Is first-time fix a reliable measure of housing repairs?

What is first-time fix?

First-time fix is the share of repairs completed at the first visit, with no return, follow-up or chaser needed. Right first time is the same idea under another name, and it is the term the Scottish Social Housing Charter uses.

In England the Tenant Satisfaction Measures do not include it, so there is no single national definition for landlords to report against.

What does the published data show?

Scottish social landlords report the measure to their regulator every year. In 2025/26, after the indicator was redefined, the median landlord reported 97.7% of reactive repairs right first time. Across the 161 landlords with repairs satisfaction data, the correlation between the two was 0.07.

A measure that almost every landlord passes no longer tells landlords apart. Because of the redefinition, the 2025/26 figure cannot be compared with earlier years.

How can a repair pass first-time fix and still take three visits?

The measure counts jobs. The tenant counts the repair.

• The first visit closes its job, and the follow-on is raised as a new one. Both can pass.
• A job that is re-raised restarts the target clock. It does not restart the tenant's.
• A job closed without being completed drops out of any measure built on completed jobs. The median landlord in England closes 11% of the repairs it raises that way.

Two published cases show the size of the gap, each counted by the landlord itself. Tees Valley Housing reported 98% or more of jobs inside target while the whole repair averaged 28.8 days (government housing pilot, 2005). At one council, 15% of repairs took four or more visits (published case study, 2011). Neither is a sector benchmark.

Same words, five different measures

Five organisations can report the same first-time-fix rate and be measuring five different things. You don't have to adopt anybody else's definition, but you should know what yours hides.

Two ways a repair stops

The first is physical. A missing valve. A part sitting in a merchant across town. A door that wouldn't fit in the van. Fix the materials flow and most of this disappears. The stock management guide covers it.

The second is quieter. The operative is standing in the kitchen. He knows what's wrong. He has what he needs on the van. And he does something else, because he isn't allowed. In one council a dripping kitchen tap was raised as ten jobs, every one completed on time: around £700 spent avoiding a £60 repair. The plumber knew. He had the parts. The system had made following the instruction safer than fixing the tap.

Ten jobs completed. One tap still dripping.From Housing Repairs ER

Permission without parts doesn't fix the tap. Parts without permission don't fix it either. Put the two together, and a tenant reports a problem, an operative arrives, works out what's needed and fixes it. Once.

Four questions instead of a rulebook

Instead of specifying every task, give operatives a decision test. Before changing the repair, four questions. The council called it PLAN:

Four yeses, and the operative fixes what's actually wrong, keeping the old parts as evidence if anybody asks. Supervisors stop checking whether the instruction was followed and start backing professional judgement.

What tracks tenant satisfaction instead?

Time, and repairs that come back. Across the same Scottish landlords, those averaging five working days or fewer to complete a non-emergency repair had a median repairs satisfaction of 92.5%, against 84.4% for those averaging more than twelve days (r = −0.35). The median landlord averaged 6.2 working days. The regulator's national figure, which is weighted by stock, is 8.8.

A new Scottish indicator counts damp and mould cases that were resolved and then reopened. It is the first regulator-published measure of a repair that came back. The median landlord reopened 4.6% of cases, a quarter of landlords reopened more than 11.1%, and one in ten reopened more than 17.5%.

How to count first-time fix on the whole repair

1. Count the fault the tenant reported, not the job raised on the system.
2. Start the clock at the tenant's first report and stop it when the home is right.
3. Treat a follow-on, a second trade, a part on order or a re-raised job as another visit to the same repair.
4. Count a visit that ends in no access as a visit.
5. Count a repeat report of the same fault as a failed first fix.
6. Report the result beside the days from report to fixed, the spread of those days and the number of times tenants chased.

Expect the figure to fall when you count it this way.

Do regulators look at repeat visits?

Rarely, on the public record. Of the 49 current regulatory judgements in England graded C3 or C4, the two grades for serious failings, one mentions follow-on work, repeat visits or appointments.

That count comes from a keyword classification of the judgement texts, retrieved on 2 October 2026. It is not a reading of each judgement.

What has and has not been tested

The question behind this page is whether a landlord's measures show what tenants live through, or only make the service look fine. On the Scottish data, first-time fix as reported is a measure of the second kind.

It is one of three claims tested in The Chase Report, Part 1. That targets hide the tenant's wait is supported: repairs completed within target explains 12% of how residents feel about repair times across 352 large landlords in England. That first-time fix is flattered is supported by the figures above. That surveys measure satisfaction and not effort is only partly supported, because no public source counts chasing or visits per repair.

My proposition is that four numbers from the tenant's side track satisfaction and trust more closely than the target does: the days from the tenant's report to a home that is right, first-time fix on the whole repair, the spread of those days and the number of times the tenant had to chase. The first two have public data behind them. The other two do not yet.

All of this is repairs. The same targets run voids and lettings, and those have not been tested. There is a scorecard for each of the three services: repairs, voids and allocations.

Sources: Regulator of Social Housing, Tenant Satisfaction Measures 2024/25 (large landlords, low cost rental accommodation); Scottish Housing Regulator, Charter data 2025/26; regulatory judgements graded C3 or C4, retrieved on 2 October 2026 and classified by keyword. Analysis: The Chase Report, Part 1. Correlations are Spearman rank correlations; the 12% is R² from a least-squares fit across the 350 landlords with both measures. These are associations across landlords in a single year. They say nothing about cause at any one landlord.