Within target. Out of patience.

One council. Two clocks.

When a team rebuilt repair histories one at a time, from the tenant's first report to the problem actually fixed, the same service looked like this on each clock:

From Housing Repairs ER, chapter 6: "97% on Time. 216 Days to Finish".

An operative could attend, do the specified task and close the job. If the problem was still there, a new job was raised, and that one could be completed within target too. A leaking bay window generated visit after visit. Every month, the report said 97%.

The tenant doesn't want a successful appointment. They want the bloody leak fixed.From Housing Repairs ER

It is not one council. The public data says the same.

Across 352 large landlords in England in 2024/25, the share of repairs completed within target explains 12% of how residents feel about the time their repair took. Landlords reporting 95% or more inside target range from 54% to 96% of tenants satisfied with the time taken. The length of the target a landlord sets itself has no relationship with satisfaction at all.

Scotland publishes a number closer to the tenant's clock. Across 161 Scottish landlords, those averaging five working days or fewer to complete a non-emergency repair had a median repairs satisfaction of 92.5%; those averaging more than twelve days had 84.4%.

The regulator in England notes the gap itself, in its 2024/25 headline report (paragraph 5.7), without quantifying it. We are not aware of a published cross-landlord analysis that tests target compliance against satisfaction; the regulator's report notes the gap without quantifying it.

Regulator of Social Housing, Tenant Satisfaction Measures 2024/25 (large landlords); Scottish Housing Regulator, Charter data 2025/26. Analysis: The Chase Report, Part 1. Associations across landlords in one year; they say nothing about cause at any one landlord.

A target tells you somebody complied

A capability measure tells you whether the service works. The purpose of a repairs service is to put the tenant's home right, properly, with as little unnecessary effort as possible. So measure that.

What happens if a landlord measures the world from the tenant's side instead? Four numbers:

1. the days from the tenant's report to the day the home is right, not the day a job is closed;
2. first-time fix counted on the whole repair, with no splitting into follow-on jobs;
3. the spread of those days, not just the average;
4. the number of times the tenant had to chase.

Our proposition is that these four track satisfaction and trust far more closely than the target ever has. The first two have public data behind them. The other two do not yet: no public source counts chasing or visits per repair, which is what Part 2 of The Chase Report sets out to close.

This is no longer only a management question. Awaab's Law runs on exactly this clock, from awareness of the hazard to the home being safe. A service that can't produce its end-to-end times can't know whether it is compliant.

"Our satisfaction is high"

High satisfaction says tenants trust the landlord, not that the repair cost them little effort. Satisfaction and complaints move together; neither counts the chasing. A landlord that does not measure how often tenants chase, how many visits a repair takes and the days from report to fixed cannot tell how much of its satisfaction is patience.

Six numbers every repairs leader should know

Not six new targets: six things to investigate. If your organisation can't answer them in an hour, that tells you something too, about what it has chosen to count.

1. How many repairs are genuinely fixed first time? Problems fully resolved with nobody having to go back, not jobs closed after one visit.
2. How long do repairs really take? From first report to actually fixed, including the spread and the longest cases.
3. How many come back? Repeat visits and jobs raised again for the same problem.
4. How much demand is coming in, and why? New problems versus contacts caused by something that hasn't happened, hasn't worked or hasn't been explained. That second kind is failure demand.
5. How often is the first diagnosis wrong? How often does an operative arrive to find a different problem from the one on the job sheet?
6. How much capacity goes on avoidable work? Failed repairs, missing parts, redone work, visits that weren't needed. Add it up: that is your hidden capacity.

And the fix doesn't start with a new IT system. The council's systems were working perfectly. They just weren't collecting anything that mattered to the tenant.

What has and has not been tested

All of this is repairs. The same kind of targets run voids and lettings, but the finding has not been tested for them and should not be read across. There is a score for each of the three housing services: repairs, voids and allocations.