WA swimming pool inspection rates improve

The Western Australian Building Commissioner, Kristin Berger, has reported on local government’s private swimming pool safety barrier inspection figures for the 2018/19 period, as voluntarily reported by those local governments.

She says the report shows a significant reduction in the total number of overdue inspections, although there is room for improvement.

WA local governments are required to inspect the safety barriers of private pools in their districts at least every four years to ensure they are compliant and continue to be effective in restricting access by young children.

The Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety - Building and Energy Division (Building and Energy) is monitoring local authorities’ progress with these checks after an ombudsman report found that 8639 private swimming pools in the state were overdue for barrier inspections in mid-2015.

The Building Commissioner’s latest progress report shows that WA local governments inspected the safety barriers of more than 47,000 private properties during 2018-19. At 30 June 2019, there were 2,545 overdue inspections compared to 3,632 overdue at the same time last year.

That is estimated to be 1.6 per cent of pools overdue for an inspection, compared to 2.3 per cent in 2017/18.

The local government inspections also revealed that more than two-thirds (67.5 per cent) of the local governments that provided data are now up to date with their pool inspections – an improvement when compared to less than half (46 per cent) in 2015, as reported by the ombudsman.

The progress report is available on the Building and Energy website.