Housing Matters June 2010

Safety – not sorry!

Recent prosecutions serve as a salutary reminder to landlords that they must ensure the competence of contractors and actively manage contracted work to ensure it is done safely and correctly.

Earlier this month a council was fined £10,000 with £12,000 in costs after a contractor left a tenant’s property contaminated with asbestos during refurbishment work. Whilst the contractor was also prosecuted, the council was criticised for not verifying the competence of the contractor.
 
A housing association was recently fined £50,000 plus £7,500 costs following the death of a tenant whose boiler exploded after being incorrectly decommissioned by an independent plumber. The association was criticised for failing to check contracted work had been completed correctly.

The law is very clear that delegating work does not delegate health and safety responsibilities. Clients must check competence, conduct risk assessments and manage and supervise contractors. The consequences are clear if this does not happen.

Landlords are also reminded of their specific duty to ensure that gas installations are safe and checked annually by a competent engineer registered with the Gas Safe Register (“GSR”). Many of these engineers will be contractors.

Records of the annual check must be kept for two years.

Failure to comply with the regulations carries a potentially unlimited fine and possibly imprisonment. In a recent HSE prosecution, a private landlord was fined £8,000 plus nearly £2,000 in costs for failing to carry out an annual inspection.

With housing associations having large portfolios, the potential exposure is significant. The Audit Commission has recently criticised a number of housing associations for not carrying out annual inspections and having inadequate record keeping.

If a fatality results from a failure to ensure tenants’ safety, prosecution for corporate manslaughter is now a possibility. To date, no landlord has been prosecuted under this relatively new legislation.

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