Cladding Remediation—Follow-up Contents

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Summary

On 14 June 2017, 72 residents tragically lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire. Since then, this Committee has undertaken a range of work focussed on building safety. This report revisits our recent work on cladding remediation, following the Secretary of State’s statement on 10 February 2021 on the Government’s latest interventions to support the removal of unsafe cladding. These interventions include:

• an additional £3.5 billion towards cladding remediation for high-rise residential buildings 18m and above, on top of £1.6 billion already committed;
• a long-term loan scheme towards the costs of cladding remediation for buildings between 11m and 18m, with a maximum monthly payment of £50 per leaseholder; and
• a new developer levy and a new tax for the UK residential property development sector.

To make homes safe, and to know how long that will take, we need to know how many residential buildings have fire safety defects and what those defects are.

• We reiterate our recommendation from our June 2020 report that in the same way as it has done for buildings with ACM cladding, the Government should publish a monthly data release on the number of buildings with non-ACM cladding and other serious fire safety defects awaiting remediation. This data release should also explicitly include buildings between 11m and 18m as well as buildings 18m and above.

We welcome the additional £3.5 billion that the Government has put towards the Building Safety Fund, taking the total to £5.1 billion. The funding, however, does not go far enough. We have previously estimated that the total cost of full remediation works on affected buildings could be up to £15 billion. We also heard about limitations to the Building Safety Fund regarding who is eligible and what the fund can be used for.

• The Government should establish a Comprehensive Building Safety Fund for full remediation works of affected buildings. In allocating funds from the Comprehensive Building Safety Fund, the Government should move away from the current height- and product-based approach and should instead take a holistic, risk- and evidence-based approach that prioritises occupants who are most at risk. To support that approach, the Government should consider establishing a more formal process for identifying and prioritising risk holistically and report back to the Committee on the best way to achieve this, along with the evidence.
• We call for a Comprehensive Building Safety Fund that:
  • applies to all high-risk buildings of any height, irrespective of tenure;
  • covers all fire safety defects, including combustible insulation; and
  • covers all associated costs.
• The Comprehensive Building Safety Fund should be fully funded by Government and industry, and the Government should establish clear principles regarding how the costs should be split between the two. Total contributions should not be capped.
• Social housing providers should have full and equal access to government funds for remediation.

It has consistently been this Committee’s position that leaseholders should not have to contribute towards any of the costs for a problem they played no part in creating.

• It is disappointing that the Government’s proposed loan scheme, whereby leaseholders contribute up to £50 a month to pay for cladding remediation works on buildings between 11m and 18m high, does not satisfy the previously agreed principle that leaseholders should not pay.
• The Government should abolish the loan scheme. We reiterate our call on the Government to re-establish the principle that leaseholders should not pay anything towards the cost of remediating historical building safety defects.

We heard about the wider impacts of the cladding crisis on the private and social housing sectors. We call on the Government to:

• report back to this Committee with its assessment of the impact of fire safety remediation on the wider housing market; and
• carry out and publish an impact assessment on the knock-on effects of fire safety remediation on maintaining existing social homes and building new social homes.

We have stressed before that this crisis is about more than statistics, costs, and materials. At the heart of this crisis are people: people trapped in unsafe, unsellable homes. After a year in which we have spent more time in our homes than ever before, it is vital that affected residents get the mental health support that they need.

• We do not think the Government is doing everything it can to support the physical and mental health of residents of affected buildings. The Government should work with local authorities to ensure that affected residents have access to the physical and mental health support they need.