Newport City Homes – “Walk Up Flats” December 2021

Newport City Homes (NCH) and Riskmonitor have worked together for over 10 years. NCH have a very proactive and experienced Fire Safety Team that pride themselves on putting residents at the heart of what they do, and they are a joy to partner and work alongside.

NCH has over 10,000 properties across Newport and the largest provider of social housing in the city and continually invest in their homes and services to their residents.

Riskmonitor’s assessors carry out filed based Fire Risk Assessments (FRA’s) across the entire portfolio with all reports and any remedial actions managed by NCH via Riskmonitor’s RAMIS compliance management software.

It became clear that after the FSA 2021 was brought into effect by the Welsh Assembly Government in October 2021 that it would have a huge impact on all Housing Associations and Local Authorities that managed a diverse portfolio of housing stock. As is always the case, NCH were keen to embrace the change and get ahead of the curve and the dynamic of our partnership kicked into overdrive.

NCH quickly identified 291 “walk up flats” that would require a unique type of external assessment to ensure the safety of the tenant and the compliance of the buildings to the Act.

The new assessment would be unique to this type of property and a normal FRA would not be fit for purpose so the Fire Safety Team at Riskmonitor got to work.

A new type of assessment, with a bespoke question set, that would ensure a robust, suitable, and sufficient, assessment could be carried out by our assessors in the field. It would have to factor in many facets including property structure, access and escape routes, cladding, balconies and even windows and facias would need to be reported on.

In little over a week, which contained many planning meetings and over 25 versions of the assessment, Riskmonitor’s in-house Development Team were able to build the question set and mobilise it for the field assessors to use on their tablets and mobile devices whilst physically visiting each property. They would complete assessments and be able to add photographic evidence of findings directly into the mobile enabled assessment “live, as they were at the property. This gave everyone visibility, accuracy, and speed. Most of all it allowed for consistency across the entire portfolio.

The results were incredible.

Each property has been comprehensively assessed by our experienced assessors.

A bespoke report has been published for each property based on the assessors visit and findings.

Remedial actions, if any, are outlined in the report but because NCH is a RAMIS customer, and the designed integration between the mobile assessment and RAMIS these reports, and remedial actions are visible and managed by NCH via RAMIS.

Each of the 291 properties were visited, reports completed and fully published within 3 weeks.

All the above resulted in NCH achieving 100% Fire Safety Compliance across all their entire housing portfolio and we recognised as such by the Welsh Housing Association. This is a testimony to their proactive, positive, and diligent approach to Fire Safety.

You can find out more about NCH at https://www.linkedin.com/company/newport-city-homes/

If you would like to learn more about Riskmonitor, get some advice and speak to someone about your portfolio then click here.