Douglas Council has to ’get back to reality’ and serve its tenants, according to its own leader, David Christian.

Mr Christian launched into an astonishing, impassioned speech as he demanded answers over a lack of progress in fixing insulation in council-owned houses.

The issues with insulation in council houses was one Mr Christian first raised in 2016 and he pulled no punches in detailing his anger at a lack of progress since then.

He told chairman of the council’s housing committee, Councillor Claire Wells: ’Either I’m being made to look a fool, or the housing department isn’t doing its job.’

Mr Christian said that some reports show that up to 95% of houses have issues with insulation and that ’very little’ has been done to resolve it.

He added: ’Now we have our tenants being told that we’ll do it with the capital programme. It’s absolutely ridiculous.’

He also told members that the work that has been done was ’minor’ and ’only scraping the surface’.

Mr Christian asked Mrs Wells if asbestos surveys were included in the void refurbishment framework contract awarded to Maclo Construction Ltd. However, he then said the council was ’obsessed’ with asbestos surveys.

And said: ’Our staff are in our properties every day. Why can’t we get them to have a quick look at the insulation?

’Surely we don’t need an asbestos survey for everything?

’It is nonsense and either the chairman is being fed nonsense or she believes it.

’We have done nothing about poor loft insulation.’

Mr Christian told members that he had spoken to and visited the homes of tenants and has seen for himself problems with inadequate insulation.

He also suggested that the council had ’too many officers and not enough people in work up ladders’.

’Let’s get back to reality and look after our tenants,’ he added.

The long-standing council leader also told Mrs Wells he wanted answers to his questions by next month and queried why the housing director hadn’t been in the council chamber to assist her during March’s sitting.

Mr Christian added that if he wasn’t satisfied that the answers he was being given would lead to progress by the time the council confirmed its new mayor in a couple of months’ time, he would raise the further issues then.

In response, Mrs Wells said there was nothing stopping staff having a look at insulation but that workers had to be wary of asbestos.

She then turned the blame away from the committee to the Department of Infrastructure.

Mrs Wells added: ’I can’t stress enough it is not through a lack of want of trying. Our hands are tied by officers up the road.’

She told Mr Christian that if the DoI let the council use more than the 25% of rental income it allowed for maintenance then the housing department could do more.

Mrs Wells continued: ’We don’t have the staff to put a project together for insulation.

’And Mr Christian is not the only one who gets phone calls. But we are restrained in what we can do.’

She also noted that many of the problems the housing committee and department are dealing with are ’historical problems’ which have not been fixed.

And she insisted the housing department is ’learning from its mistakes’.

Mr Christian accepted that the council has issues with the DoI and that it affected the council’s ability to get work done. But he added that it would take years to fix problems at the current rate of work being done and warned it would leave tenants ’having to just live with it’.