Dominic Harman, Persimmon Homes

We have a long history of working with Nabarro.We tend to use them for complicated customer matters and they are always on hand to offer quick, concise, pragmatic advice. This assists us greatly because we never like to keep our customers waiting for a response.

Nabarro is very good at offering advice on the range of individual issues that can occur when you’re building houses for so many people. We’re the UK’s largest home builder, constructing 17,000 houses a year.

One instance where they were most helpful relates to a group of customers who formed a residents action committee over what they believed to be contamination of their water supply.

We established very early on that these issues had not been caused by Persimmon but we recognised our customers were understandably concerned and as a responsible housebuilder, we offered to totally replace their plumbing systems which was a major operation. We had to move our customers out of their properties for a period of up to six weeks while we put their furniture into storage, took their carpets out, stripped out all of the copper, replaced it with plastic, replaced baths and sinks, redecorated, and re-carpeted, then of course, moved them back into their homes.

Nabarro helped us set up standard documentation that was acceptable to all of the customers. With 23 people all feeding into one agreement it was quite difficult to get some common ground. There were all sorts of issues to resolve, from people not wanting the work to be done during school times to how best to handle a fairly expensive tropical fish tank!

Nabarro advised us to try and keep the customers as close as possible to their homes, so we actually bought two houses on the estate for them to move into while the work was being done.

Once the work commenced, Nabarro was in the background to assist us with any unforeseen issues that inevitably occurred, and in ultimately agreeing an ex gratia payment to customers for the inconvenience of having to move out of the property.

This whole project took almost two years to resolve and Nabarro offered us very clear and concise advice throughout. This situation could have escalated way out of all proportion had it not have been for their expert assistance.

Nabarro were always on hand and we worked together as a team. What they did very well for us was offer firm advice on those areas which had to be non-negotiable, the areas that we needed to make a commercial decision on and those areas that really didn’t go to the heart of anything. This enabled us to focus on what mattered.

Nabarro’s key strengths are their speed of response and their impartial commerciality. They understand our business and they understand where something could lead to. They’re professional and clearly they’ve got a lot of inhouse expertise they can draw upon. They’re quick to respond and they want to move matters as promptly as possible. I suppose the best way to describe their service would be to say they help maximise the result but minimise the cost to ourselves.'