A tenant lay dead in his apartment in Bolton for six long years before the social landlord found his body.
The remains of retired bookkeeper Robert Alton – who was 70 – were found after social landlord Bolton at Home entered to carry out a gas check.
The gas had previously been switched off after Alton failed to respond, but the landlord failed to act for years – it continued to receive his rent via housing benefit.
Bolton At Home eventually obtained a court order to enter the property, with officials using an angle grinder to cut through the flat’s security chain.
A statement from the social landlord said: “Everyone at Bolton at Home has been deeply shocked by this and we realise it will concern and upset people to learn his body remained undiscovered for such a long time. It’s completely unacceptable to us that something like this has happened, and we’ve taken action to reduce the risk of it happening again.
“The reason we didn’t discover Robert’s death for so long is because our previous procedure, while meeting legal requirements, wasn’t strong enough to prevent something like this happening.
“We’d made Robert’s home gas safe in June 2017 by turning off the gas supply externally after we were unable to contact him to arrange the annual gas safety check.
“Following this, we made many attempts to contact Robert over a number of years to arrange gas safety checks. It’s clear that the action taken by us to understand why we couldn’t contact him didn’t go far enough. Opportunities were missed in spotting that something was potentially wrong. We should have done more to check on Robert’s welfare.”
Since July 2022 Bolton at Home said it started immediately seeking access to someone’s home via a warrant in instances where it cannot contact them to arrange a gas safety check. This was what led to the body being found.
On entering the property there was a knee high stack of post, while Alton’s body was at the top of the stairs.
Bolton Council also failed to act after Alton’s council tax went into arrears after 2017.
The council has since promised to hold an internal inquiry to identify how it failed to spot something was wrong.
