ABSTRACT
On a majority of estates in the survey, the parks department, quite separately from housing, repairs and maintenance, or cleansing, was responsible for maintaining communal gardens, grass verges, lawns and flower beds. In all cases in the survey bar one, repairs were handled by a separate department. On all but one of the estates in the survey, prior to local management, the repairs service was inefficient, and in some cases, delinquent, with patently dishonest practices at work. In Hackney, the manual unions calculated that only 33 per cent of their time was spent on actual repairs; the rest went on travel, paper work, waiting for materials and so on. In the survey, no repairs service worked to the satisfaction of housing managers prior to local management. Rent collections provided an umbilical link between the households and the landlord, and served to pick up repairs orders and complaints, as well as endless other queries and problems.
