Unite Students

When Unite Students, the UK’s leading operator of purpose-built student accommodation, needed to implement a total legionella control and management programme across its 130 properties spread throughout 23 of the UK’s cities, it turned to H2O Nationwide to provide the solution.

The first stage of the partnership was for H2O Nationwide to design and implement a bespoke control scheme to ensure that all the properties were brought in line with approved standards and fully complied with the latest regulations. This involved detailed strategy meetings to decide how best to deliver complete compliance in a practical and cost-effective way. 

Initially, this control programme consisted of undertaking fully detailed water hygiene risk assessments in compliance with BS 8558 across the whole portfolio of properties. In conjunction with the risk assessments, a monitoring and testing programme was rolled out across the entire estate with logbooks issued for all the sites to ensure accurate record keeping.

It was decided that in order to ensure compliance was delivered in a cost-effective manner, Unite Students’ own in-house teams would undertake some of the routine monitoring tasks and therefore H2O Nationwide designed a comprehensive training course that would ensure the competence of Unite Student representatives. Training was delivered nationally and over 20 training sessions were held from as far north as Edinburgh to as far south as Bristol to deliver regional coverage.