Guinness Housing Partnership - Asbestos Services

The Guinness Partnership is a housing provider with over 125 years’ experience in building and managing properties. Their stock contains over 65,000 homes across England, ranging across rural and city areas and including domestic and non-domestic properties.

Pennington Choices were awarded an Asbestos Surveying and Consultancy Services contract for 3 years, with the option to extend for a further 2 years. We were contracted to undertake all required asbestos management, refurbishment and demolition surveys, re-inspection surveys, site analytical services and update the clients Asbestos Register. This includes the mentoring and training of Guinness in-house surveyors who undertake re-inspections to elements of their estate and delivery of a variety of asbestos training programmes to many of Guinness staff.

The Challenge

As Guinness own a significant number of homes nationwide, the major challenge was delivering our services in an effective schedule across the country. Our expert Planning and Scheduling team are experienced in working around geographical challenges on large jobs, and were able to mobilise resources in all areas of the UK to meet the contract demands. As our site-based team of over 50 surveyors and analysts grows, we are becoming more flexible in our resources and in turn are able to meet any spike in demand, particularly in the planned work streams.

What We Did

Pennington Choices have established a good relationship with Guinness Housing Partnership, having successfully completed a detailed mobilisation that was essential to the success on a contract of this size. Our fully dedicated project team ensure that the contract is delivered effectively and swiftly throughout the UK. We were contracted to provide: 24/7 repairs A three-day turnaround on asbestos surveys from instruction to report delivery Delivery of extensive planned programmes Yearly re-inspections of communal areas to ensure compliance Mentoring & Training for Guinness Asbestos Management Team and their in-house surveying team. Data development -working closely with Guinness in the development and implementation of their changeover from Promaster to Keystone asset management system Auditing of asbestos removal contractors during non-licensed work Asbestos Abatement Management for licensed work including Certificates of re-occupation

Our Achievements

Management of data is critical in meeting legislative requirements. As part of our mobilisation, we worked closely with Guinness Housing Partnership to assist in the successful migration of their asset management system from Promaster to Keystone. To supplement this, we have developed a fully automated mapping process from our in-house TEAMS (The Electronic Asbestos Management System) software to Keystone.

Our training team have worked closely with Guinness Housing Partnership to develop a bespoke two-day training course for their asbestos management team. Often, businesses rely on 100% classroom training for their management staff, however we believe it is beneficial to compliment this with practical training, in which the team shadow our in-house surveyors for site based experience.

We also work with Hackney Way, a project run by the charity Mancunian Way and owned by The Guinness Partnership. The multi-award winning charity supports projects to tackle social issues that young people face and empower them to make positive choices by bringing communities together.

The Hackney Way project offers local young people a more structured and competitive experience of 5-aside football in the Hackney area. The funding we have provided is used to purchase football tops, trophies, balls and wages for staff for weekend matches with other football teams. The football team have recently played their first competitive game of the season.