Defend disrepair claims with confidence.
As a leader within a housing provider, you ' ll have watched disrepair claims go from an occasional headache to a steady drain on your budget and your team. The claims management companies have found social housing, the adverts are everywhere now, and a tenant who would once have picked up the phone to your repairs line will often pick it up to a solicitor first.
When a claim lands it tends to name the familiar things, damp, mould, condensation, a repair that took too long, and by the time it reaches your desk the works are historic, the timeline is contested and you ' re left trying to answer the one question you were never really set up to answer, which is what was actually happening inside that home, and when.
The argument that’ s hard to win
The difficult part is that a disrepair claim is rarely about whether there ' s an issue, it ' s about cause, and without objective data sitting behind you, you can ' t say with any certainty whether it was the building, the heating, the ventilation or the way the home was being lived in. So you settle, not because you ' re in the wrong, but because you can ' t prove you ' re in the right.
One housing professional described it to us as a triage problem: of every hundred damp and mould cases their team investigates, nine in ten have little to do with the building itself, and yet each one still gets fought, and too many still get paid out, on opinion rather than fact
The reactive trap...
80 Issue 28
None of this happens from a locak of effort. You ' re bound by regulation to act quickly, so your teams deal with what ' s in front of them. The trouble is that if the tenant is your alerting system you ' re already on the back foot, because by the time a claim comes in the chance to intervene early has gone and the record you ' d need to defend yourself was never captured. And what reaches you is only part of the picture: where organisations rely solely on issues being reported, we regularly see close to 9.4 % under-reporting, risk building quietly towards the next claim.