Construction union UCATT has warned that Government plans to give social housing tenants responsibility for repairs to their homes, could increase the risk of people being exposed to asbestos and is a recipe for spiralling costs and poorer maintenance work.

The Conservative-led Government are proposing that tenants should be given responsibility for conducting routine maintenance on their homes. This would be conducted through a "tenants cashback" scheme, where the tenants would be paid for undertaking the work themselves or by them paying a local builder and keeping the savings.

However UCATT fears that the proposals could lead to tenants inadvertently exposing themselves to asbestos, which is contained in their homes. In the report As Safe as Houses? by Linda Waldman and Heather Williams, written for UCATT in 2009, the authors found major defects with the way that asbestos was managed within the homes of social housing tenants.

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Currently, social landlords do not have a duty to manage asbestos within the internal part of properties, although they do in communal areas such as stairwells. The report also strongly recommended that social landlords should by law maintain an asbestos register for all properties. The register should include information on whether asbestos had been found, whether asbestos had been removed or damaged and whether it had been professionally removed.

Without access to this information under the Government's proposed scheme tenants could easily disturb asbestos, without even being aware that they were potentially risking their health.

George Guy, Acting General Secretary of UCATT, said: "Of course tenants want to take pride in and improve their homes but this needs to be conducted in a safe environment. Currently, many tenants do not know whether their homes contain asbestos and until these dangers are resolved it would be entirely inappropriate to force them to conduct their own repairs."

UCATT are also highly concerned that the proposals to encourage local builders to undertake work currently done by highly skilled directly employed social housing maintenance workers, could be a recipe for cowboy practices.

There is a genuine concern that builders will use cover-pricing practices to artificially boost the cost of work, which will actually increase the cost of maintenance and repairs being undertaken. Alternatively, tenants could opt for the lowest price regardless of the quality of the work in order to gain a cash windfall. If workers lacking the appropriate training undertook poor quality repairs, homes could fall into long term decay, resulting in much higher future maintenance costs.

(CD/KMcA)