New South Wales Police says it has completed the most urgent repairs to stations and police homes where asbestos and lead paint contamination were detected.

Hundreds of properties, including more than 300 in the Western Region, were identified as carrying risks to workers in 2011.

During the past year the government’s spent more than $16 million repairing buildings and buying new homes.

The Police Properties Group says it is half way through a four year remediation program and is now turning its attention to preventative measures.

Superintendent Darryl Tuck says there are moves to replace or reclad fibro outhouses and garages, before they pose a safety risk.

“Once it’s broken in automatically escalates for us into a higher priority job and so we have a process in place to make sure we actually remediate that,” he said.

“In the long term what we’d prefer is rather than sending out specialist staff to remediate broken fibro on an ad hoc basis is simply remove the material and completely remove the hazard.”

He says a community police station model is also planned to replace demountables which are being used at police properties.

“We’re working on developing the design and the model.

“Cost efficiencies will be gained by being able to develop a not so much cookie cutter, but a standard design and layout.

“Then we’ll be able to go to the market, see what we can achieve with the dollars we have and then roll those out across the state.”

He says the program will particularly benefit rural and remote areas where they may be labor shortages.

“We’ve actually recently replaced a house at Lake Cargelligo with a pre fabricated house.

“So for some of our more remote areas there are great benefits in being able to have a pre fabricated house developed and built somewhere where there’s no shortage of labor and having that deployed to a very remote area because the challenges out there are getting labor on site for significant periods of time doing the building work.”