Home Safety Checks

It is extremely important to us that you and your family are kept safe in your home. To ensure this is the case, we carry out routine safety checks, including an annual gas safety check.

It is a legal requirement to carry out a gas safety check and check your smoke alarms every year and we therefore follow strict procedures to ensure this is done. Thank you to the 70% of customers who allowed access for our Gas Engineers on the first visit over the last 12 months.

When customers haven't provided access after 3 visits by the Gas Engineer, we send a letter to advise that we will need to force access to the property. This is a last resort to ensure the property is safe and is carried out on the 4th visit. For this appointment, we arrange for a joiner, gas engineer and housing officer to attend the property. This involves a lot of administration and we need to pay for the tradespeople who may or may not be required. As well as the financial cost, this also limits the appointments available to carry out other repairs.

We had a total of 119 (5%) gas safety checks carried out on the 4th visit over the last 12 months, costing the Association over £26,000. To reduce these incidents happening in the future, we are proposing to apply a charge for the 4th visit. We will take the proposal to our Tenant Focus Group and Tenant Consultation Group to agree the best approach. Please contact us if you would like to join the discussion.