ao link
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In
Twitter
Facebook
Linked In

You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles

Safety is a governance issue and needs to be our number-one priority

Better performance information and ensuring tenants and staff members are heard are needed to improve safety, writes Duncan Forbes

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Picture: Getty
Picture: Getty
Sharelines

Housing leaders have paid insufficient attention to safety – @Forbes_Duncan #ukhousing

“We need to find an effective way of hearing directly from tenants and frontline staff about their safety concerns,” writes @Forbes_Duncan #ukhousing

Don’t wait for the Grenfell Inquiry, act on safety now, writes @Forbes_Duncan #ukhousing

Safety starts at the top and has had insufficient attention.

Leaders determine the culture of an organisation and the extent of their interest and time spent on safety issues advertises how important or unimportant the topic is.

Everything we do or don’t do as leaders gets noticed and sends a cultural message.

It’s no accident that failing to discharge health and safety responsibilities is pretty much the only failure for which a board member or senior executive of a housing association can get prosecuted.

That’s because the law regards the safety of individuals as the most important duty we discharge. Safety should be our number-one priority.

It needs our time, our energy, our interest, our attention to necessary detail and often our organisation’s money.

“The law regards the safety of individuals as the most important duty we discharge.”

Boards of housing associations, cabinet members in local authorities and senior leaders in both need to ensure they get sufficient information from different sources about safety to be able to triangulate and gain the assurance they need.

We need to get the right performance information on safety issues, far more than the gas safety information on which many organisations have previously relied.

We need to commission and scope the right internal audits which check on data integrity and provide assurance that our systems are flagging up accurate and reliable information.


READ MORE

Future Shape of the Sector report: associations must change governance modelsFuture Shape of the Sector report: associations must change governance models
Ronan Point 50 years on: are tenants being listened to on safety?Ronan Point 50 years on: are tenants being listened to on safety?
Social Housing Green Paper expected by recessSocial Housing Green Paper expected by recess

The third element of the triangulation beyond performance information and internal audits is to know what is really happening on the ground. We need to find an effective way of hearing directly from tenants and frontline staff about their safety concerns.

For tenant feedback, the challenge is how we identify, collate and present the important information to those at senior level and demonstrate back that we have listened and responded.

“We need to find an effective way of hearing directly from tenants and frontline staff about their safety concerns.”

We only have to look at the #MeToo campaign, child safeguarding inquiries and hospitals where there have been major breakdowns in the treatment of patients to realise that the challenge with hearing from staff is that there is a culture of silence in many organisations.

For understandable reasons, people (maybe even most people?) are reluctant to speak out on safety issues because they fear repercussions.

While at senior level we might listen to and applaud a member of staff who raises a safety concern, that is not people’s experience of how their line managers necessarily respond.

If slapped down once, people take years to have sufficient trust to raise issues in the future.

We need to find out if our staff really feel comfortable about raising a safety concern, offer them easy and safe ways to do so outside the normal management channels, make sure we listen and that our response in all cases is supportive if they do raise a concern in good faith but also ensure that we don’t allow this process to undermine our managers.

This triangle has four points!

“We don’t need to wait for the Grenfell Inquiry to make our tenants and leaseholders safer.”

The fourth element is hearing directly from safety experts we commission on occasion (as we do from internal auditors meeting with the Audit Committee without staff present).

Experts will only write things they can verify in their reports but you need a conversation with them to hear about the cultural concerns they have – such as the manager who was reluctant to give them information or who was obstructive or the weakness they noticed in the reporting system. While these remarks may be anecdotal they are intelligence that may be useful.

We don’t need to wait for the Grenfell Inquiry to make our tenants and leaseholders safer. It’s in our hands and we can and should act now.

Duncan Forbes, independent consultant

Never Again campaign

Never Again campaign

Inside Housing has launched a campaign to improve fire safety following the Grenfell Tower fire

Never Again: campaign asks

Inside Housing is calling for immediate action to implement the learning from the Lakanal House fire, and a commitment to act – without delay – on learning from the Grenfell Tower tragedy as it becomes available.

LANDLORDS

  • Take immediate action to check cladding and external panels on tower blocks and take prompt, appropriate action to remedy any problems
  • Update risk assessments using an appropriate, qualified expert.
  • Commit to renewing assessments annually and after major repair or cladding work is carried out
  • Review and update evacuation policies and ‘stay put’ advice in light of risk assessments, and communicate clearly to residents

GOVERNMENT

  • Provide urgent advice on the installation and upkeep of external insulation
  • Update and clarify building regulations immediately – with a commitment to update if additional learning emerges at a later date from the Grenfell inquiry
  • Fund the retrofitting of sprinkler systems in all tower blocks across the UK (except where there are specific structural reasons not to do so)

We will submit evidence from our research to the Grenfell public inquiry.

The inquiry should look at why opportunities to implement learning that could have prevented the fire were missed, in order to ensure similar opportunities are acted on in the future.

 

READ MORE ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN HERE

The Paper Trail: The Failure of Building Regulations

Read our in-depth investigation into how building regulations have changed over time and how this may have contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire:

More on the Hackitt Review

More on the Hackitt Review

The Hackitt Review: key recommendations at-a-glance Inside Housing breaks down the key areas of the final report from Dame Judith Hackitt’s review of building regulations

Brokenshire: government will consult on banning combustible cladding The housing secretary announces a consultation despite the Hackitt Report findings

Dame Judith Hackitt: the interview Dame Judith Hackitt spoke to Inside Housing shortly after releasing her much-anticipated review of building regulations

Final Hackitt report calls for new regulatory body but does not ban combustibles Dame Judith Hackitt has called for a regulatory body to be set up to oversee the safety of buildings, but has stopped short of a prescriptive approach or the banning of dangerous cladding.

Grenfell survivors ‘saddened and disappointed’ by Hackitt report Reaction to Hackitt’s findings decision to ignore calls for a ban on combustible cladding

Linked InTwitterFacebookeCard
Add New Comment
You must be logged in to comment.