Buildings deemed to be a high fire safety risk have still not been inspected by Barnet Council – five years after the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

An audit report by the local authority acknowledges there has been “insufficient progress in managing fire safety risks in private sector housing”, with five buildings classed as high risk yet to be inspected by Regional Enterprise (RE), a joint venture between the council and Capita.

The report adds that a tracker used to oversee private sector tower blocks in the borough is “missing key information” and that resource issues and recruitment challenges have hampered efforts by the RE team to manage fire safety risks.

Councils can take enforcement action against private sector building owners or landlords who fail to ensure remedial works are carried out to improve fire safety. But only three out of ten buildings in the borough identified as high risk had been inspected by RE when the audit fieldwork was carried out, with two further sites known to have been inspected subsequently.

Councillors raised concerns over the audit report when it was presented to a meeting of the housing and growth committee on Monday – a day before the fifth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed the lives of 72 people on 14th June 2017.

Labour’s Ella Rose asked: “Do we have any idea of when those [buildings] will be inspected, given it is now five years since the awful fire at Grenfell?”

Private sector housing manager Belinda Livesey did not provide a timeline, telling the committee it would depend on the “complexity of cases”, with some proving “extremely complicated” because of the inspection findings or the “inadequacy of the paperwork” provided to the team.

She added: “The most important thing is that we are going through it thoroughly and systematically, so we are not missing things we should be picking up.”

Conservative member Richard Cornelius asked about the possibility of naming and shaming agents who had not complied with fire safety regulations. Belinda ruled this out, saying the team’s work was “confidential between the parties involved” but assuring the committee it was working closely with freeholders and leaseholders.

Anne Clarke, a Labour committee member, said it was a “real concern that we do not have enough funding” for inspection teams and that “we have potentially dangerous buildings not looked at because of a shortfall of funding”.

Belinda told the committee that it tended to take one to three days to inspect a building and there were “huge problems generally around paperwork that demonstrates fire risk assessments”. She added that it was “very complicated” trying to get people into the team because it was a “difficult area of work” and a “new area of work since Grenfell”.

She continued: “Getting people who have experience of working in complex tower blocks who also have enforcement experience has been difficult”.

But Belinda assured the committee the team was “much better placed” after recruiting a new member of staff, and that although it was not yet fully staffed, conversations with the council over resourcing were continuing.

According to a report to the committee, the fire safety delivery programme for council-owned buildings “continues to progress well”. Some £51.9million has so far been spent on safety measures, and additional fire safety works to high rise buildings are 97% complete.