Service Housing - Response Maintenance – Chargeable Items - the NFF

The Naval Families Federation

...the voice for families of those serving in the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines

Response Maintenance – Chargeable Items

Response Repairs consist of work required to restore the function of part of the housing estate, or to ensure the safety of people or their environment. The root cause of this will be primarily as a result of the failure of part of the estate. Examples of this are that the heating system does not work, dislodged roof tiles and typically it will include repair of fixed appliances, leaking pipes, resealing surfaces and sanitary fittings etc.

Deliberately embellishing details or attempting to obtain work that should not be done as response maintenance may mean that families with more urgent needs remain longer in the queue. It also wastes money and resources, which should be more properly invested in the SFA estate.

MODern Housing Solutions (MHS) is paid by Defence Estates Operations (Housing) (DE) for the work it does within the Housing PRIME Contract up to the limit of the DE budget. It is untrue to assume that MHS makes profit by not doing work, in fact profit relates to volume of work but each job is paid for only once despite however many visits are made in relation to that particular job.

There are occasions, however, when it should not be for DE and MHS to fund a repair and these are the ones caused by personal loss, accidental or deliberate damage, misuse or neglect to fittings, fixtures including keys etc by the occupant, members of the household or visitors to the property. On these occasions it is the responsibility of the occupant to meet the cost of repairing or replacing the items.

MHS can and will do this for occupants but the occupant will be charged for this service at the commercial rate. The commercial rate includes all costs involved in completing the repair or providing the replacement. An approximate cost for MHS to do this can be provided by the Help Desk. DE will then raise the necessary charges, which will be deducted at source along with the SFA monthly charges. In order to ensure that other SFA occupants are not disadvantaged, MHS operatives do report on the nature of any loss or damage and this is electronically stored alongside the original maintenance request for regular audit purposes.

It is strongly recommended that occupants of SFA have the necessary insurance to cover any such eventualities.