Agenda item - Housing Safety and Quality Compliance Update

36.1    Cllr Williams presented to the committee. Key points included: significant progress has been made; the paper includes a root cause analysis to understand how the council got into this position and lessons to be learned; there is an improvement plan to ensure that the council becomes compliant and then continues to remain compliant in the future. Council stock was developed during a time when regulations were less stringent, the properties are now old, underinvested and were not designed or maintained to fulfil modern day expectations and standards.

36.2    Martin Reid said it was important to learn from this experience and that positive progress has been made; the council is now compliant with fire risk assessments, have reduced remediation actions, increased resources to have the right capacity and skills in the team; struggled with water risk assessments but are now at 81%, electrical safety is now 87%  and smoke detection is at 98.9%. They are aiming to be 100% compliant but the last few percentage points are the hardest to achieve are due to difficulty in accessing the last few properties. The repairs backlog remains an area of concern; there were 6578 repairs that were over 28 days overdue; however, this is now below 3000. The action plan will have a phased approach and aims for continuous improvement for residents and regulations.

36.3    Cllr Sykes asked whether the fire risk assessments had been shared with the residents, how many fire risk elements were serious breaches and about the cost for fire-doors. Martin Reid said the fire risk assessments will be going online but there are a lot of them to get through; that they triage them to make sure there are no intolerable risks, and those would be actioned straight away, but the majority are things like fire action notices, fire doors compartmentation and electrical safety. The cost of fire doors comes from a tendering process and they consider whether it is appropriate to charge the leaseholder or not depending on the situation.

36.4    Cllr Cattell asked about black mould and similar issues. Cllr Williams said the council is declaring a war on mould and damp this winter and have set up a full specialist team specifically for these kinds of complaints, which they will do a members’ workshop on very soon.

36.5    Cllr Fowler asked about carbon monoxide detectors. Martin Reid said they were at 99.7% and there are plans to get them hard wired into the buildings so residents don’t have to worry about relying on batteries.

36.6    RESOLVED – that the report be noted.

The Chair closed the meeting at 20.05.