Essential Services maintenance provider regulation is a area that authorities need to take a serious look at.
It’s our OC’s biggest annual maintenance expense. My advice for any OC is to do an audit yourself.
I did this. It’s complex and it took me a while. But this some of what I discovered:
- It is essentially an unregulated industry.
- Service providers need minimal training and mostly no qualifications.
- Most maintenance involves simple inspections and log keeping.
- Remote fire monitoring (via digital radio) is a near monopoly in Australia – only two companies provide it and they charge the same.
- Even the industry admits most standards are over specified, meaning that the maintenance frequency is more often than really needed.
- There is zero legal obligation for an OC to employ anyone to do Essential Services maintenance. The law says the owner must do it but it allows the owner to employ someone. So If the OC feels competent, it can do the ES maintenance itself. Of course, by employing a company(s) the OC meets its legal obligation.
I found the following for our OC:
- For the first 2 years our OC management did nothing. We had no Essential Services maintenance at all!
- The management then noticed and employed an ES auditor (A) to set up our Essential Services maintenance. The EC was not informed.
- The ES auditor (A) chose company (B) to do most of the maintenance. But for some reason a third company (C) was also employed to do some of the work that (B) was also doing.
- For the next 6 years both (B) and (C) did some of the same work and charged the OC. Neither the manager, nor (A), (B) or (C) noticed this – but (B) and (C) must have seen the on-site log books of the other company.
- Company (B) on their website states that they will ES auditor (A) work too. But when approached they said they no longer will do it and referred me back to (A).
So there’s no doubt there can be a ‘cosy’ relationship between OC managers, ES auditors and ES maintenance companies themselves. But whether this is anything illegal or not is another matter.
The EC went and got some quotes from another Essential Services maintenance company – but they turned out to be more expensive than our current providers.
In terms of the actual work performed Essential Services maintenance and monitoring is astonishingly poor value. Most of the work is quick and very simple (just inspections really). But it does need to be done! It just should not cost many thousands of dollars per year for almost no actual work.