Minutes:
“In April 2021 a resident reported to me concerns about a wall that is part owned by the council. The wall, around six feet high, was in such poor repair loose bricks were clearly resting above head height, presenting a significant health and safety risk to residents, their children and their pets.
I finally received a response in May 2021, nearly a month later. An assessment of works needed was listed.
I chased this in August 2021, to be told that the failure to respond was an oversight and progress was being made, but ownership issues had made things complicated.
In November 2021 I chased again, no response.
In mid-December, I chased again, this time copying the Chief Executive in. She responded saying she had asked senior housing officers to sort it and let me know what was happening as I’d not had a response in November. I got no further response.
On 17th Jan, I wrote to the Chief Executive again. This time I informed her that if the wall was not at least made safe by the following Friday, 21st Jan, I would attend and do the work myself.
Sometime in the intervening days council staff finally attended to remove the loose brickwork and fence off the damaged wall, making it much safer.
Why does this council apparently need to have the leader of the opposition threaten to undertake basic demolition work themselves after ten months of complete inaction by this council, when the safety of residents, children and pets is at risk?”
Answer
The Leader asked Councillor F. Thomson (Executive Member, Housing and Climate Change), to answer: -
Thank you for your question.
As I’m sure Cllr Zukowskyj is aware, this particular issue was complicated by the fact that the wall is in multiple ownership and the majority of the wall is not actually owned by the council. Nonetheless she agreed that this should have been dealt with much earlier and was not acceptable that this has taken as long as it had.
Since I had taken on the Housing Portfolio in May, I had been working very closely with the Chief Executive to review the work of the Housing Property Services Team and that we recognised the culture needed to be changed in some of the teams to ensure that staff follow through the initial enquiry and job requests. Given the volume of repair jobs that the team were required to carry out (for example, the team had dealt with in excess of 20,000 responsive repairs since May), we were also investing in systems to ensure that jobs could be tracked more effectively and that a new staffing structure will be put in place in the coming months
Councillor Zukowskyj in a supplementary question stated that there were other walls in disrepair around the borough and that if he could forward any new issues to the appropriate section and copy Councillor Thomson in. Councillor Zukowskyj also stated that it would be good to have some indication of how long the administration feels is appropriate for a response when someone raises something that could be a health and safety issues and asked what a reasonable response time frame would be?
Councillor Thomson answered that the work should have been carried out sooner. Structures were being reviewed and she, with Officers to seek, ways the service could be improved. In response to specific time frames any repairs were risk based but in this instance the response took too long.