An operative drives across the patch, parks, knocks, waits, knocks again, and drives away. The job is still open. The resident is still waiting. The van has done twenty miles and fixed nothing. Nobody did anything wrong, and yet the entire visit was wasted. Multiply that by a few dozen a day and you have one of the most expensive habits in social housing repairs.

No Access is not a rare event. In sector research, more than 80% of landlords reported that up to 20% of their repairs and maintenance appointments were missed, and the single biggest reason was the resident not being home. The cost is measurable. Estimates put a missed appointment at roughly £112 outside London, and up to £150 inside it. Across the sector, the total cost of failed access has been put as high as £1bn. That is before the knock-on effects. The job stays open, the clock keeps running, and a small problem gets time to become a large one. With Awaab’s Law Phase 2 starting on 30 November 2026, an open job is no longer just a delay. It is a statutory timescale being eaten by a door that did not open.

Most attempts to fix No Access focus on scheduling. Better reminders, wider slots, text confirmations, more contact attempts. Those help and they are worth doing. But they treat the visit as fixed and try to improve the odds of someone being in. The bigger gain comes from questioning whether the visit needed to happen in that form at all. A significant share of repairs can be understood before anyone travels. If you can see the fault, you can often diagnose it, order the right part, and send the right trade once, at a time the resident genuinely chose rather than one they were offered.

Alix moves diagnosis to the front of the job. Residents send photos and video of the problem when they report it, from wherever they are, in their own time. That turns a vague description into something a surveyor or planner can actually assess. Some jobs get resolved or reclassified without a visit at all. The ones that do need a visit get booked with the right trade, the right parts and a realistic appointment, and residents are far more likely to keep an appointment they helped set. Every avoided wasted trip is an operative hour back on real work.

No Access is usually treated as a resident behaviour problem. It is mostly an information problem. The less you know before you travel, the more journeys you waste. A good place to start is last month’s failed visits, and an honest count of how many you could have avoided knowing what the resident could easily have shown you.