Building Safety Fund Update January 2022?
By insulatedwalls – January 22
The Building Safety Fund was established by the Government in July 2020 to help alleviate the costs of removing unsafe cladding. The £5 million fund so far has only seen 3% of registered buildings started and only 1% completed, so a slow start overall and currently with a working rate of 8 buildings per year, we are looking at nearly 400 years to complete.
Not deturbed by this, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, Michael Gove, has unveiled a £4bn package that enables leaseholders to escape the costs involved in replacing the combustible cladding, for buildings between 11m and 18m.
As a headline, this looks good and will certainly be welcomed by owners of flats who are either facing crippling costs to rectify the cladding or are stuck in properties that they cannot sell.
Insulatedwalls have looked into this a little further and although the headline could be described as a grabber, could the content be described as just blabber?
Digging deeper.
The Government will force the developers to pay for the rectification costs, but what will actually happen if the developers do not play ball. The current thinking is to impose a solution on them, in law, which is likely to be a form of tax, but will this be without issues? as developers will look to fight this if they deem it unfair.
Why would the developers fight this if they are responsible? The issue is it may not just be the developers who are responsible, considering that the construction of the affected buildings, also involves housing associations, local authorities, manufacturers and suppliers.
There is a desire within the industry to ‘put things right’ but we may well be a little short on the detail confirming how this is to be done. We may also be a little short on the scale of the problem and whether £4bn is enough to cover the remediation.
The Government will be engaging with developers and hopes to have an update after Easter.
Recent Comments