Recurring quality issues in the UK private house building industry

Abstract

PurposeThis paper seeks to provide an examination of the UK private house building industry and its record of delivering to customers a quality end product.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the literature regarding quality and the perception of quality along with the problem of defining quality in relation to new private houses, and also includes the results from both qualitative and quantitative data collection from interviews and questionnaires with new home owners, showing the scope of the problem in the Northwest of England. The literature examines not only the private house building industry, but also other industries and their quality procedures. The paper then goes on to identify and analyse some of the possible reasons for the apparent lack of customer satisfaction with current UK private house builders and their products.FindingsThe industry must either find out for itself what it is that its customers want or take note of the current research. The author is of the opinion that it is not a major task to significantly improve the current customer satisfaction ratings and frequency of defects reported in new houses. The house builders need to establish a set of quality criteria that they can deliver to their customers on a consistent basis, they need to establish a robust management system that ensures that the tradespeople on site are aware of the quality criteria and that the company will accept no deviation from the agreed criteria. This would then ensure that the customer has a set of criteria on which to judge the level of quality delivered in the end product and not be allowed to make subjective assessments on non‐existing criteria. In short, the builder would then only have to work towards delivering one set of criteria instead of multiple criteria depending on the number of customers on each site.Originality/valueThis is currently an area that is under‐researched and thus this is original research.