Sustainable building maintenance within social housing

The social housing sector contains the largest number of professionally managed properties and as such has a significant role to play in improving the UK’s economic, environmental and social sustainability. This thesis explores the viability of integrating the sustainability agenda with social housing maintenance decision making in order that the sustainability of existing social housing stock can be improved through planned maintenance (and refurbishment). The thesis presents the argument that the current single criterion, conditioned based approach to maintenance planning does not support the continuous improvement in sustainability of social housing. Furthermore it argues that a new, multi-criteria approach to maintenance planning is needed based upon the performance of a home in-use rather than its condition. The performance based sustainable social housing maintenance model was presented and its application explored with Octavia Housing. Two aspects were further explored, firstly what criteria did landlords need to assess to ensure sustainability was systematically integrated into maintenance planning, and secondly, how could this multi-criteria be assimilated in order to prioritise maintenance actions to improve the sustainability rating of housing going forward. The questionnaire determined that traditional social housing maintenance was still the norm and whilst the sustainability agenda was considered important, it wasn’t integrated within housing management planning. The interviews determined the criteria landlords wished to use to assess the sustainability of their housing stock and prioritise maintenance need, exceeded that expressed in the Decent Homes Standard but, more importantly the specific criteria was unique to individual landlords and no definitive list of criteria required. The case study demonstrated that the proposed maintenance model could be implemented and presented a methodology by which it could be populated. An important aspect of the new maintenance model was the development of the Analytical Hierarchy Process modelling toolkit to measure the sustainability of the existing stock and prioritise maintenance work to improve this measure over time through planned maintenance. Whilst the model was based on data collected in the field, the worked example was theoretical and provides an opportunity for further work with Octavia Housing.