The Chartered Institute of Housing has launched a project called RECAP, Repairs Culture, Accountability and Participation, run with the National Housing Maintenance Forum. It will produce a free resident scrutiny toolkit co-designed with residents, a culture and accountability framework for landlords and contractors, and briefing materials for board members. For anyone who has sat through a repairs performance review wondering whose account of the service is actually in the room, it is a welcome piece of work.

Most landlords already collect resident views on repairs. The difficulty is when, and how much. A TSM survey asks about satisfaction after the fact, in categories somebody else chose, often weeks after the job closed. Complaints capture the cases that went badly enough for someone to escalate. Neither gives a repairs manager much to work with on a Tuesday morning while deciding which of forty routine jobs moves first. Repairs and property condition dominate complaints across the sector, which suggests the feedback loop is not short enough to catch problems while they are still small. Eve Blezard, CIH policy lead and chair of the RECAP advisory panel, said residents “are the people best placed to scrutinise it.” Scrutiny in that sense is not a survey. It is participation, with the standing to ask questions and expect an answer.

RECAP builds on RERAM, the earlier CIH and National Housing Federation work that set out twelve guiding principles across resident influence and engagement, operative engagement, and data-driven accountability. Those three themes sit together for a reason. A resident can only scrutinise what they can see, and they can only see it if the information about their own repair was captured properly in the first place. In most repairs teams, the richest description of a problem is the one the resident gave on the phone, and it is also the one most likely to end up compressed into a job code and a line of free text. What good looks like is closer to a conversation that stays open: the resident describes the fault, shows it, hears what was decided and why, and can point at the record afterwards.

Alix starts from the same premise. Repairs work better over the long term when residents are treated as an ongoing source of insight rather than a box ticked once at intake. When someone reports a fault through Alix, they describe it in their own words and show it, with photos or video, from wherever they are and in their own time. That opens a dialogue rather than closing an intake form. What the resident sent stays attached to the job, so the account of the problem that reaches the surveyor, the operative and the manager is the resident’s own rather than a summary of it. We are glad CIH and NHMF are doing this work, and the toolkit will be more useful to landlords whose systems can show a resident what actually happened to their repair.

Resident scrutiny tends to get framed as something landlords submit to. It is more useful thought of as free, continuous information about a service that is expensive to run and difficult to get right. RECAP runs through the summer, and the toolkit is being co-designed rather than handed down. It is worth getting involved while it is still being shaped.