One of the UK’s largest house builders, Barratt Homes, has revealed that it could take anywhere between five and seven years – and cost up to £400 million – to fix fire safety issues on all its buildings.
The announcement was made by Chief Financial Officer, Mike Scott, who spoke at Barratt Homes’ annual general meeting (AGM) on 17 October 2022. The developer is one of 49 firms that signed up to the building safety pledge set out by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities earlier this year.
The purpose of the pledge was to protect leaseholders from the costs of remediation of fire safety defects and hold the industry accountable. The pledge committed developers to “remediate life-critical fire safety works in buildings over 11 metres that they have played a role in developing or refurbishing over the last 30 years in England”. They also agreed to reimburse the government for all the funding they had received through the Building Safety Fund.
According to Barratt Homes’ financial accounts for 2021–22, over £396 million has been put aside for the remediation of fire safety issues in existing buildings. Current estimates from the builder suggest that the work “should be delivered over the next three to five years”. According to a news report by Inside Housing, the “seven-year figure is precautionary” as there could be further delays caused by labour shortages and the rising cost prices of materials.
In attendance at the AGM – alongside shareholders and the Barratt Board of Directors – was Dave Richards, who is from the London Cladding Action Group and a member of the End Our Cladding Scandal (EOCS) campaign team. The action group later tweeted: “We asked how many buildings were in scope and the number of buildings where no work had started. The questions were not answered.”
In a full write-up of the meeting, EOCS reported that, according to the Chief Executive of Barratt, David Thomas, the building firm had “limited experience” of remediation work so far but had formed its estimated costs from its knowledge of the wider industry. There was also an indication from Chairman John Allan that Barratt was carrying out remediation work due to a “sense of moral obligation”, suggesting that the government had “behaved badly” and that “they didn’t need to threaten [the company]”.
It was also confirmed that while the housing developer has indeed signed the government’s pledge, they have yet to sign a legal contract because “the draft from the Government is not in a form that any builder could sign up to”.
In response to EOCS, a Barratt spokesperson told Inside Housing: “We backed the industry pledge in the spring and expect to sign the long-form agreement with government soon.
“In the meantime, we are focused on supporting leaseholders by instructing independent assessments of buildings in line with latest government guidance and then planning and carrying out that remediation on our historic buildings as quickly as possible.”