City Hall ‘sitting on’ scathing report

Senior officials in Cork City Council have been accused of sitting on a scathing report on the council’s housing maintenance department for almost a year.

The ‘walkthrough audit’ was commissioned by City Hall last year, and presented to officials in September 2013.

However, Sinn Féin Cllr Thomas Gould, who chairs the council’s functional housing committee, said it has never been brought to councillors’ attention.

“We want to know why it wasn’t published and given to councillors,” he said.

“It contains several recommendations and we want to know if they have been acted upon. This report was paid for by taxpayers and we should see it.”

The Irish Examiner has seen a copy of the year-old report which highlights several areas of concern and recommends several changes to policies, procedures, management structures and work practices.

It says the main problem is that “no real budget” for repair and maintenance “has ever existed”.

“The process of identifying a budget is based on historic spend only. This is a flawed approach,” the report read. Other findings include:

na functioning senior management team hasn’t been in place in the directorate since February 2012;

nthe top two management layers have been dealing with direct management issues to the detriment of planning, organising and controlling of work;

nthe management structure is “cumbersome and unwieldy” and would benefit from rationalisation;

nthe call-handling service is inadequate; with only half of all calls from the public being answered by staff — the rest go to voicemail;

nthe call-handling and admin system is overstretched; staff are overworked and council tenants are suffering from the deterioration in service;

nthe repair depots are in need of significant upgrade;

nthe repairs system needs to be standardised across the city, a repair prioritising system needs to be overhauled, and repair target times must be set and monitored;

na system should be developed to record materials used in repairs and match them against budgets

The report said consideration should be given to sharing the burden of repairing long-term vacant housing stock with the voluntary housing movement, and to the outsourcing of the call-answering service.

It also suggests a series of changes which could deliver “short-term wins”, including a review of the practice of staff taking council vehicles home.

Mr Gould said there are genuine hardworking staff in the department but staff cuts, the recruitment embargo, and government cuts means they just can’t do the work that needs to be done.

He described recent government funding to repair around 180 vacant homes as a “drop in the ocean”.

“The council needs major investment,” he said.

City Hall said it would respond to the issues today.