Safety and Access Ltd has won a £74,000 contract to carry out statutory scaffold inspections across Hackney Council’s housing stock.
The council’s contracts register recorded the award on 9 November 2026. The work is scheduled to run from 23 November 2026 to 4 April 2027.
It’s the company’s second scaffold inspection award from Hackney this autumn. A £46,800 contract, awarded on 1 October, covers 21 September to 20 November 2026. So the new deal picks up almost exactly where the first one ends.
What the work covers
The contract covers routine inspections and checks after bad weather or significant alterations. It also covers scaffold sign-off, compliance records, defect reporting and follow-up inspections once faults are put right.
Hackney says the service is there to keep its scaffolds compliant with the Work at Height Regulations 2005 and NASC’s TG20:21 guidance.
Why Hackney is buying in inspections
The awards follow a long-running gap in how the council handles scaffold inspections on its homes.
Papers that went to Hackney’s Cabinet Procurement and Insourcing Committee in April 2025 said inspections weren’t part of the council’s previous scaffolding contract. Officers flagged that as a health and safety risk in 2022.
Since then, staff from the council’s in-house direct labour organisation (DLO) have done the checks as evening and weekend overtime. The papers warned this left the council at risk of missing its legal duty to inspect every seven days. Demand has peaked at around 130 inspections a week.
The committee approved a £1.7m-a-year scaffolding and roofing lot. It deferred a separate inspection lot, worth about £250,000 a year, while officers looked at bringing the work in-house.
The register entries don’t say whether the two Safety and Access awards are interim cover while that decision is made.
