SYSTEM TO COLLATE FEEDBACK FROM TOWN COUNCILS ON MAINTENANCE CREWS’ WORK ON LIFTS AT HDB BLOCKS

I filed a PQ suggesting that MND/ HDB consider putting in place a system to collate feedback from Town Councils on the quality of maintenance crews’ work on lifts at HDB blocks installed and maintained by lift contractors under HDB contracts. The idea is to incorporate this input in determining whether these lift contractors should be issued with contracts for supply and installation of new lifts in the future. Minister Desmond Lee, in his reply, highlighted that HDB lifts are monitored by the Tele-Monitoring System and the number of faults captured by the TMS is a good proxy for the standard of maintenance crews’ work. In my respectful view, a qualitative assessment may still be useful principally because the TMS concentrates more on safety features. It does not capture faults in ventilation systems, in-car buttons and lift display panels. Also, intermittent faults leading to down time of less than 60 seconds are also not recorded by TMS. Town Councils will be able to give valuable inputs such as responsiveness and productivity of maintenance crews, whether the crew is keeping a ready supply of lift spare parts, etc. My PQ and the Minister’s response may be accessed below.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Mr Murali Pillai asked the Minister for National Development (a) whether HDB has in place a system to collate feedback from Town Councils on the quality of maintenance crews’ work on lifts at HDB blocks installed and maintained by lift contractors under HDB contracts; and (b) whether such inputs are used by HDB to gauge the suitability of lift contractors to be issued contracts for installation of lifts for future HDB projects to ensure a high standard of maintenance of installed lifts during their lifecycles.

Mr Desmond Lee: All lifts in the Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates are monitored by the Tele-Monitoring System (TMS) which collects data from lifts and alerts the lift contractors in the event of a fault or breakdown. The quality of the lift maintenance crews’ work is reflected in the lift fault rate, which is computed based on the number of faults captured in the TMS and user-reported faults. Lower quality maintenance works would result in higher lift fault rates.

In HDB’s tenders for supply and installation of new lifts, the lift fault rate is one of the evaluation criteria. Tenderers with a higher lift fault rate will be given a lower score during the evaluation. Lift maintenance contracts in tenders also have built-in levers to ensure quality maintenance of installed lifts by lift maintenance contractors.