built up over the past few months.

Like many in our sector, the restrictions in place over the past few months has meant that we have had to postpone our non-essential works which we are now working through in order of urgency.

Our teams are working as fast as they can to get through the back log of work, and in just a few short weeks have carried out over 2,000 gas safety inspections, re-let 130 homes and continued to make over 1,000 welfare calls a week to some of our most vulnerable customers.

The next phase of our approach, when it’s safe for us to move to, is to focus on reinstating our full programme of works in customers’ homes. We will also resume letting homes in our sheltered housing and extra care schemes from 29 June and we’re confident we can restart mutual exchanges in early July, once we’ve made the necessary changes to protect our customers and colleagues. 

As life begins to take on a new normal, we continue to follow the advice from government and to carry out our own risk assessments to help keep our customers and colleagues safe in line with our high-level risk assessment which is available here.