Housing associations spent a record £10bn on repairs and maintenance in 2024-25, 13% more than the year before. Over the same period the Housing Ombudsman investigated 43% more repairs complaints and upheld 73% of the ones it decided. Both lines moved upwards together, and that combination is harder to explain away than either number would be on its own.

Some of the extra spend was never optional. Labour costs across residential trades are rising by roughly 6% to 8% a year as experienced operatives retire faster than apprentices arrive, and ageing stock generates more work every winter. The Regulator of Social Housing's quarterly survey has providers forecasting £10.7bn over the next twelve months, so the curve isn't about to flatten on its own. A meaningful share of that money, though, never reaches an actual repair. It goes on visits that were never going to succeed: the operative who arrives without the part, the appointment where nobody is home, the second visit booked because the first one turned out to be a diagnosis. None of that shows up as a line in the budget, which is partly why it survives year after year.

Capacity isn't the only lever available. A team that knows what it's walking into before it dispatches anyone can make a different decision: send the right trade, order the part first, or settle the job without a visit at all. A couple of photos from a resident will often answer in two minutes what a scheduled inspection takes two weeks to answer. First-time fix rate and No Access are where this shows up quickest, and both sit inside a repairs team's control in a way that trade inflation never will.

Alix is designed to close that information gap before the van leaves. Residents and operatives can share photos and video asynchronously, so teams diagnose before they commit a visit. Structured intake captures the details and vulnerability flags that decide how a job should be handled, and the triage view gives leaders the shape of the whole workload rather than only the jobs shouting loudest. Job information, photos and decisions live in one place, which is as useful for a Tenant Satisfaction Measure conversation as it is for an Ombudsman one.

Underneath all of this sits a simpler idea. Residents are the best available source of information about the condition of their own home, and most repairs processes still treat them as something to be logged once and then worked around. Teams that keep listening past the first phone call tend to spend less and get it right more often. That's not a technology argument. Technology just makes it easier to do at scale.