The Taylor House lift has been broken for three months. Emma, a Taylor House resident is chasing it
On December 8th 2021 we received a text message from MTVH saying that they were aware of a fault with the lift and it had been reported to contractors. Over the course of December, January and February, I would use the MTVH repairs website to request more information on the status of the repair (I did not hear back on my requests, nor could track on the website if anyone else was submitting enquiries) and would phone MTVH property repairs call centre every week. I felt like every time I called them, I spoke to a different person and got a different story. They would always put me on hold while they phoned the 3rd party lift repair contractor Rubax to get an update and Rubax would typically say something along the lines of
waiting for new parts to be delivered
waiting to get a report from the engineer who attended to determine next steps
waiting to have an engineer booked to attend
With every passing week I became more frustrated that MTVH themselves weren’t increasingly frustrated with the service that their own contractor Rubax is providing to them. I highly doubt that the contractual Service Level Agreement would say that 2+ months of “waiting” falls within an acceptable timeframe. I was particularly frustrated one week to hear that an engineer had attended in early February and had still not submitted his report by mid-February. Why was no one chasing this up? Why is MTVH not applying more pressure to Rubax?
After the TRA damp meeting where I got the contact details of Jules Bickers and Michelle Casey, I have been in direct contact with them and I do trust they are chasing it up; I hear from them every few days. However, the timeframe is still unacceptable. On February 17th Michelle wrote to me: “They have advised that they are struggling with diagnostics as the original manufacturer of the controller no longer exists and there is no technical support for it. They are attempting a process of elimination to get to the bottom of the issue and to get the lift running.” On March 2nd Jules wrote to me “The current issue is getting parts in a reasonable time which we are seeing on a number of similar problems at the moment. The length of time to obtain parts has been increasing. Our response is to change our supplies to UK based manufacturers but that will take time.”
I do believe that the lift will eventually be fixed, but at this point I also believe the residents are due compensation because as of tomorrow it will have been 90 days where we have not had an operational lift and this is impacting many people’s lives.
St Martins TRA 