EMSD Chided Over Unsurprising Surprise Checks

The Ombudsman, Winnie Chiu, on Thursday criticised the effectiveness of government inspections on lifts and escalators, pointing out that 'surprise' checks conducted by the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD) were not surprising at all.

Chiu’s office recently completed an investigation into the matter, after a number of serious incidents in recent years – including a fatal lift incident in 2018 at a Sheung Shui housing estate that killed one woman.

The watchdog found that it is common practice for the EMSD to reach out to contractors before ‘surprise’ inspections. The department explained that it needed to first confirm contractors’ maintenance schedules before conducting its own checks.

But this also tips off contractors, and Chiu said it undermines the deterrent effect of the inspections on older facilities – which account for less than four percent of the overall number of checks the department conducts every month.

"We recommend that the EMSD increase the ratio of surprise inspections, and that the contractors provide timely information about their schedule of maintenance work [online]," Chiu said.

The Ombudsman’s probe also found that the EMSD's monitoring of contractors’ workers, to make sure they did not do too many repairs in a day, was lax.

The department’s guidelines say these workers should not work on more than six lifts or escalators in a single day. But the watchdog found that contractors allowed their workers to perform “excessive maintenance”, and then would explain why this had been done in a report to the EMSD later.

"We find this measure rather passive,” Chiu said. “We believe that to have better monitoring, EMSD should require contractors to submit reasons for and the number of excessive works prior to such work being done.”

She added that EMSD explained to her office that some of the “excessive maintenance” was allowed because the work involved was relatively easy, facilities were close to each other, and owners only allowed repair works after office hours.

Chiu said out of around 50,000 facilities, fewer than a fifth of old lifts and just 7.5 percent of old escalators had been retrofitted with safety devices – that’s despite guidelines issued by the EMSD asking contractors to update them.

But Chiu stressed these escalators and lifts are still safe, as long as maintenance and repair works are done properly.