Repairing and maintaining Chesterfield council housing is top priority after Covid 19 restrictions prevented necessary works

Results from Chesterfield Borough Council’s STAR tenant satisfaction survey revealed a drop in confidence in Housing Services, with 68 per cent saying they were happy with the department, as opposed to more than 80 per cent in 2017 and 2019.

Speaking in a meeting of cabinet, Service Director for Corporate Donna Reddish put this reduction down to the challenges posed by the pandemic.

She said: “Some of the challenges that we have identified are that this is an area that has been significantly impacted by Covid 19 restrictions, so non-essential housing management and support services were delivered remotely and focus was placed very much on emergency response and managing health and safety risks.

“It was also an area where we redeployed significant numbers of staff into really essential services such as care line and the crematorium.

“So during the pandemic, tenants did not see as much of our staff as they perhaps routinely would have.”

She added the council had put together an improvement plan in reaction to tenant’s comments, which looked at increasing the number of frontline housing officers to provide ‘real emphasis on direct tenant support’ and ensure repairs were delivered.

Executive Director Christine Durrant added: “The repairs and maintenance team haven’t been able to access people’s homes as they would have done previously and I think as restrictions were lifted there was a lot of work we had to do to review risk assessments.”

She said there were also issues around supply chain, whereby materials could not be sourced for work that had been scheduled, which added to people’s frustrations.

A similar survey carried out with Chesterfield residents in general saw an increase in the number of people satisfied to call the borough home.

The ‘Are You Being Served?’ survey showed overall satisfaction among residents was at 85 per cent in 2021, a figure that was up from 84 per cent in 2019 and significantly higher than the national average of 78 per cent.

Meanwhile, the proportion of people happy with the way the authority ran things was 77 per cent in 2021, compared to 74 per cent in 2019 and 56 per cent nationally.