£1m – the cost of tenants missing vital safety appointments

Customers who miss appointments for important safety checks at their homes are costing believe housing close to £1m a year.

The County Durham-based housing association has revealed that around a quarter of all appointments it makes to complete compliance visits are missed by tenants.

When it calculated the cost of wasted home visits and employee time spent rearranging appointments and securing access to properties, it was around £1m a year.

That is the equivalent of fitting 588 new bathrooms, 379 new kitchens or 769 new boilers in homes.

It is reminding tenants that alongside the impact missed appointments have on believe housing in terms of time and money lost it is also delays important safety checks.

Emma Jorgenson, Compliance Manager at believe housing, said: “We have a regulatory responsibility to visit homes to conduct important checks on a regular basis.

“Depending on the property this can include gas servicing, electrical checks, fire door inspections, legionella monitoring, asbestos surveying, testing and servicing of stairlifts, or radon monitoring.

“These visits are vital for tenants’ safety and must be completed, yet around a quarter of the appointments we make are missed by customers.

“As an organisation we’re looking at ways to reduce this, including trialling new software to make it easier to confirm and rearrange appointments with customers.

“We also urge customers to support us by keeping appointments or calling 0300 131 1999 if they receive an appointment but are unavailable, so we can rearrange to visit their home at a suitable time and give that slot to someone else.

“This will help us to keep customers safe and make sure time and money that could be spent upgrading homes isn’t wasted.”