Plant and switch rooms in Mount Kuring-gai estates a cleaner should not enter

Committees reading a cleaning scope naturally assume that anything not excluded is included. That assumption is harmless for a corridor and consequential for a switch room. Where a scope says nothing at all, an owner walking past an untidy plant room concludes the contractor is not doing the job, when in fact the area was never within anyone's arrangement. The contractor then has no way of correcting an impression they never created.

Writing exclusions explicitly costs nothing and prevents that entirely. It also does something more useful: it prompts the committee to ask who does look after those areas, which in a surprising number of schemes turns out to be nobody. The exclusion list therefore serves as a small audit of the parts of common property that fall outside every arrangement the scheme holds. That is a useful thing for a committee to discover in a proposal rather than in an incident.

Areas containing electrical equipment, pressurised systems or moving plant require people trained for them. A cleaner who enters with the best of intentions is exposed to risks they have not been trained to recognise, and the scheme is exposed to a question it does not want to answer. No amount of care substitutes for the relevant competency. Willingness has never been a substitute for training in an area of this kind.

The same applies to roof access, confined spaces and anything requiring isolation before work can start. Where a scheme genuinely needs those areas attended, the right response is to engage a party equipped for it, often through the maintenance contractor who already attends the plant. That is a separate arrangement with separate insurance and separate documentation. Those arrangements usually already exist and simply need extending.

The area outside a plant room is a different matter. Approaches, external doors, adjacent hardstand and access paths are ordinary common property and can reasonably sit in a cleaning scope. Drawing the boundary at the door rather than at the general vicinity gives the crew a clear instruction and keeps the useful part of the work inside the arrangement. It also keeps somebody walking past the area on a regular basis.

It is also where the practical problems tend to be. Material stored against a plant room door, vegetation growing across an access path, or an approach that has become a de facto storage area are all worth reporting. Those are not risks a cleaner needs to enter the room to observe, and they are exactly the sort of thing nobody else is walking past regularly enough to notice.