Around 6,000 Sheffield Council households are waiting for overdue repairs

The council said new repair requests continued to be 25 percent above pre-pandemic levels with the size and scope of works also increasing.

Figures were revealed in response to questions asked by councillor Sophie Thornton during a recent full council meeting.

On average tenants had to wait 22 days for a repair between February and April this year.

The longest wait was more than two years, 818 days, to fix a front door that needed to be made fire safe.

Although way off target, the council said this was not a “true reflection of delays” because there were problems agreeing access to the property.

Councillor Douglas Johnson, chair of the housing committee, said although the backlog was still thousands of jobs long the council had made progress and staff were working longer hours to address it.

He said overdue repairs had reduced by 30 percent from 8,360 to 5,922 over the last three months.

“The service is working hard to clear the backlog of works and to improve our response times going forward,” he said.

“The implementation of the new IT system into the service is improving the planning, organising and performance management of our responses to repairs. The repairs service continue to encourage overtime, recruit trades staff and to work with agencies and subcontractors to increase capacity and speed up the reduction of overdue jobs.

“Following extensive consultation and negotiation with the trade unions and the workforce, new terms and conditions come into effect from July 1 within the repairs service. These changes will address a number of legacy issues with the workforce and deliver efficiencies through an extended working day, start and finish on site and flexible working.”

On average, the repairs service answered 730 calls per day on its phone line in May.

The average waiting time before answering shortened over the past three months.

It was 33 minutes in March and just under 10 minutes in May.

The longest waiting time was nearly three hours, in March.

Coun Johnson said other contact centre staff joined the repairs team to help improve the service.