Falkirk Council: Repairs backlog to council homes almost cleared

Just 400 non-emergency repairs remain to catch up on, members of Falkirk Council’s scrutiny committee heard yesterday (Thursday).

At the meeting, Labour councillor David Aitchison questioned a report that showed Falkirk Council taking double the time to complete non-emergency repairs compared to the Scottish average for 2020/21.

They were told that non-emergency repairs had been massively impacted by the pandemic, which took Falkirk Council into the lowest quartile when compared to other local authorities.

Members heard that some other councils were understood to have stopped recording non-emergency repairs during the pandemic when staff had to abide by strict social distancing rules.

As a result the council prioritised emergency repairs and homelessness.

Director of transformation, communities and corporate services, Karen Algie, said: “Yes, it is disappointing to see those figures but in previous years our performance was fairly good for non-emergency repairs.

“Over the period of the pandemic we had a number of restrictions on the way we could run the service – we could not carry out repairs to the full extent that we were able to pre the pandemic.

“At that point we focused very much on emergency repairs to make sure that safety of tenants was the priority, but also focused on our statutory requirements, such as homelessness and trying to ensure that we got houses ready for anyone who was homeless.

“As a result, we had a backlog of around 7000 outstanding jobs. Some councils told their tenants they couldn’t do those jobs and took them off the system – we kept all of those requests for work on our system and we have continued to work through them.

“Of those 7000 jobs we have only around 400 that remain to be completed so we have done a huge amount of work since the figures you have got in the report.

“We are hoping that by next month that backlog will have been sorted and we should see, as we move forward, an improvement in the figures.”

Councillor Aitchison said: “I totally appreciate your answer but the regulations would have been the same for all local authorities, so for Falkirk’s to be twice what it was in 2018/19 is really disappointing.”