11 January 2022 - Five years after Grenfell, the government tries to fix building fire safety crisis
What is the cladding scandal and how is the government trying to fix it ?
(Evening Standard, 11/01/2022)
The safety of high-rise buildings has been under the microscope since dozens of people lost their lives in the tragic Grenfell Tower blaze.
The Government has now pledged to take fresh action to relieve the burden on leaseholders, who have so far faced eye-watering costs for remediation work.
It says it will not hesitate to introduce a developers’ tax to hit those responsible for dangerous cladding if firms do not voluntarily step up to fix safety defects.
Cladding: Developers told they must pay to remove unsafe material
Helia Ebrahimi (Channel 4, 10/01/2022)
The government has pledged to take “every step necessary” to make building firms fix dangerous cladding on medium rise blocks, warning they could face taxes if they don’t live up to their responsibilities.
Michael Gove said leaseholders would no longer have to bear the costs themselves, saying he was ready to “impose a solution on them in law”.
But four and a half years after the Grenfell fire, critics say it’s all taken too long and doesn’t go far enough.
Government’s plan to end building safety crisis still has large holes
Ben Chapman (The Independent, 10/01/2022)
Adevastating fire at a residential block in New York this weekend should have reminded Michael Gove of how urgently he needs to fix Britain’s building safety crisis.
At least 17 people died, including eight children, bringing back memories of the Grenfell Tower inferno that killed 72. It could all happen again.
The Guardian view on the cladding scandal: businesses must pay
Editorial (The Guardian, 10/01/2022)
The tragedy of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in west London has revealed a housebuilding industry corrupted by a profits-first and anti-regulation ideology.
Property developers and speculators cannot be saddled with all the blame for this. It was a project of successive governments, and notably that led by David Cameron, to remove rules that they saw as making life unnecessarily difficult for construction businesses. The dysfunctional system that led to 72 people losing their lives included failures of housing management and safety culture as well as the inappropriate use of flammable cladding.
As the public inquiry into the disaster continues its examination of the specifics, a parallel process has led to tens of thousands of flat dwellers in England trying to escape a nightmare of their own (the precise number of those affected is unknown). The same type of cladding used on Grenfell was found on 477 other buildings over 18 metres tall in the aftermath of the disaster, with a full audit of buildings between 11 metres and 18 metres tall that are in need of alterations still incomplete. It is the plight of these unlucky residents, many of them first-time buyers of leasehold properties, that the secretary of state for levelling up and housing, Michael Gove, on Monday pledged to resolve.