Restoration giant responds to Pitt review.
Mark Taylor, general manager, Homeserve Chem-Dry has commented on the Pitt review and outlined the need for local strategies and local councils to be involved in the overall plan to protect against flood risk.
“We don’t believe Pitt adequately recognises the importance of local strategies over a national plan to oversee all flood risk.” Instead, he proposed collaboration between local authorities and flood restoration companies to benefit from the companies’ expertise to plan for incidents and assist with training council personnel.
Discussing the practice of counsils self-insuring properties, he said: “they use inexperienced maintenance teams who are not accustomed to dealing with major flood incidents.” He identified lack of expertise and equipment as problems that they face in dealing with such situations.
Homeserve has been included on the Emergency Planning Committee of Hull City Council and with its insurance partners dealt with 32,500 claims during the 2007 floods.
Taylor commented: “The flooding of 2007 also highlighted other industry problems such as the abandonment of the supply chain in a crisis situation. Last year this led to a breakdown of quality and cost control measures which were then exacerbated by market forces, resulting in spiralling costs. Intra-supplier Service Level Agreements would help alleviate this problem.”
A major problem with flooding incidents is the restoration of properties “like for like” without consideration for increasing its property flood resistance to protect against future episodes.
