3 November 2025
What a housing board actually needs on one page of charts
A board pack that reprints every estate’s raw counts will be read by nobody. Members ask three questions, even when they use different words: are we keeping up, where is the pressure, and what can the extract not tell us.
The first chart is outstanding jobs at month-end, not jobs raised. Raised volume can rise because you opened a dedicated damp line; outstanding volume shows whether the diary absorbed it. The second is the five schemes with the highest raise rate per hundred homes, so a small sheltered block is not hidden by a large family estate.
The third is trade mix for the last twelve months against the twelve before. If electrical work has doubled while plumbing is flat, the conversation moves to a contractor, a programme, or a coding change — not to a general sense that ‘repairs are worse’.
The fourth is a humility chart: the share of jobs missing an estate code, a trade, or a completion date. Committees respect a briefing that admits the log is incomplete. They distrust a colourful map built on addresses that were never stored.
We write the two-page note in the same nouns the housing service already uses — responsive, planned, voids, heating, sheltered — and we refuse to invent a composite ‘performance score’. Members can argue about targets; the page should only hold counts they can check against the extract.