Agenda item

Report of the Director of Property Management

This report sets out the latest position on the Camden fire risk assessment programme, associated actions and updates on the work to comply with the requirements of the Building Safety Act 2022 and address the issues raised in the Regulatory Notice.

This report also constitutes the monthly update for October 2023 for members of the Panel and will also be shared with members of the Housing Scrutiny Committee. A standard format for monthly updates will be introduced from November 2023.

Consideration was given to the report of the Director of Property Management.

Gavin Haynes, Director of Property Management, took the meeting through the report and he along with Melissa Dillon and Maria Jacobs, Head of Neighbourhoods, gave the following key responses to questions:

·       There were still 76 high-risk actions that remained to be undertaken, the majority of which related to door repairs and remaining clearances. There were 26 no access cases that the Council was working to address, with the remainder having works scheduled for October.

·       The current programme of works sought to address the remaining outstanding 9,000 overdue actions by Christmas this year.

·       An action plan was being finalised by officers to seek to address all the outstanding works. The action plan had been shared initially with the regulator to get their initial views. These views were now being considered and the action plan would be revised accordingly. The Council through its Housing Safety and Regulatory Board and the Regulator would assess the delivery of the action plan and the standards arising from the regulatory regime, and when necessary determine any need to change policy or practices. This information was being pulled together in an industry wide template and would be shared with the Panel on a monthly basis.

ACTION BY: Director of Property Management (DJ)

·       The action plan sought to highlight the actions that had been undertaken by the council to deliver the outstanding work, provide data on service performance on an industry wide template, along with how future works would be undertaken. The work arising from the duties and regulations would be on-going which would mean that there would always be outstanding issues that needed to be addressed and highlighted in the work programme. It was hoped that for the one-off duties the Council would be able to achieve 100% of the requirements (e.g. the installation of hard-wired carbon monoxide alarms and smoke detectors and electrical testing). Though it was recognised that accessing tenant’s homes was proving difficult (currently this figure was at 30%) and may mean that this could not be achieved in full.

·       Once the action plan to address the remaining outstanding actions had been signed off by the Regulator of Social Housing and the Council then the document would be shared with councillors, the Panel and be available on the Council’s website.

ACTION BY: Director of Property Management

·       Officers agreed to bring a report to the next meeting of the Panel regarding the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms installation programme. The report would highlight the reasons for the approach being taken, movement from battery to hard-wired, the engagement programme that was undertaken with tenants, along with the challenges being faced with the delivery of the programme (e.g. access issues).

ACTION BY: Director of Property Management (DJ)

·       The Council’s fire and building safety activities represented a significant investment of Housing Revenue Account Resources. The Council had allocated £296m to fire safety capital works since 2017, and had an annual revenue budget of £4.5m for fire and building safety work. The new duties and responsibilities had to be funded from existing resources (apart from the Chalcots and Cromer Estates capital works), by making savings elsewhere and by reducing budgets for other revenue and capital works.

·       The Council had now established a team of 10 experienced Building Safety Managers as part of the Resident and Building Safety Team, and Building Safety Cases were being prepared in line with the required timescales.

·       High rise building must now be registered with the Building Safety Regulator, and as part of the Council’s review of its housing stock an additional 17 buildings were identified as now being in scope (167 in total), and these would be registered with the regulator by the deadline of the end of October.

·       Officers agreed to provide Thomas Watkins with information regarding the height of high-rise buildings within scope of the Building Safety Act and how they were measured.

ACTION BY: Director of Property Management (MD)

RESOLVED –

THAT the report be noted