Site Inspections

These are carried out by a range of staff including our Principal/Senior Estate Officers (P/SEO’s), Neighbourhood Managers; Sheltered Wardens and our grounds maintenance contractor.  

The Neighbourhood Managers and Sheltered Housing Wardens provide independent scrutiny and balance to the process. Residents are also able to carry out site inspections through participation in the ‘Mystery Shopping initiative’ and on request with any member of the aforementioned inspection personnel. Resident involvement is encouraged through a number of mediums including invitations provided with our EnviroWatch Surveys.

Site inspections are carried out electronically on-site and results are stored on a web based database and accessed week to week by the External Services Officer who processes reports into work requests with other sections (eg reports of disrepair) or job orders internally (eg graffiti removal). The P/SEO’s also access site inspection reports to inform ongoing monitoring and checks on works progress or rectification of service faults.

Site inspections are carried out randomly, but may be targeted where estate issues regularly occur or where ongoing monitoring is required to assess a service or estate risk. Site inspections are reviewed at monthly grounds maintenance liaison meetings with our contractor, and also internally during team meetings or staff one to one supervision meetings.

Site inspections cover a range of set ‘task’ elements which are scored as follows:

Excellent. Where there are no faults with standards of service

Good. Where there are only minor faults with standards of service

Fair. Where there are some faults with standards of service which could reasonably be expected to occur during inspection

Rectify. Where there are faults with standards of service that should not reasonably be expected to occur during inspection

Default. Where there are faults with service that should not reasonably be expected to occur during inspection and is not capable of remedy

Each task element is ‘weighed up’ to provide an overall score which provides a summary of standards with Estatecare and/or Grounds Maintenance.

Detailed below for illustration purposes is as sample of a Site Inspection showing the range of tasks scored during inspection.  Last year a total of 1,332 Site Inspections were carried out in total.

How well do our Estatecare and Grounds Maintenance services perform?  Detailed below are some facts and figures relating to our services scored by site inspections.

• During 2008/09 some 1,352 site inspections were carried out averaging 113 each month, a very slight drop on the previous year. The purpose of the site inspections are to monitor and score standards of estatecare and grounds maintenance on our estates on a day to day basis and also record any urgent issues requiring rectification. In April 2008 we improved the efficiency of delivering these inspections by setting up a web based form to record inspection results using Blackberry handheld devices. The benefit was a reduction in paperwork with data being accessible immediately and in a format accessible to all staff, including other sections. 
• On 95.35% of inspections during 2008/09, standards of service were judged to be fair, good or excellent against a Local Performance Indicator target of 95.5%.   On 69.95% of inspections, standards of service were judged to be good or excellent against a Local Performance Indicator target (LPI 20) of 59.5%.  Driving this improvement has been our commitment to staff training in cleaning and improved and settled structure of supervision on estatecare. On our grounds we have also had continued benefits arising from the renewal of our shrub bed areas. It is also thought that the new system of electronically scoring our site inspections has compounded these improvements by identifying issues early, addressing them quickly and in turn improving performance.