What could be learned from retail and municipalities?

From retail, aspects of the principle of category management could function as an inspiration for housing associations. By improving the performance of an entire category rather than of separate products, improved performance might be delivered overall. Comparably, maintenance performance as a whole could be improved by integrating decision-making for reactive maintenance, planned maintenance and void repairs. Currently, separate departments of housing associations are often responsible for these three maintenance types, despite the links between the three, which may well hamper the achieve- ment of optimal outcomes. For instance, structural maintenance could be aligned with installation maintenance in order to improve energy quality and to decrease energy bills. Integration could, in addition, be achieved for main- tenance and (small) improvements. For instance, maintenance workers that visit tenants for reactive maintenance could also install new police-approved locks, if so desired by tenants.

Unlike municipalities, the situation of retailers is one of competing for cus- tomer favour. Public accountability and transparency function as incentives for rational decision-making by municipalities and effective spending. With regard to the immobile housing services market, competition is very restrict- ed. In order to stimulate effectiveness in spending, there seems some need for public monitoring and transparency, at any rate regarding investment in public services. Unlike the activities performed in a competitive setting, there is limited incentive for efficient investment. Nonetheless, public, and in par- ticular European, procurement rules are not being applied, and actual trans- parency is thus limited. Given this, it would be advisable to apply transparent procedures enabling fair competition among candidate suppliers.

For collective choices, when the direct benefit principle cannot be applied, residents have access to democratic tools in order to influence their munici- pality’s decisions. For housing associations, planned maintenance can be per- ceived as a form of collective choice. Tenants can thus use tenants’ organi- sations to empower themselves. However, it appears that currently, the fact

that decisions are taken at a business (instead of local) level, affecting many aspects including the price and quality of services, is seldom contested. Giv- ing stakeholders (e.g. tenants) a strong position vis-à-vis the internal deci- sion-making structure of housing associations (e.g. supervisory bodies) could improve debate, allowing accountability to follow transparency. This could include paying attention to the representativeness of tenants’ organisations. Increased accountability for tenants’ interests would probably lead to an in- creased focus on the customer. It would be logical, for instance, for the pur- chasing department to become accountable for its performance from the ten- ant’s perspective. Inadequate service delivery would have consequences for the housing association’s decision-makers.

At the level of the housing block, for collective maintenance choices, i.e. planned maintenance, tenants’ opinions could be collected and used for maintenance priority setting. For reactive maintenance, the individual tenant might be offered certain product or delivery process upgrades in exchange for a fee. In any case, it is important to keep tenants well-informed about expect- ed maintenance works.

An adapted version of this chapter was also included in the Habiforum report Inkoop van onderhoud en goede dienstverlening (Van Mossel and Straub, 2007).

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5 Impact of maintenance