Keys and fobs for Lidcombe buildings and who authorised the contractor

Ask most schemes who holds access to their building and the answer is a list of guesses. Contractors have come and gone, fobs have been issued by successive managers, and the system may never have been audited. That is uncomfortable in an ordinary building and considerably more so in one with tenancies holding sensitive material. The absence of a register is rarely deliberate and always inconvenient.

Keeping a simple register costs nothing. Who holds what, which areas it opens, who authorised it and when. It is the sort of document that seems unnecessary right up to the moment a committee has to answer a question about it, at which point its absence becomes the whole story. Building it into the cleaning arrangement gives the scheme at least one accurate entry. One accurate entry is a better starting point than none at all.

A contractor should hold access only to the areas it is engaged to service. In practice buildings often issue a master because it is simpler, which gives a cleaning crew the ability to enter plant rooms, storage areas and sometimes tenancies that have nothing to do with their scope. Nobody intends that; it is a convenience decision made without much thought. Convenience at the point of issue becomes a question nobody can answer years later.

The better arrangement is to issue only what the scope requires and to state in writing what that covers. It is easier to administer than it sounds and it removes a category of risk entirely. Clean Best does not seek access beyond the scoped areas and states in the proposal exactly what is required to deliver the work. Restricted access is also easier for a crew to work with than a master they must be careful about.

Access is issued carefully and returned casually. A contractor finishes, the last invoice is paid, and nobody follows up on the fob. Where the building has an electronic system, deactivation is straightforward if somebody remembers to do it. Where it has keys, the scheme has no way of knowing whether copies were ever made. Keys in particular leave a scheme with no way of closing the question properly.

Building the return into the arrangement rather than treating it as an afterthought closes it properly. Confirmation in writing that media were returned or deactivated, on a stated date, gives the scheme a clean record. Clean Best provides that confirmation as a matter of course, because an open question about building access is not something either party benefits from leaving unresolved. A dated confirmation is what allows a committee to close the item.