Southern Housing Lift Compliance Management

Our Lift Engineers are providing ongoing Asset Management support to Southern Housing for circa 500 units in their key strategic operational buildings in the UK.

Challenge

Southern Housing operates a diverse portfolio of Inner City Social Housing units that are all fully operational and range from offices, general flats/apartments to elderly assisted living schemes.

The scale of their portfolio means Southern Housing requires a full-time Consultant and Account Manager covering all Asset services and site activities. The volume of units combined with a diverse range of stakeholders needs to be met, meaning project management, budget planning, and finance management for works are also required.

Solution

Our technical support involves the provision of a full-time Consultant and Account Manager covering all Asset services and site activities, while supporting Southern Housing’s internal project management stakeholders. The appointed Account Manager is based at Southern Housing’s head office for 2/3 days per week, attending briefing meetings with contractor representatives. 

We ensure Southern Housing’s diverse portfolio maintains operational effectiveness and remains code compliant, removing risk for Southern Housing and its customer/tenant base. The team introduced standard processes and improved compliance to manage the large and heavily dependent portfolio, removing and/or mitigating identified risks.

Our team review and track Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations (LOLER) defects, verify the Safety Assessment Federation (SAFed) certification, as well as monitor and report on contractor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

We take a proactive approach to our qualitative and quantitative measures for planning, executing, monitoring and providing feedback on key tasks, while ensuring Southern Housing are informed of portfolio performance. This provides tenant representatives regular updates and closure on perceived or actual performance-based issues regarding the availability of assets across multiple verticals within Southern Housing’s customer base.

We've received positive feedback from Southern Housing staff members managing the deployment of the Performance Management Guarantee Contract (PMGC), with recognition from the tenants’ representative during management team meetings.

Martin Craven, Director of Asset Compliance at Southern Housing, said:

“We've worked with RPS for over five years now. They have been fundamental in helping us to deliver our lift modernisation regime and have played a key role in supporting the management of our lift servicing and maintenance contracts.

The team are knowledgeable, professional, and hard working. It has been a pleasure to work in partnership with them".