Technician visits to your home during Covid-19

This has been a very worrying time for consumers across the UK, we have needed to adapt how we provide services, without compromising on the level of support we provide.

As we are appointed by your utilities supplier, we have worked with them wherever possible to offer a number of changes to the services, especially for vulnerable customers.

As the UK entered ‘lock-down’ we suspended on non-emergency works within your home. We continued to provide emergency support for emergency situations affecting consumers, such as leaks and supply outages.

In these emergency situations, we took extra precautions to protect our team and you. This included understanding if anyone was not well, ensuring our team and their household was well, additional PPE, social distancing and amended working practises.

It is important to know that our team are not penalised if they do not come into work, we would prefer them to stay at home if they, or someone in their household, is ill. We aim to create a culture that is accepting of this reality and as a result we may need to rearrange works at short notice.

As we enter a stage where we are restarting non-emergency activities within your home, we have committed, as part of our updated Risk Assessments, to ensuring a number of protections are implemented:

• Ensuring non-emergency work does not occur in properties where someone in the household is isolating, which means we will ask when we book an appointment.
• Our technician will also confirm that no one in the household is not feeling well on our visit, as well as confirming the same to you.
• We continue to ask you to provide access to our work area but socially distance, preferably in another room – we are not being unsociable, but we cannot also accept a cup of tea!
• We will not remove your personal belongings from the work area but will always try to inform you what might need moving in advance.
• We provide hand sanitiser and other cleaning supplies to ensure all work equipment can be sanitised before use.
• Our technicians will have their standard PPE which also includes disposable gloves, shoe coverings and aprons.
• If you prefer you can ask our technician to wear a face covering, or they may be wearing one anyway.
• Our technicians will travel alone using a work vehicle and not by public transport or other shared vehicle.
• Normally our team will work alone but sometimes a job requires more than one technician, we will keep these teams consistent.
• Where we need a signature for work completed this will not be requested on the tablet, instead we will email or SMS you for a contact-free signature.
• All our work is electronically recorded on tablet, which allows for easy contact tracing should the need arise.

We are constantly reviewing the best ways of working safely, in line with government guidance, as well as industry specific guidance. We want to carry out our work safely for everyone, so we are happy to share our risk assessments and Covid-19 processes with you, as well as discussing with you the safest way we can carry out our work.