The warmfront scheme was administered by eaga on behalf of the government. When eaga was bought by Carillion last April they also took over running the scheme.
I joined Iguana services ( a subsidiary of eaga) in August 2006 and they were getting 30% of the warmfront work. All jobs were inspected by warmfont inspectors but they were paid peanuts and wouldn't know a good job if it fell on them. They had a checklist which they used, if everything on the list was ticked the job passed.
We were paid on a poor basic but a very good bonus to encourage productivity. Because it was a bonus per completed job it also tended to encourage cutting corners. A common trick that installers used was to get the powerflush machine in and run the hoover so that the customer could hear machinery being used. When the inspector asked if the system had been flushed the customer would say yes because they heard the machine running.
Because there was good money to be made Iguana (and other companies on the scheme) were recruiting like mad and not bothered how good the installers were. It was all about boilers on walls.
Every now and again there would be a quality drive but this would soon go out of the window and back to boilers on walls.
The Government finally cottoned on to the fact that the way the scheme was run was bordering on the corrupt and it all changed in April 2010. Prior to that a company was allocated the job and surveyed it for the necessary work themselves. Strangely most jobs came in at the maximum grant level. In April 2010 the jobs were surveyed by "surveyors" employed directly by warmfront and the jobs put out to tender to the firms on the scheme.
This put firms like eagaheat (as Iguana had now morphed into) at a disadvantage because they were seriously top heavy. For every 6 engineers there was a field manager who had a regional manager and national manager above them. You also had planners in the office, people on the complaints desk etc. Rather thanprune the back office staff the company decided to cut the job durations and put more pressure on the frontline staff to perform. The MD at the time viewed the installers like a production line, boilers in one end and complete installs out of the other, and could not understand why some jobs couled take 3 or 4 times as long as another. If a boiler swap could be done in a day then all boiler swaps could be done in a day.
This obviously lead to even more corner cutting as installers attempted to earn bonus by meeting ludicrous targets.
Through all of this mess I, and some of my colleagues, carried on installing properly and got a reputation as being problem solvers so spent a lot of our time putting right the dodgy installs that didn't slip through the very large holes in the net.
Most of the pictures I've posted in the Hall of Shame thread are of warmfront jobs that I was called into to put right.
