Video Case Study: Bringing Soha Housing’s Repairs Service In-House

With a clear ambition to enhance service quality and strengthen local accountability, the organisation decided to explore delivering its repairs and maintenance service directly.

To guide this complex transformation, Soha partnered with ARK Consultancy. Led by consultant Luke Beard, ARK supported Soha from initial review to full mobilisation, helping to design a detailed business plan, establish robust governance structures, and build workstreams covering supply chain, health and safety, people, fleet, and customer engagement. The project focused on creating a service shaped by residents’ needs, ensuring high-quality repairs and an improved customer experience across all homes.

Watch the full video below to find out how about our work to transform Soha Housing’s repairs and maintenance service.

Below is the full transcript of the video:

Kate Wareing, Chief Executive, Soha:
Soha Housing are an 8,000 home, mutually owned, community-based housing association. We’re based in Didcot, which is in South Oxfordshire. All our homes are within an hour’s travel time of the building that we’re filming in, which is our headquarters immediately opposite the station. We’re very traditional, really. We began life as the housing stock of South Oxfordshire District Council. But since then, we’ve built about another 4,000 homes. But the thing that makes us unusual is that our residents and our staff have the opportunity to become shareholders of Soha. So that’s what the mutual piece means, and that gives them a real say and real control actually over how Soha is run.

Matt Archer, Director of Housing and Communities, Soha:
Soha is a community mutual. And what that means is we exist for the benefit of our residents, but also that residents have a key role in decision making. So anyone can choose to become a member, as a resident or a staff member. And members have real decision-making power.

Kate: We’ve heard for years from our residents that they wanted us to think about the delivery of our repairs service. We can see from the data that we gather from our residents on a regular basis that that’s been the thing they’ve been least happy with about us for a while. But from our perspective, because we’ve had that feedback from our residents through something called our scrutiny group, and because we could see it through the data we were gathering.

Andy Tollett, Director of Property Services, Soha:
The need to change, and the want to change, was based on a desire to improve the resident journey. So we’ve been aware over quite a number of years, our resident satisfaction has been gradually decreasing year upon year. And we thought that the only way we could arrest that trend was to think about bringing it to an in-house service. We realised right at the outset we didn’t have the skills needed to implement a project of this nature and scale. So we’ve got lots of experience collectively within the business of running repairs services, but most of that was based upon running a repairs service with an external contractor. So the desires and the needs for running an internal service required a different set of skills. And we thought that if we brought in an external project manager like ARK, that they would be able to help us through the parts of this that we didn’t understand. And that proved to be absolutely the case.

Luke Beard, Assistant Director, ARK:
We were initially brought in by Soha to review their repairs and maintenance provision. We looked at the different options for delivery. We quickly settled on doing a business plan for a direct service, so bringing in the delivery service from an external contractor and bringing it back into Soha Housing.

Andy: We then worked with ARK really closely to develop the whole project from there. So starting from the business plan, we built workstreams across various disciplines that we needed, so governance, supply chain, people, residents, etc. We built the workstreams, and then we were able to work with ARK really closely on those, with Luke Beard acting as project manager, and they just held our hand all the way through. And when we needed additional support in areas such as if we needed some expertise around fleet, ARK were able to bring that in. If we needed some expertise around health and safety, ARK again brought that in for us, and we shared that all the way through.

Luke: We started the process around about May 2024 with a target date of bringing in the new service on the 1st of May 2025. So quite a tight timescale in terms of mobilisation. During the implementation process, we set up various workstreams with a clear focus on ensuring that we had good resident involvement. There was a good cross-section of residents that was engaged throughout the project. We also set up different ways for residents to interact with the project, whether that was through the website or through focus groups or some of the workstream project teams that we set up, but with a really clear emphasis on, “we’re doing this for the resident”.

Matt: ARK’s help was invaluable in helping us design the service with the resident journey in mind so that we were designing services from the residents’ perspective rather than what’s most convenient for us. Residents have been absolutely thrilled with the new service. We immediately saw a rise in resident satisfaction. We’re going to work hard to maintain that. And it’s also, we’ve heard feedback, things like “this is what a repairs service should look like”. Our staff are polite, professional, do the job, communicate well. And so overall, the feedback we’re getting from residents is that the service is working really well.

Luke: Post go-live, I think the feedback’s positive. Satisfaction has risen to around about 90%, which is kind of sector-leading, it’s upper-quartile performance. Staff satisfaction surveys, both from core staff and within the subsidiary, suggest that they’re all engaged, and everyone believes that this is the right thing to do. And I think customer feedback follows along those same sort of lines. The project’s running to budget, and the implementation ran to budget as well, which is a positive.

Kate: Because we’ve got an ambition to spend our money locally, to be a good local employer, and we will be remaining rooted here, to these people. We were able to take a long-term view and decide it was a change we were willing to invest in making.

Conclusion
By appointing ARK, Soha Housing gained access to transformation expertise that would have been costly and time-consuming to assemble internally. The project delivered:

• A fully scoped and resourced in-house service model
• Improved control over service quality and customer experience
• A future-proofed operational platform ready for growth
• A collaborative, values-driven delivery approach aligned with Soha’s mutual ethos
• A merchaants contract procured through CHIC with on-going management and catalogue support, to maintain best value

The Ongoing Partnership
Our work with Soha Housing exemplifies the value of our comprehensive transformation services. The project demonstrates that the right expertise, strategic thinking, and implementation support can deliver significant organisational change while maintaining focus on customer service and value for money.
ARK’s transformation programmes are designed to deliver sustainable change that aligns with our clients’ values and objectives. We understand that successful transformation requires more than just project management – it demands deep sector expertise, stakeholder engagement, and a commitment to operational excellence.

Contact us today to discuss your transformation requirements, whether you need strategic review support, implementation expertise, or ongoing transformation guidance. We can help you navigate the challenges your organisation is facing.

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