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Atrium Lockdown Exit Plans

Atrium has been establishing its plans for exiting lockdown and getting staff back from furlough or home working and into its office and tenants' homes. We are being guided by this by Scottish Government advice which permits non-essential offices to reopen from 31 July, but also permits other outdoor based or low risk construction type works to take place now.

Based on this, our timeline is this:

• From Monday 13 July: Atrium Property Services has begun work on external repairs which have built up over lockdown plus re-commissioning and preparing void properties which were ready for let back in March. This will take them several weeks.
• Also from w/c 13 July external estate inspections have recommenced to catch up on contractor activity, which has been ongoing over the last 3 months. We’ll be giving a priority to the garden maintenance scheme which started again in early June. In parallel, allocations staff have started to do viewings on voids with a view to allocating properties again.
• From Monday 20 July, we will begin to allocate the small number of empty properties that are ready. Some tenants may already have been contacted regarding this. We are liaising with our contractors on the upgrade and repair of other properties which became empty during lockdown to get these properties ready for occupation as soon as possible.
• From Monday 3 August, our phones will be reset to operate on our standard hours i.e 9.00am to 5.00pm Monday to Thursday; 9.00am to 4.00 pm Friday, as we take another step back towards resuming full service.
• Also from Monday 3 August, we anticipate APS and other contractors will begin work on the substantial backlog of internal repairs which has built up since we went into lockdown. We will be checking with customers in the coming weeks that they’re happy for work to be done, and scheduling appointments. We will be introducing safety measures to make it as safe as we can for customers and contractor alike, to carry out repairs.
• From Monday 10 August, we hope that some staff will be able to work from the office in Shortlees, and we will be considering this in more detail closer to the time.

A Note on Repairs

Since March this year we have only been able to undertake emergency and urgent repairs to occupied properties, but our tenants have still been reporting other repairs to us. This has resulted in a substantial backlog which we will be aiming to address as quickly as we can. Many of these repairs are inside occupied properties and additional safety measures may be needed to minimise the risk of Covid spread. This may impact on the speed at which our operatives and contractors can work, which in turn may affected the length of time needed to address the backlog. We will be aiming to do these repairs in order and it will take some time to work through them.

In addition, we expect we will receive additional repair requests to those already recorded. These will be triaged as normal, allocated a priority and addressed in turn. It may be several months before we are able to achieve anything like the average response time of 4.5 working days for routine repairs that tenants previously enjoyed, so we ask for your patience.