Work to deal with fire, water and electrical safety risks in thousands of council houses and flats is on target after a critical official report, tenant reps were told.
They were given updates, assurances and promises at a series of Brighton and Hove City Council meetings held over the past fortnight.
The problems were laid bare in a report by the Regulator of Social Housing in August. The watchdog was set up in 2018, just over a year after the Grenfell Tower fire, in London, which claimed 72 lives.
After the watchdog’s report, housing chiefs in Brighton and Hove pledged to spend £15 million to tackle serious failings in electrical safety, to provide smoke detectors and improve fire and water safety.
Councillor Gill Williams, the council’s cabinet member for housing, said in September that the most significant failings would be dealt with by December.
The target for electrical safety is to have all homes and communal properties tested by December 2026 and to set up a permanently maintained five-year testing cycle
The regulator said that 3,600 council homes out of about 12,100 did not have an electrical condition report. Five-year domestic testing is now 56 per cent complete and ten-year testing is 74 per cent complete.
A programme to fit hard-wired smoke detectors in all homes by December 2026 is 84 per cent complete, tenant reps were told at four recent housing panel meetings.
All high-rise and seniors housing has had a fire risk assessment and workers are more than half way through the second phase of reassessing for other “low-rise” buildings.
Two contractors have been brought in to deal with water safety and have carried out risk assessments of 80 per cent of “water systems”.
A further two contractors have been brought in to deal with the backlog of repairs which has since reduced from 6,476 in June to 5,309.
This is down from a previous “significant backlog” of 8,000 low-risk and low-priority repairs.
The council’s head of tenancy services Justine Harris said: “We are having monthly meetings with the Regulator of Social Housing, East Sussex Fire and Rescue and the Health and Safety Executive.”
She said that updates would be sent to tenants and given to a “scrutiny panel” and the cabinet.
Good to note that the backlog is constantly been added to. A discussion I once had with one of the officers was that on average 3,000 added a month, so reducing the backlog means not only keeping up with the currently workflow, but exceeding it, by a decent margin.
Hopefully it follows that trend, means end of spring roughly the backlog should be zero?