Electric and M&E
Clear provides competent technical advice to landlords regarding their obligations under the Building Safety legislation.
Clear identified that the robust oversight of other compliance streams is often not present in work streams such as EICR cost control, powered door and gate entry maintenance and compliance. We believe we provide industry-leading advice and cost control in these areas, saving clients significant expenditure.
Impact on costs
Clear has undertaken some interesting work overseeing EICR regimes, bringing the average cost per property down by up to 40% whilst maintaining compliance rates. For one client the average cost per property of completing an Electrical Inspection Condition Report (EICR) was lowered from around £600 to £145, with no reduction in service or compliance rates.
Clear has also worked with Door & Gate Entry and Lifts & Lifting Equipment systems, helping to implement planned preventive maintenance whilst overseeing risk management.
Clear is accredited to undertake electrical design work in complex buildings. This has been an area of considerable concern with the advent of Electrical Vehicle charge points and the increased provision of renewable energy sources that can have profound effects on electrical design and loading levels.
Clear's portfolio of services includes:
- Competent technical advice from qualified Electrical Managers
- Oversight of contractor activities via desktop and/or quality assurance inspection regime
- Advising on best practice
- Representation within the larger elements of the landlords’ businesses (Housing Officers, Leaseholders)
- Incident investigation
- Specification provision
- Certificate review and validation
- IT support- working with compliance reporting systems. Defining reporting rules, bulk uploading of documentation, advising on administration
- Contractor management and cost control
Electrical safety inspections – our regime
Our inspection regime is fully integrated into our reporting software and outcomes from inspections are reported live, especially those identified as ‘Immediately Dangerous (ID)’, these are automatically notified to duty holders.
All our reports are openly available to clients and contractors to facilitate honest and open conversations around quality and working collaboratively.
We can benchmark multiple suppliers of service, as well as analysing individual engineers for training or quality gaps.
Our inspectors
Clear employs appropriate electrically qualified individuals to complete thorough quality assurance and investigative inspection regimes. All our inspectors have extensive experience with the issues around Social Housing, especially with regard to vulnerable residents and the skills required to provide the highest quality service to landlords.
Our administration team
Diary bookings and access rates are always a challenge in the Social Housing environment and our administration team is highly-skilled at making confirmed bookings at convenient times for working residents. We offer out-of-hours appointments, where requested, and having worked through COVID we have a strong understanding of the nuances of individual residents and what can be done to ensure we meet as many of the residents’ requests as is possible within the confines of our remit.
Our systems
Our industry-leading systems are accessible to all stakeholders.
- Our diary booking system includes SMS reminders and tracking of inspector progress.
- Our inspectors are provided with a lone working system which has alarm and notification functionality. In addition, the data capture audit system allows inspectors considerable flexibility to record situations on-site with the appropriate corroborating evidence.
- Our clients benefit from the inherent flexibility of our system which makes it possible to alter what we are recording and reporting, based on the clients’ needs. Therefore, if a client requests changes to the audit form, this can be immediately activated and be in place the next working day.
- The system for contractor works and cost control provides a complete audit trail of all decision-making, all finance commitments and the associated point of approval, complete forward and current budgetary control, as well as a fully auditable set of annual accounts for analysis (including spend patterns).
What makes Clear different?
We provide regular updates to our landlord clients ahead of planned changes in legislation and offer toolbox talks to their contractors to ensure best practice. For clients with larger housing portfolios, Clear provides representation within the wider elements of the landlord’s business and liaises with other key personnel such as Housing Officers, Leaseholders etc.
In addition, clients using Clear for guidance on electrical / M&E / lifts safety compliance can tap into our broader experience across a range of compliance streams, ensuring access to advice on a range of matters including: