Introduction
In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster on 14 June 2017, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (the Department) established the Building Safety Programme “to ensure that residents of high-rise residential buildings are safe, and feel safe from the risk of fire, now and in the future”. The Department immediately began to identify all other high-rise buildings in England with cladding of a similar style to that used on Grenfell Tower (unsafe aluminium composite material, or ACM). Since then, it has identified 455 buildings with unsafe ACM cladding. In May 2018 the Department announced £400 million to fund remediation work for high-rise residential buildings in the social sector with unsafe ACM cladding, followed by an additional £200 million for similar buildings in the private sector. From this £600 million, the Department expects to fund the removal and replacement of unsafe cladding from 232 (of 455) high-rise buildings. It expects building owners to fund the remainder. In March 2020, following additional fire tests, the Department announced a further £1 billion for the removal and replacement of other forms of unsafe cladding; it estimates there are around 1,700 buildings that lie within this scope.
Published: 16 September 2020