Maintaining Council Housing

Important update

Are you a Moray Council tenant? Please help us to keep you and your family safe  

Fire regulations in Scotland have changed.  As your landlord, we have a legal duty to upgrade the smoke, heat and carbon monoxide alarms in your home.  This will make sure your property meets the new minimum legal safety standards needed for fire safety in social housing.  We can only carry out the work if we get access to your property.

Who will carry out the work?  Approved electricians from a company called Belac.  It should take no more than 2 hours and will follow Covid safe working practices.

What can I do to help? Belac are contacting all our tenants. Please look out for a letter, email or phone call or you can phone Belac direct on 0141 459 0010 to arrange an appointment that is convenient for you.

How do I know if the electrician from Belac is legitimate? All the electricians will carry photographic ID – please ask to see it.  You can also phone our Moray Council Contact Centre on 01343 543451 to confirm they are who they say they are.

Do I have to give access? It is a legal responsibility under your tenancy agreement to give access to Moray Council or its contractors to carry out essential work.  If there is a genuine reason why you cannot give access for the work please tell us and we can work with you to find the best solution to get the works undertaken.

What happens if I don’t give access?  Belac will refer these cases back to us.  We will try to continue to contact you to arrange access.  If we do not hear from you or there is no real reason that would stop the work going ahead at this time we will have no option but to follow our escalation process, up to and including forced entry, but we want to do everything we can to avoid this happening.  

Please help us to help you.  

Repairs Service Update

Moray Council’s non-emergency repairs service for housing tenants re-started from Monday 26 April.  This includes all planned maintenance programmes such as cyclical maintenance and upgrades to your home.  

Due to the previous restrictions we have a current backlog of outstanding work.  This will cause some ongoing delays within our repairs and maintenance services.  We ask for your patience.  Please bear with us while we do everything possible to address this current backlog and all incoming calls.   

All new non-emergency repairs can be reported from Monday 26 April by phoning our Contact Centre on 0300 123 4566 during office hours, 8.45am - 5pm.  Please note our Contact Centre can be very busy between 8:45am and 10am.  Where possible we would appreciate if your call can wait until after this time to avoid any unnecessary waiting time for you.  All repairs will be prioritised depending on the nature of the repair.

The health and safety of our tenants, their families, our staff and our contractors is our number one priority.  You can see our guidelines for visiting your home on our website at www.moray.gov.uk/moray_standard/page_133392.html.

We take the maintenance of our housing stock very seriously, and invest millions of pounds every year into making sure our houses  provide good quality, energy efficient homes.  We do this through our void letting standard, by making sure that homes continue to meet the Scottish Housing Quality Standard (SHQS) and by improving energy efficiency in order to meet the Energy Efficiency Standard for Social Housing (EESSH).  

During 2020/21 we will spend over £11 million on the upkeep and improvement of our homes.  This will include expenditure under our major cyclical and planned maintenance programmes as shown in the tables below.

Cyclical maintenance

This budget is mainly spent on the servicing of gas, coal, oil and air source heat pump installations, and a regular six-yearly programme of pre-paintwork repairs and external paintwork to properties.  During 2020/21 we will also be carrying out a major House Condition Survey to improve the level and quality of information that we hold on our properties and allow us to forward plan future work programmes.

Planned maintenance

This budget covers capital improvements and planned maintenance of our housing stock, including our current Energy Efficiency Standard for Social Housing (EESSH) programme which we must meet by December 2020.  A new standard, EESSH2 will be introduced from 2020 to 2030 and in order to meet this a programme of renewable heating systems is also being considered for 2020/21. 

The table below shows our overall planned maintenance budget for 2020/21.

We need to make sure that all our homes continue to meet the Scottish Housing Quality Standard (SHQS).  This is achieved by homes being compliant with the tolerable standard, free from serious disrepair, energy efficient, supplied with modern facilities and services and being healthy, safe and secure.

Since December 2020, social landlords are also required to meet the Energy Efficiency Standard for Social Housing (EESSH).  We have prepared a strategy to enable our stock, as far as practicable, to meet the requirements of this standard and have revised our budget to provide funding for increased energy efficiency and other related improvements.