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Ten new housing repairs and maintenance contracts commence at south London council
Ten new housing repairs and maintenance contracts for Lambeth Council worth a total of £220m over six years start today.
The largest of the new deals, worth £8m a year, has been awarded to Wates Living Space, which will manage responsive repairs and voids in the south of the borough, covering 17,000 of Lambeth’s 33,000 homes.
Fortem Solutions will deliver similar services in the north of Lambeth for £7.7m a year, with seven other companies taking responsibility for managing communal gas and water systems, domestic gas and electrical works, and lift maintenance.
An in-house team, Community Works, will also handle repairs to communal areas of estates.
The new contracts, which were approved by Lambeth’s cabinet in March, provide for two four-year discretionary extensions after the initial six-year terms expire.
They supersede arrangements with 11 firms, but dominated by Mears. They handled responsive and void repairs, planned maintenance and estate services across much of the borough.
The old system was criticised in council reports for being both overly complex and not flexible enough in terms of enabling it to reallocate jobs.
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In January last year, Lambeth Council signed an agreement with 10 housing associations to find more “cost-effective” ways of managing the homes in the borough.
That came two months after the Regulator of Social Housing issued the authority with a regulatory notice. Fire safety, gas safety and asbestos management failures had caused it to breach the Home Standard.
Maria Kay, cabinet member for housing and homelessness at Lambeth Council, said: “Through introducing more competition for council projects, our expectation is that residents will have a better experience from our repairs service.”
She added: “There will be a broad mix of expertise among the contractors, and the new pricing structure will act as an incentive for contractors to get the job right first time.”
Tenderers for the new contracts were encouraged to offer a contribution equivalent to 1% of their contract turnover towards funding social and environmental initiatives within Lambeth.
A statement issued by Wates said the company would be working with the council to improve social equality throughout the borough, as well as helping achieve carbon neutrality using energy-saving technologies across its housing stock.
Gary Wilkinson, regional managing director for Wates Living Space, said: “We are excited to work with our partners in Lambeth to deliver quality housing and support for the long-term development of local people and businesses.
“We pride ourselves on the social value that we can generate from our work.
“In 2020, we provided 1,500 hours of training and employment experience and £6m of spend for local people and businesses across all our operations, and we look forward to continuing this investment to benefit the communities across Lambeth.”
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