Urgent works for Incoming & Lateral Mains Replacement in Council Housing

Since August 2025 the Council have been working in partnership with UK Power Networks (UKPN) to carry out proactive testing on the incoming and lateral electrical mains to our high-rise blocks where we don't currently have the ability to isolate the block supply to enable testing. This testing is in order to understand the state of the installations and plan a programme of works.

The proactive testing programme followed an earlier Strategic Overview Report on the condition of electrical intake services to high rise residential blocks. This visual inspection report has now been followed by a detailed condition survey of each site. This survey programme has taken significant time to be agreed with UKPN, whose support we require to isolate the electrical supply to the blocks to allow testing and inspection.

This proactive testing programme has identified significant urgent critical safety risks that concern the infrastructure to the electrical power supply rising and lateral mains at two high rise residential blocks in the City. These installations are at imminent risk of failure, which could leave many vulnerable residents without power. The condition and age of the installations is such that health and safety concerns also exist around fire and electric shock. Due to fire safety concerns, we have also had to ensure waking watches are in place at three of the blocks.

The Housing Repairs & Maintenance service has an urgent need to procure specialist electrical contractor/s to support our in-house team to undertake a programme of electrical rewiring/replacement works to ensure power can be sustained at the current high-risk properties and safety risks addressed. Owing to the urgent nature of these works the service wishes to mobilise contractor/s as early in January 2026 as possible. The contractor/s that we are currently in discussion with a view to progress this work have previously carried out this type of work (directly contracted OR subcontracted) on behalf of the Housing service and indicate they can mobilise from early January. Due to the urgency and severity of this we need to directly award a specialist contractor/s to undertake urgent upgrade and replacement works at these two high rise residential blocks.