If you are a Kingston Council tenant and you have been chasing a repair since early 2025, you may have noticed something shift. Breyer Group — the company Kingston had contracted to carry out housing repairs — went into administration, leaving thousands of council tenants across London in limbo.
From April 2025, Kingston Council transitioned its housing repairs contract to Cardo Group. The council presented this as a managed handover. Tenants living through a broken boiler or a leaking roof in the middle of that transition may have experienced something rather less orderly.
This article sets out what you are legally entitled to, what response times Cardo is obligated to meet, and exactly what steps to take when things go wrong — from first report through to the Housing Ombudsman.
Breyer Group had held Kingston Council's responsive repairs contract as part of a wider relationship covering a number of London local authorities. When the company collapsed in early 2025, it left outstanding jobs, missing records, and confused tenants who did not know whether their repair request had been received, logged, or simply lost.
Kingston Council awarded the contract to Cardo Group to pick up the work. Cardo is an established social housing maintenance contractor operating across England. The transition, however, created an accountability gap that residents and scrutiny bodies will be watching closely in the months ahead.
Repair response times are not guidelines — they are obligations, and they flow from a combination of your tenancy agreement, the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, and the Regulator of Social Housing's Decent Homes Standard.
The Regulator and the Housing Ombudsman both expect landlords to categorise repairs and respond within defined timeframes. While Kingston Council's specific contractual timescales with Cardo are set out in the service specification (which residents can request under the Freedom of Information Act), the sector-standard categories are:
Emergency repairs — typically within 24 hours. These include total loss of heating in winter, severe water leaks, electrical hazards, and anything posing an immediate risk to health or safety.
Urgent repairs — typically within 3 to 5 working days. These cover partial loss of heating, minor roof leaks, or faulty door locks that do not leave a property insecure.
Routine repairs — typically within 20 to 28 working days. Plastering, minor joinery, guttering, and similar non-urgent defects fall here.
If Kingston Council's contract with Cardo specifies tighter timescales — which it may well do — those timescales become the relevant standard against which performance is measured.
Ask the council directly what the contractual response time categories are for Cardo. You are entitled to know.
The phrase 'reasonable timeframe' appears constantly in housing repair correspondence. It sounds reassuring. It is also vague by design.
Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 requires landlords to carry out repairs to the structure, exterior, and installations of a property within a reasonable time of being given notice. What is 'reasonable' depends on the nature of the defect — a broken boiler in January demands urgency that a stiff window catch does not.
The Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018 goes further: if a defect renders a property unfit for human habitation, the landlord can be taken to the county court regardless of whether they have been formally notified. Damp, mould, structural instability, vermin infestation, and defective sanitation can all bring a property into scope.
Critically, following the tragic death of Awaab Ishak and the subsequent introduction of Awaab's Law (now being implemented under the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023), social landlords face new statutory timescales for investigating and fixing hazards caused by damp and mould. Kingston Council, as a social landlord, is covered by these provisions.
'Reasonable' therefore has a floor — and courts have repeatedly found that months-long delays for genuine hazards are not reasonable, regardless of contractor difficulties or transition periods.
If your repair is not being done, here is the structured path you should follow. Do not skip steps — the Housing Ombudsman will want to see evidence that you exhausted the landlord's internal process first.
Step 1 — Report and get a reference number. Contact Kingston Council's repairs line and report the defect. Insist on a written confirmation — by email or letter — with a job reference number and a stated response category. Without this, you have no paper trail.
Step 2 — Chase in writing once the deadline passes. If the repair is not completed within the stated timeframe, write to the council (email is fine) referencing your job number, the date reported, and the category of repair. Keep this message factual and dated.
Step 3 — Raise a formal complaint. If the repair remains outstanding after your written chase, submit a Stage 1 formal complaint through Kingston Council's complaints process. The council is required under the Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code to acknowledge your complaint within five working days and provide a full response within ten working days.
Step 4 — Request Stage 2 escalation. If the Stage 1 response is unsatisfactory, ask for your complaint to be escalated to Stage 2. The council has 20 working days to respond at this stage.
Step 5 — Go to the Housing Ombudsman. Once you have received a final response from the council, or if eight weeks have passed since your formal complaint without a resolution, you can take your case to the Housing Ombudsman Service (housing-ombudsman.org.uk). The Ombudsman can order landlords to carry out repairs, issue apologies, and require compensation. There is no fee.
You can also contact a Designated Person — your local councillor or MP — who can refer your complaint to the Ombudsman on your behalf, which can sometimes accelerate the process.
The Breyer collapse and the Cardo transition raise questions that go beyond any individual repair job.
How many outstanding jobs were inherited from Breyer Group, and how many remain unresolved? What is Cardo's current average response time across each repair category? What financial penalties — if any — are built into the Cardo contract for missed timescales? And who within the council is monitoring performance on a monthly basis?
With 48 councillors across 19 wards and full council elections scheduled for 7 May 2026, housing repair performance is precisely the kind of local accountability question that residents should be putting to their ward representatives now — not after the ballots are cast.
If you have an outstanding repair, do not wait. Log it in writing today. Note the date, the defect, the risk it poses, and every conversation you have had with the council. That record is your evidence.
If you have already been waiting longer than the relevant response time category allows, move to Step 3 and raise a formal complaint. The council cannot manage what it does not know about — and the Ombudsman cannot help you without a paper trail.
Residents of Kingston upon Thames: your ward councillors have a responsibility to scrutinise how Cardo is performing and how the council is managing this transition. Use Council Clarity to message your councillors directly — ask them what oversight mechanisms are in place, what the latest performance data shows, and what they are doing to ensure tenants are not left waiting indefinitely for repairs that are legally required. It takes two minutes, and it puts your question on the record.
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