Kingdom Housing Association’s maintenance team has celebrated its 10th anniversary with a 94 per cent approval rating.

The association, with 3,500 houses in Fife and Central Scotland, decided to take the reactive repairs service for half of its homes in-house in 2006 and four years later it was decided to carry out all reactive and voids repairs through the in-house team.

The maintenance team is now 24-strong and includes five of the original staff who celebrated their 10th anniversary this week.

Mike Hargreaves, one of the original team, said: “Kingdom has been a great company to work for over the last 10 years. It has opened up great opportunities for me now and in the future, I enjoy the variety of work and it’s good to meet different tenants every day.”

Bill Banks, chief executive at Kingdom, said: “The growth in the in-house maintenance services has been incremental and there are advantages associated with increased control over scheduling, greater flexibility and cost savings. The main advantage, however, relates to the improvements in tenant satisfaction levels. When we started delivering in-house maintenance services, we had poor turnaround periods for voids and very low satisfaction levels with our repairs service. The average satisfaction level is now 94 per cent and this is largely due to the service provided by the in-house maintenance team.”

The maintenance team carry out the Association’s reactive repairs, change of tenancy works, emergency repairs, along with elements of the planned and cyclical programme.

Alan Simpson, head of asset management, added: “Delivery of high quality reactive maintenance services can be challenging at times, however the benefits are worth it. A few years ago we expanded the services we deliver in-house by starting to carry out our own kitchen replacement programme. This has been successful and during 2016 we have plans to further expand the amount and types of work we do through the in-house maintenance team.”