The Repairs and Maintenance department provides a dedicated gas servicing team linking up with the Repairs Help Desk and the current gas contractor to provide both a responsive repairs service and a planned gas appliance inspection program.  This gas servicing team includes very experienced technical personnel whose experience extends upto over 30 years in the industry.

The responsive gas service operates 24 hours a day 365 days a year, providing an emergency call out service outside of normal working hours. 

The team oversees the service to approximately 7500 homes in the borough.  The contractor completing this work is one of the larger gas contractors in the region, using engineers who are fully competent gas engineers with significant experience of working for social housing providers.

The team also oversee the required Annual Landlord’s Gas Safety Inspections.

It is essential that the gas appliances in your home be inspected every 12 months to ensure they are safe to use.  A gas appliance that has not been checked and is operating dangerously can present a serious risk in extreme circumstances this can be fatal.

Remember: In this time of increasing fuel prices, a gas appliance working safely and correctly will be cheaper to operate.

Six Town Housing has a legal requirement to inspect the gas appliances every year, to ensure this we start the inspection process for each tenancy every ten months.  This means we need to gain access to your property to carry out a safety check of the gas appliances; this legal requirement will not go away.

Access Procedure

In the region of 95% of our tenants co-operate with our gas contractor during the early part of the access procedure to complete the gas inspection required.  However, some are not as co-operative, and as such, we have a procedure we have to follow to gain access.

Step 1 – 10 weeks before your certificate expires
We will contact you by letter about 2 weeks before the date we are going attend; this will allow you to contact the gas contractor to make an appointment at a time to suit you.  Normally the engineer will leave a card upto 2 days before to let you know when he will be calling. If you do not make an appointment, the engineer will still call.

Step 2 – 8 weeks before your certificate expires
If you are not in when the gas engineer calls, he will leave a card stating he has called and remind you of where to contact to make an appointment.

Step 3 – 7 weeks before your certificate expires
The engineer will then attend a second time, if you are not in a second time the engineer will leave another card reminding you of the contact details.  If you are not in on the second occasion, Six Town Housing will write to you a couple of days later to remind you of the need to make an appointment.

Step 4 – 6 weeks before your certificate expires
If we have not received a response from either of the two visits by the gas engineer, or the reminder letter from Six Town Housing.  Approximately a week later a final reminder letter will be delivered reminding you of the need to make contact and arrange an appointment.

Step 5 – 4 weeks before your certificate expires
If we do not receive a response from this letter and the gas contractor has not been allowed entry to carry out the gas inspection we will notify you officially we will be taking legal action to gain entry to your property and you will be charged for this.