Like every other commercial business currently carrying out installs and upgrades in the social housing sector, we are open and determined to stay open, but I am increasingly asking myself, at what cost?

In the simplest terms, our business is measuring an aperture, ordering a window or door and fitting it. Add on selling it and getting paid to the beginning and the end of that, and you’ve got most of the picture. Over more than a decade, we’ve honed every single one of those elements and become one of the most efficient commercial installers in the business.

But Covid is currently putting paid to all of that. It is affecting every single stage of our operation and, despite sustained demand, our margins are under real pressure.

Surveys are often cancelled, fabricators and others in the supply chain are unable to get stock to us, and illness, shielding and general anxiety amongst residents are drastically affecting the number of installations we can complete. We are constantly having to track changes in delivery dates, and cancel and reschedule installations, sometimes at the last minute when a resident or even one of our own fitters is ill or self-isolating – and it’s proving a costly and time-consuming business.

And that’s before we even get to the right and wrong of it. Yes, we need to fit to survive and the government has clearly said that in England and Wales, tradespeople can still work in other people’s homes, but we also need to survive to fit. Since the start of the second wave, every business has surely had to question whether we are asking our staff to take an unacceptable risk with their health, while there is such an increased risk of infection?

I know that the carefully written Covid-19 secure protocols should, in theory, protect everyone, but the fact is that they can’t unless they are scrupulously followed – not just during the installation itself but on the journey there and back as well. And the reality is that it’s not always happening.

There is a light at the end of our tunnel of course in the form of the mass vaccination programme but for installers, it can’t come soon enough. Resident facing SMEs like ours are an essential element in the supply chain, and I don’t think any of us wants to see any more signs going up which say ‘Closed, but with fixed costs’.