Cork City Council paid €10k for report it ignored

Cork City Council paid almost €10,000 for a year-old report it has yet to act upon, the Irish Examiner has learned.

The ‘walk-through audit’ of the council’s housing maintenance operations was completed last September but its contents only emerged this week.

The scathing 55-page report highlighted several areas of concern and recommended a raft of changes to policies, procedures, management structures and work practices.

But furious councillors said the report, its findings and recommendations, had never been brought to their attention.

Sinn Féin Cllr Thomas Gould, who chairs the council’s functional housing committee, led criticism of senior city officials, accusing them of effectively “sitting on” the report for year.

In a statement, a spokesperson for City Hall said the report cost City Hall €9,741.60, and was delivered to officials in October 2013.

“The report has not been published to date as it was intended that the report would be used for internal management purposes only,” the spokesperson said.

“Initiatives as to how internal processes and service delivery might be improved are being considered.”

The report found the main problem with the council’s housing maintenance operations 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. It also found that:

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

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

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

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

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

- the repair depots are in need of significant upgrade;

- the 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;

- and a 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 plans to raise the issue with city officials at next Monday’s first full council meeting since the summer break.