Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of supporting building owners to fund remedial works (a) for buildings of all heights and (b) beyond those needed to external wall systems.
The Government has made £1 billion available to fund the removal of unsafe non-Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) cladding. This is in addition to the £600 million made available already to ensure the remediation of the highest risk ACM cladding
The Government’s decision to place the scope of the Building Safety Fund at external wall systems, and buildings over 18m, reflects the exceptional fire risk that certain cladding products pose at that height, but also because unsafe cladding acts as an accelerant to fire spread
Our guidance is clear that it remains building owners’ responsibility to address unsafe cladding on buildings of all heights. We have provided advice from the Expert Panel on the measures building owners should take to ensure their buildings are safe
We recognise that in many cases, leasehold agreements will allow building owners or their managing agents to pass remediation costs on to leasehold owners of individual flats. It is unacceptable for leaseholders to have to worry about the cost of fixing historic safety defects in their buildings that they didn’t cause
The Government is determined to remove barriers to fixing historic defects and identify financing solutions that protect leaseholders from unaffordable costs and we will provide an update when the draft Building Safety Bill returns to Parliament.