Do you care?
I just returned from London where I was visiting my 91 year old mother. She lives in a block of (former) council flats in the Borough of Redbridge. Just after I arrived, the downstairs neighbour came to check if we had a leak as she had been having water entering her bathroom for weeks and despite trying to get resolution from the Council, she had been unsuccessful.
I called the Council’s Repair office and managed to get someone sent out that same night. The plumber, on visiting three flats on the ground floor (the one with the flooding problem), the middle flat (my mother’s) and top floor, ascertained that the leak causing the problem was from the third floor. Due to access issues, he claimed he couldn’t fix it on the spot and promised to file a repair job the next morning.
Unfortunately, it just wasn’t that simple. Due to contradictory interests, a mismatch in policy and implementation (definition of problem versus intervention required), and a lack of professional self-reflexivity combined with inefficient accountability mechanisms, the parties involved were unable to coordinate a timely and effective response to the tenants’ problems.
Despite hours spent on telephone calls, emails and waiting for calls to be returned, the repair was carried out more than two weeks after it had first been observed, by the same plumber who attended the first call out but told us then that he couldn’t fix it. In fact, this contractor who finally fixed the leak was not officially responsible for doing so; it was actually the responsibility of another housing association, whose plumber arrived after the job was finished, but then had the cheek to claim that he had fixed it.
It was a shambles. One block of flats with tenants under the responsibility of three London Boroughs. Two of the households were in temporary accommodation, provided by two different Boroughs, plus my mother.
So back to my first question: why is service provision so hard? Why don’t civil servants behave like public servants and why do contractors and local governments get away with leaving people to live in unhealthy, damp conditions?
Perhaps there is only one conclusion: they just don’t care. They prioritise processes over people. And poor people get used to bad service and in the end, they give up: just like my mother’s neighbour had almost given up before she asked me for help. She spent several weeks with water coming daily into her bathroom, leaking into the hall, damaging the carpets and walls. When I was told that it was weekend and the job wasn’t an emergency, I asked if they cared that my mother’s neighbour would have to spend another weekend mopping water up in her bathroom. They never replied. Yet I'm sure their own bathroom was cosy and dry.
If you’re a professional: do you care about your clients? How do you know you care? And how do they know you care? To whom are you accountable?
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