More than 3,000 council homes in Bristol suffer from damp and mould issues as repairs are delayed for many months. Over 300 homes have had their repairs delayed by more than a year.
Earlier this year Bristol City Council was ordered by the government’s Regulator of Social Housing to fix long-standing issues in its thousands of homes. This included asbestos inspections, fire safety, and damp and mould.
However, the damp and mould team has struggled to recruit and retain staff, and has also been affected by contractor capacity. An update on the regulatory issues was given to the housing policy committee on Friday, December 13.
Liberal Democrat Councillor Jos Clark said: “We’re moving forward at pace, but maybe not as quickly as anybody would have liked. There’s some real basics that we still haven’t got on top of. We have to understand how we got here and make sure we never get ourselves into this position ever again.”
Good progress has been made on asbestos in communal areas, water safety inspections, smoke detection and electrical inspections. Consultants will also analyse the root causes of how the issues came to be so bad, in a bid to prevent similar problems arising in the future.
Richard James, head of business development, said: “We have about 3,000 damp and mould cases at the moment. We’re categorising them into the severity of the damp and mould, and any other relevant factors, such as if the resident has asthma.
“It will mean that the least severe damp and mould will take longer for us to respond to than the most severe. But I’ll make it clear that we’re not disregarding any damp and mould. We will respond to all of them, but we do have to prioritise.”
Figures on the number of homes affected by damp are unreliable, and they are expected to increase as more surveys are carried out. According to the latest data, 1,870 homes have repairs overdue by between six to 12 months; and 363 have repairs overdue by over a year.
Four years ago a two-year-old boy died in a housing association flat in Rochdale, after prolonged exposure to damp and mould. Awaab Ishak’s death prompted a change in the law and criticism of the association’s attempt to blame the mould on his parents’ alleged lifestyle.
Rochdale Boroughwide Housing later apologised for “making assumptions about [the family’s] lifestyle”. Meanwhile in Bristol, as tenants are waiting for problems in their home to be resolved, the council is sending them information on how “lifestyle choices” can affect damp and mould.
Fiona Lester, interim director of the homes and landlord service, said: “We’ve all got a part to play around how we mitigate that in the way we live. One answer to that is we’ve produced quite a lot of documentation and information for residents that we’re sending out regularly, to educate our residents around how they can manage damp and mould, based on their lifestyle choices.”