COUNCIL TENANTS waiting for maintenance to be done on their homes could face a delay of up to two years according to council officers.

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Pembrokeshire County Council’s Housing team has prioritised emergency works and some tenants have become unhappy at the amount of time being taken.

Now, as the lockdown is being eased once again, the council are looking at clearing what has been described as a ‘huge backlog of maintenance’.

At Thursday’s Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee, councillors heard an update on housing building repairs and maintenance.

Peter Nicholas, Operations manager, said that once the floodgates open, it could be up to two years before they get on top of the backlog of work.

The council is looking at ways of improving this and will be looking to take on more contractors in the summer.

Cllr Michelle Bateman, Cabinet member for Housing, said that they hadn’t considered they would still be in the same position a year after the start of the pandemic and said its impact on housing had been ‘huge’.

She praised the housing team for their hard work in turning around a number of properties for use by homeless people and the building maintenance team for their work in getting schools ready.

The Council’s Chief Housing Officer, Gaynor Toft, said that there would be a ‘significant period of catch up’ and that they would not be able to respond to everybody as they would like. She pleaded with people who are waiting for work to be done to ‘be patient’ adding that they had a small number of staff who were taking on large volumes of work. Councillors shared their views on the work that had been carried out throughout the pandemic but Cllr Jonathan Preston said he had heard a couple of incidences where contractors had turned up to a house without PPE and said that one tenant was left feeling ‘quite intimidated’.

Cllr Tom Tudor called for a list to be done on work that had been carried out in different wards and said that some people felt they weren’t getting any feedback once they had reported an issue.

Cllr Bateman said the council was on a ‘digitisation journey’ which would make reporting much easier and provide feedback on issues.

She went on to say that a number of new builds in the county had been built with low cost maintenance in mind for the future so that the houses could be easily adaptable to people’s needs.

The council will be looking for people to help clear the backlog of work and Operations manager Peter Nicholas said that although they had taken 31 trades people in 2017, it was evident that they were ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’.

He added that they would be changing their strategy on their tendering process and categorising works which would hopefully attract some of the smaller contractors in the county.

The council has also signed up to the shared apprentice scheme which would help apprentices get the experience they need and Peter added that as they had contact with them in their early years as a tradesperson, they could potentially take them on in future.

Peter was also asked about the backlog and he said that once a call had come in they would assess its urgency but added that a work which may not have been an emergency at the start could have become one which meant that would have been dealt with also.He described the non-urgent work as a ‘big unknown’ but said that items were being looked at regularly.

The council would normally deal with 10-12,000 emergencies in a year but in the last year that had gone up 16,000.Advertisements calling for contractors will be going out in June and July this year and officers are hopeful that more people will be encouraged to get involved. Cllr Michelle Bateman said there would be an element of managing expectations in the next year but said they needed to be honest with tenants about where they are and have open and clear communications. She added they did not want to over promise for fear of leaving some people feeling let down.

Councillors received the report while Cllr Tudor proposed that a letter of thanks be sent to all the housing and maintenance teams fortheir work during the pandemic.