The amount of time taken to carry out emergency repairs in Dundee council homes has been branded “concerning” and “not acceptable”.
The average time taken to carry out repairs on issues that may cause a risk to tenants, the public or the environment sits at almost nine hours for the last financial year.
This is more than double the average across Scottish councils, which sits at four hours, and longer than the council’s own website which states issues should be attended to within six hours.
Repairs are split between three categories: non-emergency, urgent, and emergency.
Issues falling into the emergency bracket include burst pipes, loss of electricity and unsecured properties.
Labour councillor Brian Gordon said he expects an immediate improvement on the figure.
He said: “This is not acceptable — emergency repairs are what it says on the tin. The clue is in the name.
“It’s not good enough for people to have to wait this long to have important repairs such as burst pipes fixed.
“They should be striving to fix these more quickly. At this time of the year as well, you’d hope anything that affects heating is fixed immediately.”
Liberal Democrat councillor Craig Duncan added: “On the face of it, it’s certainly concerning.
“I am going to ask the question of the council as to why this is happening.
“Maybe we have a massively high number of call-outs or perhaps it is insufficient resources.”
The figures were published by the volunteer group Dundee Area Scrutiny Panel which looks at the performance of housing services independently from the council.
The report also states 85.8% of reactive repairs were completed “right first time”.
This is lower than the average of 92.2% across Scottish councils.
However, the council’s average time of 4.1 days to complete non-emergency repairs betters the national figure of 6.4 days.
Kevin Cordell convener of Dundee City Council’s neighbourhood services committee said the report highlights a number of other areas which are better than the national average.
He said: “Recording and then reporting our performance to tenants and other stakeholders is a vital part of understanding and improving the areas where we could be doing better.
“We always make efforts to improve the service we give to our tenants and that will continue.
“But it is interesting to note that the focus is being put on areas where we are making improvements like the time taken to make emergency repairs, rather than the areas where our performance is already considerably better than the Scottish average, for example in the time taken for non-emergency repairs, time taken to complete applications for medical adaptations and the number of houses that meet the Scottish Housing Quality Standard.”
