Questions of design at odi sub landboard offices

Sandy Grant | Monday February 24, 2014 15:46

The Board meeting room was spacious and airy and, for once, vinyl tiles had been used throughout the building instead of the usual ceramic tiles.

The clinching argument in favour of vinyl tiles is that they can take hard wear, and even when cracked and damaged can still appear reasonably okay whereas cracked and damaged ceramic tiles invariably look grotty in the extreme. On the other hand, it was surprising to see that numbers of tiles had already fallen off the kitchen wall and that staff had been obliged to place filing cabinets in the narrow passage which gives access to their offices.

 In the years to come the number of these cabinets is bound to increase so that sooner or later access to their offices will be blocked – that is unless nowhere else is provided for them.  It’s a very odd scenario which can only happen if a standard design continues to be used despite its obvious and presumably well recognised flaws. 

The failure to provide a suitably sized room to accommodate a large number of filing cabinets should have been recognised long ago as one such flaw. Yet the new Odi sub landboard building demonstrates that no such flaw was ever recognised by DABS and no corrective measures were therefore taken.

I must admit that other concerns about design continue to worry me every time BTV news covers the presentation of a brand new house to some horribly impoverished, and not infrequently, aged individual. I look at the houses and wonder how much thought has been given to their design. They appear to be the sort of two and a halfs that are to be found everywhere – two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and living room with nothing to indicate that the needs of the ultra poor are likely to be any different to the rest of us. 

But can this be the case?   How do people who have lived in a hovel all their lives use a suburban type house when they shift from the one to the other? Has anyone bothered to find out? Do they use it as they previously used their now replaced shack, as a place to sleep?  What use are they likely to make of a living room either with or without furniture when they would be used to sitting outside on the ground?

 What would they have to do with a kitchen when they only ever cooked outside? And as for the bathroom, with its toilet, washbasin and bathtub which is unusable by the old and infirm – we can only surmise! And if they had lived their lives outside, what use would they have for an interior door?

If anyone has bothered to find out the answers to such questions, adjustments would surely have been made to the original design.

But there are other questions which bother me.  Those of us who have the luck to own our own houses must constantly battle with maintenance problems resulting from poor workmanship, the use of the wrong materials, or simply the need to replace breakages or fix something that is no longer working properly.

 Obviously people who are totally destitute and probably in poor health cannot be expected to meet such needs – so who does?

Who is responsible for the maintenance of these destitute houses once they have ben handed over?

Who is supposed to check and report that a drainage system is hopelessly blocked and the kitchen and bathroom are unusable, that the front door no longer shut properly, that the lock is broken and the keys lost, that many of the windows are broken and need to be replaced and that the recent rain damaged the ceiling, flooded the house and made a mess of the floors.

It may be that I am over doing matters – but these are the sort of problems that are familiar to all house owners – and there is no reason to believe that destitute housing is exempt from them. 

But how can any of us know because it is only the official presentation of the house that is reported and shown – not the impact that such houses have had, or not had, on the lives of those to whom they are presented.

Would it come as a total surprise to find that some of those recipients have subsequently moved back to their shacks – or perhaps never stopped using them - making only occasional and limited use of the house that was presented to them?   Surely in a programme as large and as important as this one, follow up arrangements would have been made so that, in the light of experience, errors of one kind or another could have been corrected?