Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what financial support is available to leaseholders in buildings over 18 metres whose buildings failed the External Wall System but are ineligible for the Building Safety Fund.

A key eligibility criterion for the Building Safety Fund is the presence of the unsafe non-ACM cladding, as set out in the prospectus for the Fund at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/remediation-of-non-acm-buildings. This is because unsafe cladding acts as an accelerant to fire spread, and funding will remove the biggest obstacle to remediation proceeding. Government guidance is clear that building safety is the responsibility of building owners and we have given expert advice on a range of safety issues to provide clarity.

The EWS1 process is an industry led approach to assess financial risk to inform valuation for mortgage purposes. The EWS1 process is not a safety certificate and a building cannot ‘fail’ an EWS1 assessment.