Resident Questions for Housing Area Panel

 

Reference: C3.4

Question Title

Scaffolding

Date question raised

19/12/2022

Week of Area Panel

13/2/2023

Area in city

Central

Star rating applied by residents

3 stars – city wide

Deadline for officer response

9am on 19th January

Name of officer responding

Grant Ritchie

Officer job title

Head of Housing Repairs and Maintenance

Resident Question

Issue:

The Council should ensure that scaffolding is erected for the minimum amount of time necessary to do the work.

Background:

Scaffolding often stays up for many months, often when work is not being done or has been completed. There have been recent examples of this at Sylvan Hall, but it is an on-going problem across the city. Scaffolding can obstruct light and access – residents’ quality of life should not be secondary to the convenience of scaffolding companies.

Action requested:

Ask for a report on:

a.    Why is scaffolding kept up when it is not necessary?

b.    Are the Council paying for this?

c.    What action does the Council take to ensure scaffolding is only erected for the minimum time? Do contracts have penalties for a violation of this? 

Officer Response

Officer contact details:

Grant Ritchie

Officer Response:

Thank you for your question. I acknowledge that scaffold can stay up for a longer period than is necessary. We will request that a scaffold is erected two weeks before a repair is scheduled to be undertaken. Sometimes it is necessary to change the repair date which can lead to the scaffolding being in place for a longer period. There are also occasions when the extent of the repair is greater than anticipated which again can lead to the scaffold being in place longer than required.

 

On completion of works we will ask our contractors to strike scaffolds and we will stop paying for them at this stage. It is also worth noting that we only pay rental after a period of six weeks.

 

I am aware that contractors can be slow to remove scaffolds and we do try to monitor this and repeat requests where we see scaffolds are still in place.

 

I am also aware that as we are trying to complete as many roof repairs as possible and our contractors will prioritise the erection of scaffolds over striking them.

 

I do however feel that this is an area we can improve, and I propose that we focus on this going forward.

Action:

Improve contractors time to strike scaffolding

Start date:

Ongoing

End date:

Ongoing