Can Tougher Penalties Really Improve Housing Repairs?
In the late 1990s, researchers visited ten nurseries in Israel with a familiar problem. Parents were collecting their children late. Closing time would arrive, the children would still be there, and a teacher would have to stay behind until the last parent appeared.
The solution seemed obvious. Charge parents for being late.
Six nurseries introduced a fine. Four did not. The researchers expected lateness to fall. Instead, it rose. And when the fine was removed, lateness didn’t return to its previous level.
Something had changed.
Before the fine, a parent might have felt they were inconveniencing a teacher. Afterwards, arriving late could feel like a service they had paid for. The researchers called their paper A Fine Is a Price.
It’s a rather unsettling story about a perfectly sensible management decision. And it has been on my mind this week.
On Wednesday, 28 October, the Regulator of Social Housing published judgements giving Tamworth and Woking councils C3 grades, and Haringey a C4.
These were different organisations, with different failings. Tamworth’s concerns centred particularly on safety assurance and oversight; the judgement was not an indictment of its responsive repairs service. Haringey faced serious concerns including a backlog of overdue repairs.
But they shared something important. Their leaders now have difficult, unavoidable improvement work to deliver.
Imagine sitting in that chair. Residents need safe homes. Councillors want answers. The regulator expects evidence. Contractors, managers and frontline teams are already under pressure. Nobody is asking whether you fancy an improvement programme. You need one.
And then, just when you need help, you find yourself being publicly shamed.
I think we sometimes forget just how difficult leading a social housing organisation really is.
I remember walking around an empty council property many years ago with a tradesman who was showing me the work needed before the next family could move in. There were used condoms on the floor. Needles had been deliberately taped to the bannisters, positioned to injure anyone coming in to refurbish the house.
I'll never forget what he said.
"There's days when I wonder why I bother with this shit."
Then he paused.
"But I also know that if it wasn't for us, the next person would have to walk into this."
I've thought about that conversation many times over the years. Here was a man doing an extraordinarily difficult job, yet he understood exactly why his work mattered. He was making somebody else's life better.
But he also wondered when the people running the organisation would start helping people like him do the job, rather than worrying so much about making the numbers look good.
I don't think he was against management. I think he wanted management to help. And that distinction matters.
Because leading a housing organisation is hard. Really hard. Funding pressures, ageing properties, vulnerable residents, political scrutiny and regulatory demands. Most leaders I've met are good people trying to do something worthwhile. But I wonder whether the way we've been taught to manage organisations is making an already difficult job even harder.
So where do you start?
The advice we’ve inherited is reassuringly familiar. Strengthen governance. Set clearer targets. Tighten SLAs. Introduce performance incentives and penalties. Make sure everyone is accountable.
It’s not foolish advice. It is what generations of capable leaders have been taught to do.
But what if it doesn’t change what happens to the work?
Consider Hackney.
In a 2025 investigation, the Housing Ombudsman found that the council operated a performance-related bonus scheme for repairs operatives. It warned that this could encourage jobs to be recorded as complete to meet targets. Hackney’s own subsequent analysis suggested that around one in three recorded repair visits were repeats.
The investigation also described a leak where work orders were repeatedly closed after unsuccessful access attempts. The Ombudsman did not establish that bonuses caused those failures. And these were council operatives, not an external contractor.
But the uncomfortable question remains. What exactly are we rewarding when a job is marked complete but a resident’s problem remains?
Then look at Tower Hamlets.
In 2026, councillors were told that financial penalties were being applied when repairs contractors missed contractual KPIs. The council’s published figures showed 87.5% of non-emergency repairs completed within target. Yet only 61.6% of surveyed residents were satisfied with the time taken to complete their most recent repair.
Both figures had improved on the previous year. That’s worth recognising. But there is still a gap between meeting a target and experiencing a good service. And no amount of target compliance, on its own, explains that gap.
Psychologist and author Alfie Kohn has been questioning our confidence in rewards for decades. In Punished by Rewards, he challenges the assumption that offering people something extra for hitting a measure reliably improves the work itself.
Sometimes it changes what people pay attention to. And sometimes that isn’t what we intended.
That’s the nursery problem all over again.
But I think financial incentives are only the visible part of something larger.
We’ve inherited a particular theory of management.
Divide an organisation into functions. Give each function a target. Monitor its output. Reward good results. Challenge poor ones. When the numbers disappoint, turn up the pressure.
The difficulty is that residents don’t experience functions. They experience the whole journey.
A leak reported. An appointment made. An operative arriving without the right material. Another visit. Another handoff. Another call to chase progress.
Each team might have done exactly what its measures required. The scheduler protects the diary. The operative completes the task they’ve been allocated. The manager reports the SLA. Each decision makes sense from where that person sits.
But nobody has resolved the resident’s problem. And the dashboard can still look reassuringly green. Yet the repair is still unfinished.
The problem is not the people. It may be the way we’ve designed and managed the work.
This matters especially if you’ve just been given a C3 or C4 judgement, received a maladministration finding, started preparing for Awaab’s Law, or are about to appoint a new repairs contractor.
These aren’t optional projects. There are standards to meet, deadlines to respect and residents who need action. In a void property, every unnecessary day can mean a family waiting longer for a home.
But a new plan based entirely on old assumptions can produce a familiar result. New targets. New reports. Perhaps even a new contractor. The same delays and repeat visits.
There is another way to begin.
Follow real repairs from the resident’s first contact to verified resolution. Measure end-to-end time and variation, not simply whether an individual stage met its SLA. Find avoidable visits, waiting, missing materials, and decisions nobody is authorised to make. Get the truth about performance. Stand up for what's right.
Then identify what’s actually constraining the system. Test a change there. Observe whether the whole service improves.
That doesn’t mean turning the whole organisation upside down. Start with one team, one kind of repair, one constraint. Let the evidence show what improves and what needs attention next.
The ambition can be enormous. The first experiment needn’t be.
This isn’t an excuse to relax safety duties or accountability. It’s how we make accountability useful.
And here’s an interesting twist.
In 2023, Thanet District Council considered performance-related payments for its repairs contract. Its officers recommended against them.
They warned that contractors could concentrate on rewarded KPIs, neglect other areas, manipulate measures or damage partnership working.
Thanet still wanted clear responsibilities and proper oversight. It simply questioned whether a bonus was the way to get the service residents needed. I applaud them.
Which brings us back to those nurseries.
The teachers didn’t want more fines. They wanted the children collected on time.
Housing leaders don’t want more penalties. They want repairs completed, homes made safe and empty properties ready for the next family.
Because making failure more expensive isn’t the same as making success easier.
One memorable day
In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens writes:
"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been."
He goes on to ask us to consider the long chain of events that follows from just one memorable day.
I've been thinking about that tradesman again. I wonder what happened to him. I wonder if he's still working in housing. And I wonder if anyone ever listened to what he was trying to tell me.
But I've also been thinking about the leaders receiving those difficult regulatory judgements this week.
Perhaps this could become their memorable day.
Not simply the day they were told they had to improve, but the day they decided to begin in a different way.
To stop asking how to make people meet the targets and start asking how to make it easier for people to do good work.
To make it easier for residents to get their problems resolved. Easier for tradespeople to arrive with the right information, skills and materials. Easier for managers and leaders to see what's actually happening, rather than relying on reassuring reports.
I keep coming back to that man in the empty house.
He wasn't asking for a bonus. He wasn't asking for a tougher SLA. He wasn't even asking for recognition.
He was asking for a little help to do a job that mattered.
After all these years, isn't it time we started giving it to him?
