Barnsley's stormer

It didn't start well. when barnsley council announced plans to transfer a third of its repairs and maintenance work to a private contractor, staff were up in arms. More than 150 disgruntled workers from the South Yorkshire council's direct labour force gathered outside the town hall to protest against the new partnering agreement and transfer to the private sector.

That was 18 months ago. Now, the situation could not be more different. The vans of private contractor Willmott Dixon have been a common sight on the streets for the past five months, and the initial tensions have calmed. Early figures suggest the firm has saved the council between 10% and 15% on the cost of responsive repairs compared to 2001/02 figures, and the time taken to service an empty property in the areas it covers is down from more than 30 days to eight.

The five-year, £40m contract with Willmott Dixon is its longest agreement of this kind to date. The contractor manages a £7m share of the annual £21m repairs budget and all partners have full sight of each others' accounts. The deal has won Barnsley 2003 Beacon Status for embracing the Egan principles of partnering and an award from the Institute of Maintenance and Building Management for its innovative approach.

It's not the sort of arrangement one might expect from the Labour stronghold where union firebrand Arthur Scargill was born. But in the last six years, Barnsley has taken on some very New Labour ideas, including ambitious plans to become "the Tuscany of the North". In 1997, Barnsley became the first local authority to embrace partnering arrangements, and will conduct 80% of its business this way in the financial year 2003/04.

Decent homes standard
The decision to bring in private companies has it roots in 1998, when Barnsley took a hard look at the long-term future of its housing stock. It found it had a £90m backlog of repairs and that it would need an extra £600m over 30 years if it was to keep its 24,000-unit stock up to the decent homes standard. The council's building works department had a poor record of preparing properties for relet, leaving glaring flaws and sometimes taking as long as 60 days. "We had too many empty properties, and they were standing empty for too long," says Karen Mitchell, Barnsley council's assistant executive director of housing.

By last year, when the agreement was actually signed, void rates were around the 3.6% mark, compared to a national average of just under 3.5% in April 2002. Of the 120,000 surplus properties in the South Yorkshire market renewal pathfinder, 10,000 are in Barnsley, and research by the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies identified the town as having the second greatest risk of further decline, after Hull.

The repairs and maintenance partnership is just one of a number of changes in Barnsley's housing department. Best-value reviews of both its housing maintenance and management services in 2000 and 2001 led it to completely restructure the departments, bringing in a private contractor to provide some much-needed benchmarking, in December 2002, transferring its stock to an arm's-length management organisation, Berneslai Homes.

We had too many empty properties and they were standing empty for too long

Karen Mitchell, assistant executive director of housing, Barnsley Council

This means the success of the repairs and maintenance partnership could be the key that will unlock an extra £118m of ALMO cash. Both housing management and maintenance received one-star ratings – fair, with excellent prospects for improvement – at their last inspections (November 2002 for management; September 2001 for maintenance). When the inspectors return in September, the services must be awarded at least two stars to get the money.

Keith Hilton, assistant executive director of property and procurement and the driving force behind the partnering arrangement, is confident that Barnsley will impress. "Willmott Dixon receives a pre-agreed profit, and then there's an incentivised profit, for doing work faster, better, and making improvements in terms of quality – it will drive improvements," he explains. Targets for responsive repairs include cutting the average task cost by 5% and improving customer satisfaction by 10% year-on-year.

Busting bureaucracy
The main day-to-day advantage of the partnership is that it cuts through the bureaucracy that hampers repairs for most housing providers. Willmott Dixon's operatives type details of completed jobs straight into handheld computers, and select the billing details from a slimmed-down list of 200 tasks, rather than the thousands of micro-components of a job that might be used for billing by a contractor in a traditional relationship. The eight-week checking and billing paper-chase is done in real time and invoices are paid in 15 days, rather than the 60 they used to take.

The council specified in the contract that Willmott Dixon should use local businesses wherever it could, to reverse the damage to independent tradesmen caused by years of a powerful direct labour force. "When I moved here, there were quite a few decent building firms," says Keith Hilton. "But over the years, building works has grown very fast, to the detriment of the local firms."

Forums with local businesses during the early stages of the agreement have led to a number of groups being set up to help with areas such as retraining, modern apprenticeship schemes and IT investment, so that when the funding for Barnsley's comes through, there will be a thriving pool of talent to make sure it is well spent.

Culture change
The agreement's open-book approach removes the suspicion that usually stalks council-contractor relationships, and the emphasis is no longer on lowest price, but quality and service. That works well for the partnership, but council modernisers have had to overcome considerable resistance to the idea of sharing so much information with contractors.

Tenants just don’t know how much work has gone in to get this far

Joan Marsh, tenants’ federation representative

Councillor Fred Wright, chair of Barnsley's ALMO, had worked for building works until 1981, and found himself persuading reluctant colleagues at the town hall to accept the new arrangement. "They could not get it round their heads that we weren't in competition with Willmott Dixon," he says. "It took me three-quarters of an hour of explaining."

"There's been culture change across the organisation, not just in one department," says Karen Temple, the council's principal quantity surveyor. "It's happening very slowly, but we're getting there."

Maintenance workers have now enjoyed five months of working with no unpleasant surprises, but took some persuading of the council's way of thinking. After the initial town-hall protest, council managers spoke to each one about what it would mean for them and compiled a list of 59 frequently asked questions. "The question they asked most was 'why me?'," says Geoff Ryder, building works manager. "We had to give them hard evidence. We got all the facts and figures together so if we were challenged by an auditor or industrial tribunal, we could justify it."

Martin Bates, partnering director at Willmott Dixon, says the decisive moment came in August 2002, at an open day for the operatives. It wasn't the sincere speeches of the council or the contractor that swung it, but the presence of an operative from Tower Hamlets council who had transferred to the firm under a previous contract. "There's no doubt that was the turning point. They trusted him because he was an operative – they didn't trust us because we were suits," says Bates. In the end, 87 workers and five administrative staff transferred to Willmott Dixon, and it is they who are winning the next round of tender battles for the firm.

With the partnership up and running, the challenge now is making sure that building works keep pace with Willmott Dixon's improvements. There have been transfer requests from council employees, impressed by the potential rewards for performance and the career prospects within the private firm, but it is not something Bates is keen to encourage: "We need building works as much as they need us," he says. "It's really bad news if they don't perform – the arrangement is resting on the weakest link."

As for tenants, it is still too early for news of the partnership's successes to have spread far and wide. But tenants' federation representative Joan Marsh has been involved throughout and helped to develop the list of tenant priorities that provides the framework for the agreement. She asks around whenever anyone has any repairs done. "They haven't noticed the difference, because it's the same people turning up to do the work," she says. "Tenants just don't know how much work has gone in to get this far."