Efforts to bring Norwich's council homes up to scratch after years of missed checks is progressing well, council chiefs have said.
Last year, Norwich City Council revealed a failure of oversight had resulted in missed electrical safety checks at nearly 900 homes, some of which should have been carried out at least five years ago.
In addition, water supplies in up to 500 homes may have missed vital checks for legionella, a germ that can cause lethal illnesses.
On Wednesday evening, Norwich City Council's cabinet heard an update on the progress of tackling the backlog of checks and repairs.
Vivien Knibbs, the interim housing operation director, said officers have focused on "immediate action" and fire risk assessments for all high-rise residential buildings have now been carried out.
Extra contractors are being brought in, with Ms Knibbs saying extra electrical testing workers will be onboard from March. While water hygiene testing and specialist asbestos contractors start this month.
Norwich City Council is the landlord for around 14,500 council homes and owns the freehold for a further 3,000 leaseholders.
From April, the authority will also be bringing management of repairs back inhouse, after their contract with Norse - a county council company who had been paid to carry out the checks - comes to an end.
Earlier this month it was revealed the city council has set aside £3.8m to cover the backlog of repairs.
Lucy Galvin, leader of the Green group at City Hall asked if officers will be looking into how and why the backlog happened.
She said: “It’s obviously extremely costly to the council.
“Is there a strand within this report that looks at how this came about so it can’t happen again?”
Alan Waters, the leader of Norwich City Council said that had been discussed “exhaustively” and they needed to be “forward-looking not backwards-looking”.
He said: “Because we understood what needed to be done and what went wrong all the energy and efforts actually go into achieving compliance against the timetable we have set down.
“Our priority is ensuring our tenants get the compliance upgrades as speedily as possible rather than delving back into a history.”
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