Council tenants refusing access into their homes for repairs is creating a “significant impact” on the Gateshead Council’s housing staff.
According to a council report, 3,952 repair appointments have been missed this year due to tenants failing to allow workman entry into their homes. This marks an increase from last year of 3,630 missed appointments.
In October 2024 alone, out of 540 failed entries 400 had been allocated an appointment after making contact with the council, accepting the date and time, and receiving a confirmation text message. The scale of missed appointments has prompted proposals to change the council’s tenancy agreement to allow the council to charge for repeated cases of failed entry or to cancel legally unnecessary repairs.
Ian McLackland, service director, repairs and building maintenance at Gateshead Council said: “It’s huge and on-going and it’s not just repairs as well, it across the compliance teams and across the asset teams.
“Its for numerous different reasons. Often it’s not something we want to take any enforcement action on because of the circumstances but it is a huge frustration. You can see the numbers, the percentages of where the appointments have been agreed and there have been multiple contact with the residents.
“So something doesn’t make sense. Some of them are emergencies as well.”
From April to October this year, the number of appointments which had been kept has hovered between 91.76% and 96.47%.
When quizzed on the possibility of charging for multiple missed appointments or failed access to properties, Mr McLackland said: “Its something that which is being proposed it is in the repairs policy and it needs to go further. But what I would say again is that how often we would actually charge given the circumstances of the tenant would not be huge.
“You have appreciated that it often would not be the right thing to do, charge the tenant.”
