Safe and secure

UAP has worked with door manufacturer, Shelforce, to provide secure doors for 31,000 social housing properties.

The Decent Homes standard is designed to ensure that the homes of social housing tenants are well maintained and safe. Social housing landlords not only have this duty of care, but also need to manage their assets over an extended service life, maximising the availability of homes that are in high demand.

For Birmingham City Council, this manifests as a continuous capital works programme for more than 60,000 properties, which are maintained and refurbished on a regular basis. Construction company, Wates, is responsible for capital and property improvement works and responsive repairs for more than half of these properties, along with refurbishments of void homes in the east and west quadrants of the city.

The £430m contract is the largest housing maintenance contract in Europe, and Wates works with door manufacturer, Shelforce, and UAP, the specialist in locks and hardware for doors and windows, to provide secure doors across the portfolio of 31,000 homes.

More secure 

Birmingham City Council properties range from bungalows to tower blocks, where fire doors are required to slow the spread of fire and smoke from common areas into individual homes and vice versa.

All door replacements involve FD30-rated fire doors, featuring fire-rated TS008 Soterian letterplates, Duo stainless steel door handles and spyholes from UAP. The latest tranche of door installations involves 2,000 Fireshel doors from Shelforce, fitted with a full set of UAP hardware.

The performance of the door hardware is critical to the safety and security performance of the whole door, so it is vital that UAP and Shelforce work collaboratively on specification and testing of the completed doorset.

Approved Document Q: Security, Dwellings in 2015, requires doors to achieve PAS 24 certification. Composite fire doors, such as those installed at the homes in Birmingham, must also be tested as part of a complete door configuration, including all hardware, so UAP provides technical assistance throughout the specification and testing process to ensure that hardware is correctly installed, supporting first-time passing of the mandatory tests.

In addition to offering excellent fire safety, aligned to the fire rating of the FD30-rated doors, the TS008 Soterian letterplates provided by UAP also provide excellent security and aesthetics. UAP has designed them with a pivoting stay mechanism, which reduces the internal flap projection to just 35mm from the door surface, giving a less intrusive feel to the door. This enables the door to open fully without the risk of any damage to the interior wall.

Enabling the door to open fully also plays a role in ensuring the properties comply with Equality Act regulations for disabled access. The Duo door handles supplied by UAP for installation on each door are also Equality Act compliant and have been designed with a tube-shaped handle for a comfortable grip when operating. With a 243mm long backplate, these handles provide a robust, high-quality solution for entrance doors and UAP provides them with a lifetime guarantee.

Julian Roberts, technical services director at UAP, commented: “In social housing environments, durability and service life are particularly important because the goal is to maximise tenant comfort, extend the service life of the property and reduce maintenance demand and costs. All the products we have been supplying to Shelforce fit those criteria.”

The other key factor for the door hardware is safety – UAP’s spy holes are Secured by Design certified.

Specification support

The door replacement programme is ongoing and so too is the collaboration between UAP and Shelforce.

Howard Trotter, business manager at Shelforce, commented: “We have worked with UAP for just over a year and they have been fantastic.

“From a specification point of view, UAP listen to what we want and then try and match it. Specification is never a problem, and they provide clever choices that are both aesthetically pleasing and practical.”