Helping Birmingham City Council to transform its housing repairs service

By creating seamless connections between council and contractor systems, NEC Housing is improving the repairs experience for residents.

Putting the resident first 

Birmingham City Council manages 58,000 homes and processes around 250,000 repairs every year. Before their transformation programme, the council’s housing team did not have full live integration of contractor availability, which left residents chasing for appointments. So, they embarked on a complete overhaul to enable a better integrated service, restructuring their repairs and maintenance contracts with new ways of working. 

Wayne Davies is Director of Asset Management for the City Housing Directorate:  

“Our goal was to make repairs work for our residents by giving them an appointment at the first point of contact, either by booking it themselves or by talking to our team. For that, we needed a way to display contractor availability without logging in to multiple systems, and to automatically update residents as their request progressed. That’s where NEC Housing came in.” 

Enabling systems to talk to each other 

As well as holding all data in one place, NEC Housing creates real-time connections to all kinds of third-party solutions to enable a seamless experience for users. During a six-month mobilisation, the NEC team worked with the council and its contractors to navigate a complex project, integrate the relevant systems and automate key processes. As well as regular staff information and training sessions, weekly delivery meetings were chaired by Wayne to drive progress:  

“To give residents a simple experience you often need to work through enormous complexity. I wanted all the relevant decision makers in the room so we could agree next steps in the moment and keep the pace high.”  

Karen Reece is NEC’s Director of Operations for NEC Housing and headed up our work on this programme: 

“The level of senior involvement from the Birmingham team ensured the correct level of focus on the outcomes for residents. There may have been five organisations present, but it was absolutely a one-team approach.”  

Delivered on time and under budget 

The project went live smoothly on 1 July 2026, on time and under budget, with the NEC team on hand to tweak integrations as needed.  

Now, residents can log in to their online BRUM Account to choose and book repairs appointments. They also get automatic reminders at key intervals, along with an estimated arrival window on the day. And with NEC Housing connecting all relevant systems, making things seamless for the customer, the housing team can book on residents’ behalf and see the full picture of repairs performance, enabling them to identify bottlenecks and engage with contractors to balance capacity. 

Focusing on continual improvement 

With the right integrations in place, the council is reviewing training and processes in detail ahead of upgrading to a new version of NEC Housing and implementing our Repairs Diagnostics Tool to maximise the benefits. With the resident now at the heart of the repairs service, the council can operate with greater confidence, embedding and developing systems from a stronger base.