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Council breached Home Standard on fire, asbestos and electrical safety
A council with more than 19,000 homes has breached the Home Standard through serious fire, asbestos and electrical safety failings, the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has said.
Home Standard breached through fire, asbestos and electrical safety failings by council #ukhousingGateshead Council – which uses an ALMO, The Gateshead Housing Company (TGHC), to manage its homes – left thousands of tenants “potentially exposed to an unknown risk of danger over a long period of time”, according to a regulatory notice published today.
Until mid-2018, the council had no programme in place to carry out Fire Risk Assessments across its stock and “until very recently” was only carrying out assessments in its high rises and not other blocks, RSH found.
Housing providers are required to regularly assess the risk of fire in buildings where they have responsibility for maintenance under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005.
The council and TGHC also failed to carry out asbestos surveys of communal areas and complete electrical safety certificates in “several hundreds of properties”.
RSH concluded that the failings meant the council “did not have an effective system in place to allow it, through TGHC, to meet its statutory health and safety responsibilities across a range of areas” and so breached Part 1.2 of the Home Standard.
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A review commissioned by TGHC in mid-2018 identified the issues, with the council since working to complete required safety checks and actions.
But the regulator concluded that because of “the breadth and scale of this failure and the potentially longstanding nature of the issues”, Gateshead Council had breached the Home Standard and left tenants at “risk of serious harm”, meeting the serious detriment test.
It added it would work with Gateshead Council as the authority “seeks to address the issues which have led to this situation” and consider “what, if any, further action to take”.
RSH is able to use regulatory or enforcement powers in cases where there are “reasonable grounds to suspect that the failure has resulted in a serious detriment to the provider’s tenants” or there is a significant risk that no action by the regulator will result in further serious detriment to tenants.
Councils are required to meet RSH’s consumer standards but do not receive regulatory judgements.
Sheena Ramsey, chief executive of Gateshead Council, said: “The notice from the regulator reinforces a number of issues we had previously identified in our own independent review carried out in June 2018.
“Every year we carry out thousands of inspections across our 19,500 properties.
“These inspections lead to further actions needing to take place. The independent health and safety review highlighted a range of areas requiring improvement including our record keeping, compatibility of systems and modernising our processes.
“The council and The Gateshead Housing Company acted quickly on the findings of the review and significant steps have been made to ensure the required statutory checks are complete. A clear up-to-date work plan is now in place.
“Clearly our data systems and processes were less than perfect and we apologise to our tenants for any concerns they may have. Improvements have been made so residents can be confident that the council is meeting the required health and safety standards our tenants should expect and deserve.
“We have taken the findings from the regulator very seriously and will continue to work with the regulator to ensure we do not find ourselves in this position again.”
Update: at 12.00pm 24/04/19 a comment from Gateshead Council was added to the story.
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