Social Distancing Policy | Our Tradespeople At Work

UPDATE 31 October 2020:

As always, we remain open for business to help you with any property maintenance issue, 24/7 throughout the November lockdown. Our tradespeople are equipped with PPE and sanitising products, and follow social distancing advice too.
If you do have any concerns, please contact our team.

Our tradespeople are continuing to provide frontline work to maintain utilities in homes and businesses. We’ve issued them all with guidelines to help protect customers and themselves from virus transfer and possible infection.

The recommendations we provide our tradespeople with are based on advice from the Government and Public Health England. As advice changes on an almost daily basis, we’ll continue to keep our tradespeople fully updated.

All our tradespeople have been told they must confirm they are feeling well and haven’t experienced any symptoms of COVID-19. They do this first thing in the morning on a daily basis.

Aspect: tradespeople with personal protective equipment

Customer’s health

When taking bookings our call handlers will be asking customers if they or any other occupants are self-isolating, or are symptomatic in any way, or have been tested positively for COVID-19.

We’re also conscious of taking extra precautions with people in a property if they’re considered to be in an “at risk” group. This includes people aged 70 years or older and people with underlying health issues.

Personal protective equipment (PPE)

Our tradespeople all have full PPE. Due to severe shortages of some PPE items at this time certain items are kept for use in certain situations rather than on every job.

You can read more and when PPE is worn in this article.

Social distancing while working

In line with guidelines provide by Public Health England, we’ve briefed our tradespeople to maintain a distance of 2 metres from people in the properties they’re booked to visit
On the day of the visit customers should expect to receive a call before the tradesperson arrives to confirm nobody in the property has any symptoms or have been diagnosed with COVID-19
Tradespeople have been asked to stand back when a customer opens the door to them
They’ve also been asked not a shake hands with anyone they meet at a property, or before they leave
To help maintain a 2 metres distance from others we would be grateful if our tradespeople could be left to work alone in the room(s) where the work is needed
If possible we would also appreciate if the room(s) could be ventilated by opening a window

Leaving a property

When a visit is complete our tradespeople have stopped asking customers to sign their devices to acknowledge the time spent and the work carried out. Instead customers will be read these details and asked if they’re OK for them to be submitted for our customer service team to process.