Partial and piecemeal solutions
When leaseholders bought their homes, they were meant to be safe – but despite almost every stakeholder agreeing that leaseholders should not pay for the faults of others, for the first five years after Grenfell, in reality that was exactly who was left to pick up the bill (and some leaseholders still are).
Since the resident-led End Our Cladding Scandal campaign was launched in 2019 by volunteers who are personally affected by the building safety scandal, there has been some partial success as the government has announced a total of £5.1 billion of funding – through the ACM Cladding Remediation Fund, Building Safety Fund (BSF), and the Cladding Safety Scheme (CSS). However, only a fraction of that money has been spent to date. The cost to the government will also be largely offset by a new tax on development and the VAT income from an estimated £15–20 billion of remediation projects.
While government funding has of course been very welcome, it has also focused narrowly on cladding remediation – but buildings cannot be made half-safe. A truly holistic approach must give equal consideration to non-cladding defects that require remediation, such as internal compartmentation defects that allow fire to spread rapidly. The building safety crisis goes far beyond external cladding and so must funding solutions.
Equally, it has long been clear that the scale of government funding would not be nearly enough to solve the crisis. Two years ago, Michael Gove announced a “reset” of the government’s approach to the building safety crisis, declaring that it would “protect leaseholders and make industry pay.” At the time of writing, 54 developers have now signed the government’s Developer Remediation Contract, committing to self-remediation of “life-critical” fire safety defects in buildings they developed or refurbished over a thirty-year period, or to reimbursing government funding schemes for buildings where the work is already underway.
End Our Cladding Scandal has been meeting with several participant developers in the scheme, and will continue to do so in the coming months, to ensure they remain focused on remediating homes at pace. Developers are typically commissioning new risk assessments before deciding what work they will undertake, if any. It would be in their financial interest for the scope of work to be reduced or for no work to be deemed required at all, therefore it is also vital that there are mechanisms to ensure corners are not being cut and that the voices of leaseholders and residents aren’t ignored a second time around.
As Michael Gove recently noted on X (formerly Twitter), campaigners will be sharing our feedback with the Secretary of State and his Department, including any examples of companies that are delaying making homes safe or where there are any other significant concerns for leaseholders and residents. We will also be raising the many industry-wide issues that are affecting the pace of remediation – where we believe the Department of Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities (DLUHC) must take a more active role to ensure progress.
It is welcome progress that the participant developers will be contributing to remediation funding – but realistically, this only covers an estimated 10–15% of all defective buildings (currently 1,342 buildings, according to the latest DLUHC data). It is down to pure luck whether you bought a home developed by an SME developer that has not yet been asked to self-remediate their buildings, or one that chose to dissolve immediately after construction – which has happened all too frequently. In these buildings, there is no pathway for non-cladding defects to ever be fixed because this is outside the scope of government remediation schemes. We want to see consistent policy to protect all leaseholders, not a game of chance.
It’s also clear that a wider array of stakeholders and responsible parties have not yet stepped up to play their part in contributing to the cost of remediating hundreds of thousands of unsafe homes that were allowed to be built and sold for decades. Some building owners, who seek income from our homes for no discernible service in return, continue to block access for remediation work and delay homes from being made safe. Evidence at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has also shown there were a wide pool of parties with responsibility that, in our opinion, were not so slow to take profit and earnings from our defective homes – from product manufacturers to contractors, architects, building control, warranty providers, and others. If the government wants all homes to be made safe, there must be more funding available and more responsible parties must be brought to the table.
The fact that the wider industry has not been made to contribute, means that leaseholders are still footing the bill – even those that are deemed “qualifying” for protection could face bills of up to £10,000 or up to £15,000 in Greater London, in addition to exorbitant insurance costs and loss of property value if they need to sell before remediation is complete. These costs remain unjust and life-changing.