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Saltire Facilities Management Ltd (Saltire) a joint venture between ALHCO and North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) was formed in 2001 to deliver domestic heating and solid fuel services to more than 40,000 tenants of NLC.
Initially Saltire focused on improving the delivery of service that it inherited, to NLC. For example, by setting a requirement for direct customer contact with the joint venture, Saltire responded by creating a permanently manned call centre at its head office in Airdrie. The 24hours a day, 365 days per year call centre handles all of the calls to manage a reactive repair service, annual appliance servicing and minor works.
NLC as the social housing landlord has a number of responsibilities with regards to gas as set out in The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations. In short, this legislation makes it the duty of the landlord to ensure that all gas appliances provided within accommodation and all installation pipe work within the premises are maintained in a safe condition to prevent risk of injury to any person.
Landlords have a duty imposed upon them by this legislation to have all gas appliance installations and pipe work inspected and checked for safety at least every 12 months by a Gas Safe Registered engineer. Records detailing these inspections must be made available at all times for examination by the tenants. Countrywide this is a large obligation for social housing landlords as in 2002 there were 25.6 million homes in the UK with more than 5 million described as social housing – of these just fewer than 3.5 million were owned by local authorities and a further 1.7 million owned by Registered Social Landlords (RSL).
North Lanarkshire Council Deputy Leader, Councillor Jim Smith, said about the NLC Public Private Partnerships: "Each of the partnership companies are either achieving or exceeding both the operational and the financial targets determined when the companies were established, which is terrific news for everyone involved. The fact that these improvements can be seen year-on-year shows that this is not just a flash in the pan – these companies are here to stay, providing a quality, cost-effective service to the residents of North Lanarkshire for now and the years ahead”.
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