This theme looks to assess how effective the housing provider is at meeting its legal responsibilities to protect customers and keep buildings safe.
In the past year, we have continued to prioritise building safety and carry out a comprehensive programme of assessments on our buildings and works to respond to the changes to building safety legislation. We’ve invested £3.6m in the last 12 months, on a range of safety enhancements including the installation of smoke and fire detection systems, as well as continuing to develop and deliver our plans for remediation works.
This is reflected in the following key headlines:
We aim to meet our customer engagement commitments, including communicating evacuation arrangements to customers in our apartment blocks and providing regular building safety reminders. Working with customer involvement colleagues, the Building Safety Team has also started to implement its comprehensive consultation programme with customers in all our high-rise residential buildings over 18 metres, to develop individual customer-led Building Safety Engagement Plans for these priority buildings.
We have continued looking at steps to ensure we address issues related to the quality of our existing homes, particularly addressing issues of damp, mould and condensation. We have continued to implement a range of measures as part of our ongoing Living Conditions project launched in late 2022 to help mitigate these issues. This includes the introduction of a programme of follow-up assessments of all damp works completed in the last 12 months, additional colleague training and support resources and policies for colleagues and customers.
In 2023/24, 2,906 cases of damp, mould and condensation required action.
These cases related to 9% of our total portfolio of 26,451 homes
With Building Safety a key focus for Great Places, for our high rise residential buildings, the Building Safety Team used drone technology to create a digital model of one of our buildings, the Vibe, in Salford. This enabled us to capture vital information about the building to give us a clearer picture of the crucial safety information we need to comply with changes in building safety regulations and store this electronically. The inspection involved a remote-controlled drone which ascended each external elevation of the building to take pictures. Following this, the images were converted into diagrams providing a digital plan of the building.
Commenting on the project, Tony McMahon, our Head of Compliance and Building Safety, said:
“By using drone technology, we were able to create detailed digital models to give us a clear picture of the crucial information we need to be able to provide as part of the new Building and Fire regulations and store it electronically. It is a game-changer for our building safety planning and will help to ensure we have a clear picture of our buildings that we can share with the Regulator, customers and other stakeholders.”
