How to Route Building Repairs to the Right Council Department

The repairs that take longest in a public organisation are rarely the difficult ones. They are
the ones nobody is sure belongs to them.

A leak in a ceiling might be building fabric, or plumbing, or the responsibility of whoever
installed the air conditioning above it. Each team looks, reasonably concludes it is not theirs,
and passes it on. Nothing in the process is going wrong exactly, and yet the ceiling stays wet
for six weeks.

Decide ownership by job type, in advance

The only durable fix is to decide ownership before the job exists, by category rather than
case by case.

Sit down once with the heads of each team and produce a list: for each common type of work,
which team owns it. Doors. Windows. Roofs. Lighting. Drainage. Heating. Grounds. Locks and
access. Cleaning damage. Vandalism.

This meeting is uncomfortable and takes an afternoon. It replaces a recurring argument with a
one-time negotiation, which is a very good trade.

Write it down and circulate it. A routing list that lives in one person's head is not a routing
list.

Name a default owner for anything unlisted

Every list will be incomplete. The important design decision is what happens to the things that
are not on it.

The answer must not be "discuss it". Name a default team that takes ownership of anything
uncategorised, with the explicit understanding that owning it means triaging it, not
necessarily doing the work.

A default owner converts the ambiguous case from a stalemate into a starting point. The job
moves, someone has it, and the categorisation can be fixed afterwards.

Separate ownership from execution

A great deal of confusion comes from conflating two different things: who is accountable for a
job being resolved, and who physically does the work.

Make the first one explicit and single. The owner may pass the work to a contractor, to another
team, or to a specialist — that is fine. What they cannot do is pass the ownership, unless
someone else explicitly accepts it and the record shows that.

Without this, work bounces. With it, work can be delegated freely and still cannot get lost,
because there is always exactly one name that answers "where has this got to?".

Log the handover when it happens

When a job does move between teams, record it: from whom, to whom, when, and why. One line.

This is the difference between a job that took eight weeks and a job where you can see it sat
untouched for five of them between two teams who each thought the other had it. The first is a
mystery; the second is a fixable process problem.

Over a few months these lines become the most useful diagnostic you have. The pairs of teams
that appear most often in handover records are exactly where your routing list needs work.

Triage in one pass, on a rhythm

Rather than deciding each job as it arrives, set a short regular slot — the start of each
working day is common — where one person goes through everything newly logged and assigns it.

Batching has two advantages over continuous triage. Duplicates become visible, because the same
issue reported three ways is sitting on the same screen. And decisions become consistent,
because one person is making all of them in one sitting rather than five people making them in
five different contexts.

Let urgency override category, deliberately

Some jobs are not about which team owns the asset. A hazard in a public area needs somebody
there now, whoever that is.

Define a small, explicit set of circumstances where the nearest available team acts first and
the routing is sorted out afterwards. Keep that list genuinely small — if everything is an
exception, the routing list is decorative.

Then hold to it. The most damaging pattern in public estates is a routing process that is
followed carefully for routine work and abandoned entirely under pressure, because it means the
process has never actually been tested on the jobs that matter.

Review the list twice a year

Estates change. Services get outsourced, brought back in, reorganised. A routing list written
once and never revisited becomes fiction quietly, and people stop consulting it long before
anybody says so.

Put a short review in the calendar, bring the handover log to it, and adjust. Twenty minutes
twice a year keeps the whole thing honest.