Repairs body to produce fire guidance
Social housing maintenance providers will be issued with detailed fire safety guidance, following Inside Housing’s Safe as Houses campaign.
The National Housing Maintenance Forum decided there was a need for national guidance. It acted following a blaze in a Camberwell tower block last year that killed six people and after reading about Inside Housing’s successful campaign to improve fire safety in high-rises.
The forum says a guide is needed because there is currently no overarching fire safety guidance for maintenance providers working on homes and tower blocks.
Shaun Aldis, deputy chair of the forum and head of property services for arm’s-length management organisation Wolverhampton Homes, said: ‘As everyone was raising their game, we took the opportunity to review fire safety.
‘There’s no one model [good practice document] that services fire safety and [we thought] what about we devise one?’
‘Because of the nature of some of the repairs that take place, we need to make sure it [the lack of universal guidance] is responded to very quickly and there’s a definitive tool.’
David Miller, director of consultancy service Rand Associates, is producing the guide which will contain advice about the installation of fire doors, smoke compartmentation, alarm systems and other matters such as how quickly repairs should be carried out.
Mr Miller estimates the document could be up to 250 pages long and the aim is to have it ready for launch at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s annual conference in Harrogate in June.
The NHMF has a committee of 20 people and about 400 housing associations use its services
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