Reading Borough Council remains landlord to roughly 7,000 council homes, many of them in blocks with shared stacks, and nobody manages drainage on that scale from memory. The same is true of the town’s other portfolios: Forbury Place groups three office blocks and around 600,000 sq ft of floorspace on Forbury Road, a short walk from the station, and the University of Reading’s Whiteknights campus covers 120 hectares and houses several halls of residence alongside its academic departments. A drainage maintenance contract is written for estates of that kind, where the asset list is too long to carry in anyone’s head.
What goes on the schedule at a Reading estate
The asset list is written from the premises, not from a template. For an office estate it runs to the stacks in each block, the washroom branches feeding them, the kitchen line behind any staff café, and the gullies and linear channels across car parks and service roads. A campus adds catering outlets and halls kitchens, long external runs through parkland, and surface-water drainage under mature trees. A retail park’s list, at a park like the one south of the centre, is dominated by the car park and service yard gullies its units share, plus the kitchen pipework of any food unit. A housing portfolio is mostly communal stacks, bin-store drainage and estate gullies.
Each item gets an interval set by how hard it works, and the camera goes through the main runs annually so that an opening joint is recorded as a measurement rather than discovered as a flood.
Visits timed to how Reading trades
A visit is placed wherever a site is quietest, and on a campus that means the vacations, when whole halls stand empty and the long external runs can be put through the camera without a student in sight. The slot is written into the schedule for each asset, so the estate knows a year ahead when the engineer will be on site.
The record every visit leaves
Each visit produces a report for the estate file: which runs were cleaned, what the camera showed on any line it was put through, and before-and-after photographs of every asset. Where silt, grease or debris leaves the premises, a Waste Transfer Note goes with it; TrueFlow Ltd carries waste under Upper Tier registration CBDU538687, so the note satisfies the estate’s duty of care. How an FM team reads that file is under offices and facilities management.
How the annual figure is reached
A Reading proposal reads like a schedule of rates. Every run, stack and gully group is listed with the published rate that applies to it, beside the number of visits it will receive in a year. The column adds up to the annual figure; divided back out, it gives a per-visit price for estates that budget that way. Both are fixed in writing ahead of signature, and the preliminary walk round the estate carries no charge. Every visit, planned or urgent, is insured and carries the 6-month guarantee; ad-hoc commercial work in the town is described on the commercial drainage in Reading page.
Reading contract FAQs
Can visits to a campus or school be timed for the vacations?
Yes, and for most of the asset list they should be. Jetting of halls kitchens, catering lines and washroom stacks is placed in the breaks when the buildings are empty, while external gullies are cleaned in autumn regardless of term dates, because leaf fall does not follow the academic calendar. The yearly camera survey is usually a vacation job too.
Can the reports be referenced to our own asset register?
Yes. If the estate already numbers its chambers, stacks and gullies, the same references are used in the schedule and in every report, so an entry in the drainage file matches an entry in the CAFM system without translation. Where none exists, the first inspection creates one.
Does a contract cover a retail park’s car park as well as the units’ foul drains?
It covers whichever the client is responsible for, and at a retail park that is usually both. The landlord’s agreement typically lists the shared car-park gullies, channel drains and service-yard drainage, while a food unit’s kitchen line and trap can sit on the same agreement or on the tenant’s own, depending on how the lease divides the demise.
Every asset, one agreement
Ring 0808 175 7440 with the estate’s postcode and a rough list of what stands on it, or request a callback. Houses and flats in Reading are under Reading.