The council has been installing new interconnected smoke and heat alarms to meet the new standard into its homes. All council houses will already have existing fire detection provision and that ongoing works are to extend provision to meet the new standards.

It said that compliance with the new legislation has been particularly challenging due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the government restrictions around safe working practices.

The recent Omicron wave has continued to impact on the programme and as a result of a large number of tenants isolating at this time, the council has had to delay installations where this was the scenario.

Contractors have also reported that their reduced capacity has delayed much of their work in recent weeks with some parts of Highland more affected than others by the impact of Omicron infection.

Despite this, in excess of 90% compliance has been achieved across Highland to date.

Councillor Laurie Fraser, chair of Highland Council’s Housing and Property Committee, said: “Highland Council is fully committed to bringing all our council houses up to the new standard within the next few weeks. The compliance level to date reflects the good progress made despite the challenges of delivering such a large programme of works at this time.”

The local authority added that the compliance percentage may be slightly higher than that recorded once the council has confirmation of contractor access for scheduled installations. As stated above, all houses will already be partially compliant and may only require one or two additional alarms to reach full compliance with the new standard.

Area teams have reported that of the non-compliant houses, over 97% of these will have had at least one scheduled access attempt prior to the compliance date. The vast majority of the non-compliant houses have had a minimum of two or three non-access appointments.

It should be noted that the council has scheduled entry to the remaining houses subject to permitted access from tenants. Non-access has been an issue across Scotland with local authorities reporting similar issues. Unfortunately, in these cases forced access arrangements will be required on a large number of homes in February, similar to the annual gas safety requirements.

Full details of compliance and cost will be reported to both the Scottish Housing Regulator and Housing and Property Committee at the end of the financial year.