More work is going into making sure residents in council-run high-rise blocks have the right safety information.
Brighton and Hove City Council has produced a High-Rise Building Safety Resident Engagement Strategy in response to the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017.
The document is going before the council’s four housing management panels, the forum for tenant and leaseholder reps to discuss their concerns with councillors and officials.
New rules require the council to work with residents to ensure they feel safe and secure where they live after legal changes following the fire.
And now the Building Safety Regulator wants to make sure that everyone living in a tower block is aware of their rights and responsibilities under building safety laws.
The rules cover “higher-risk buildings” or those that are at least 18 metres or 60 feet high – or seven or more storeys – containing at least two flats.
The council’s head of housing investment and asset management Geof Gage has been appointed as the “principal accountable person” – a post required by the Building Safety Act 2022.
Mr Gage will be required to set up and run a system for dealing with residents’ complaints, produce safety case reports and ensure all building assessment certificates and compliance notices are displayed.
Labour councillor Gill Williams, the council’s cabinet member for housing and new homes, said: “We want to make sure our residents feel safe and up to date on the work we will be doing over the coming years and are aware of how to report an issue.
“We want you to know what to do if an incident happens, be aware of your responsibilities in and around your home, plus tell us if we are not listening or getting things right.
“We will activity encourage more residents to get involved in different ways, make information easy to understand and report back our actions in response to your feedback.”
Residents will be contacted to ask their views on decisions that will affect the building and fire safety.
The council’s strategy document said: “We recognise that some decisions will be a higher priority in terms of building safety and, therefore, the timescale for residents to provide their opinions may vary.
“We will provide residents with a timescale in which you should provide your views when writing to you about the specific decision.
“It may not always be practical to consult residents on all matters, for example, where there is an emergency situation which requires an immediate response, emergency repairs or where other statutory authorities (such as East Sussex Fire and Rescue) make recommendations.”
Housing management panel meetings for four different parts of Brighton and Hove are due to take place next week and the week after at different locations.
For more details, go to https://democracy.brighton-hove.gov.uk/mgListCommittees.aspx?bcr=1 and scroll down to the final section, “housing management area panels”.
The whole culture within the housing team at the council appears to be off when the main councillors talks, about wanting to make residents “feel safe”, when the council needs to make sure they ACTUALLY are safe.
Putting up a few notices several years after legislation was announced is madness. Why have they waited until the legislation is in force, they’ve known they will need to do it for ages. My understanding is they still don’t have personal evacuation plans in place for disabled people either.
It’s not even a month since the news that the Regulator council has “serious failings” with more than 12,000 homes without electrical certificates (https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2024/08/09/lack-of-safety-checks-to-council-homes-a-serious-failure-regulator-says/); and there are 8 high rise blocks with serious defects: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/articles/c03l205d93do.
The fact the council are asking residents to tell them if they “are not getting things right” is farcical. They are not getting things right. The Regulator has told them they are not getting things right. They know they are not getting things right. It’s not about making residents “feel safe” as Councillor Gill Williams wants, the council has legal responsibilities to make sure the buildings people live in ARE SAFE, and the council is not meeting these legal duties.
While I agree that they need to buck their ideas up (to put it mildly) the “feeling safe” issue is a real one. Residents need to understand things like sheltering in place vs evacuating, and why the option that “feels safe” might actually be more dangerous.
That’s not quite what I meant – stay put policies are there for a reason. Yet with lots of blocks, even 7 years after Grenfell many have still not had full surveys done to know if there are defects in the properties that make the stay put policy redundant. If residents know the first bit has been done properly, ie that the necessary post-Grenfell full surveys have been done, and that all the remedial work needed has been completed, then of course, following the guidelines about what residents should do and the evacuation plans is important.
As we saw with Grenfell though where 72 residents who listened to stay put policies tragically died, and even locally (although not a highrise) Pankhurst Avenue, buildings with defect can mean the advice residents are following is not the best advice. Thankfully in the Pankhurst example residents did not stay put and they all got out, if they had of listened to that advice though it prob would have been a different outcome.
The bottom line is that the council should have done surveys in its buildings long ago, they should know the risks in their buildings before now. It’s alarming that it’s only this year the LPS issue in 8 blocks has come up. Of course residents feeling safe is important, but the council doing the work to know if their buildings are ACTUALLY safe, and doing the work to make them ACTUALLY safe if they find they aren’t, is more important than feelings.
Tower blocks are death traps. I’d rather live in a tent on the streets than in one of these. Look what’s happening at the flats at the top of Whitehawk – Crumbling supports, cracks appearing everywhere on lower floors, failed recent fire inspections. Are the council in any rush to move everyone out? Of course not. They don’t have to live in them, so why should they care? All of these relics need taking down, they’re all dangerously outdated and neglected.
So much of this problem has been created by those with no knowledge of building technology making demands for retro-fitting insulation to buildings that were never designed for such conditions, causing condensation which leads to black mold, and insulation panels that can only reach the performance levels required by the ignorant through use of unsafe materials.
The stupid eco-protestors glue themselves to the road and demand more insulation to homes, the government cave to energy companies increasing prices, and councils demand better thermal performance, and we end up with unsafe un-ventilated buildings that are incredibly unhealthy, new fad products in the building industry that appear incessantly, often fail (RAAC concrete), and no one can keep up. The stupid eco-architects propose timber framed housing in flood risk areas, which will require total demolition at the first flood, and so it goes on, with idiots following idiots.
What did they think was going to happen?
RAAC is hardly a ‘new fad’ it was introduced in the 1950s. What is wrong is the penny-pinching ‘build em high, build em cheap’ philosophy that was adopted by so many councils enthralled by the promises of certain architects in the 50s and 60s.
It would be interesting in hearing the opinion on this of a regular poster who advocates demolishing the entire Lewes Road from the Level to the university and erecting endless tower blocks along its length.
OK, RAAC is 50 years old, but Thermalite blocks are the same concrete with the same issues, and they are still being used in some rare cases, though some London boroughs won’t now accept their use after so many failures.
ICF is the next one to go horribly wrong. How does polystyrene behave in a house fire?
how many notices in how many different languages will have to be posted to inform the many different residents on how to live safely and cook with care. Newly arrived migrants do not change their habits when living in a high rise block. Drugs farms steal electricity and water threatening supplies. Until the drugs gangs are dealt with by deporting or locking up forever Brighton will become an even more dangerous environment like London and Birmingham.