Written evidence submitted by the Local Government Association (LGA)

 

 

I hope this finds you well. I am writing as the Local Government Association’s (LGA) building safety spokesperson to share our analysis ahead of your Committee’s inquiry into progress in remediating dangerous cladding.

 

In the three years since the Grenfell Tower fire, councils have worked with the Government to identify dangerous ACM cladding on both social and private housing blocks. The LGA has helped support and coordinate this work. We have also been pressing the Government since 2017 to ban combustible materials in cladding systems, reform building regulations, fund the replacement of ACM cladding in the social sector, address the problems faced by blameless leaseholders in privately owned blocks with ACM cladding, and identify other dangerous cladding systems and fund their remediation. We welcome the steps that have been taken to date to address these issues. The Government has banned combustible materials, funded the removal of ACM cladding, acknowledged the dangers posed by some forms of non-ACM cladding and provided £1 billion to remediate it.

 

However, the issues underlying the Grenfell tower fire are far wider and more systemic than just the cladding. They need to be addressed as a whole in a cost-effective manner, rather than through the piecemeal identification and remediation of individual failings in the built environment. The response of central government to previous disasters at Ronan Point and Lakanal House appears inadequate in retrospect; this must not be the case here.

 

How easy or difficult has it been to liaise with Government on what standards of compliance are?

 

This is a question best answered by individual councils. We have had many discussions with councils and Government about what the standards should be, but we do not enforce the standards directly.

 

How easy has it been to estimate the time taken and cost for remediating cladding?

 

The remediation of dangerous buildings is proceeding too slowly. Social landlords have been quick to address the issue, but progress in the private sector has been unacceptably slow. This has been exacerbated by the social distancing measures necessitated by COVID-19, which has further limited the pace of remediation. We understand that at one point 70 per cent of sites had ceased work. However, the delays caused by COVID-19 would have been less of a problem if the remediation work had started sooner with greater pressure on the private sector.

 

We are confident that the £1 billion of funding announced in the budget to remediate non-ACM cladding, on top of £600 million to remediate ACM cladding, will not come close to covering the costs of remediation. These cladding costs are only a proportion of the total costs of remediating the consequences of twenty years of inadequate building safety regulations, and do not cover other issues such as fire doors and compartmentation issues.

 

The National Housing Federation has estimated that landlords could face a remediation bill in excess of £10 billion. The recent report on remediating dangerous cladding by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee estimates that the cost of addressing all fire safety defects in every high-risk residential building will be around £15 billion. The LGA anticipates that the final bill to councils will be in a similar region to these figures, spread over a ten-year period.

 

The LGA is also concerned that there is an expectation from Government that councils should fund much of the remediation work themselves. This will be hugely challenging for many councils, who are already facing significant extra costs from the demands created by COVID-19 as well as a substantial loss of income. It also has worrying implications for council investment in housing.

 

What support you feel councils need from the Government and are you getting it?

 

We have been calling for Government to fund remediation, including of non-ACM cladding, for nearly three years. The funding provided to date is welcome, but in the non-ACM sector that money is only just starting to become available, is inadequate and is not readily available to councils and housing associations.

 

We have called for adequate powers and sanctions to enforce against owners of dangerous buildings. MHCLG has put an enormous amount of work into building safety reform, having earlier introduced amendments to the Housing, Health and Safety Rating system, and the Home Office has also introduced the Fire Safety Bill to improve building safety. We have worked with Government on these important reforms. We remain concerned that more needs to be done to align them and to make the new burdens affordable to owners while protecting the position of leaseholders.

 

We have called for Government to fund data collection on the cladding on buildings by local authorities, which it has done. This exercise has been delayed by the demands of COVID-19, but there is nothing we feel Government can do to support its acceleration.

 

On balance, the Government has provided support, albeit with less urgency than hoped for. However, the funding it has provided is not enough to cover the cost of remediation, as the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committees inquiry on remediating cladding has found. We support the findings of the Committee.

 

Moving forwards, two crucial areas of support remain:

 

 

 

What advice have you given to councils about what they need to do to remediate cladding?

 

The LGA has a ‘Grenfell Tower: Frequently asked questions for local authorities’ page on its website. The LGA has not issued its own advice, as this needs to be provided by Government and based on expert opinion. We have disseminated advice to councils as it emerged from MHCLG and its expert panel.

 

In terms of councils' enforcement role, we have established the Joint Inspection Team (JIT) with MHCLG. This exists to support council enforcement under the Housing Act and link up with Fire and Rescue Service advice. So far, the JIT has advised councils on 7 cases and hopes to do more in the next few months. The JIT is funded until 31st of March 2021.

 

How easy have councils been finding it to get private building owners to carry out the works? Are council powers sufficient?

 

Councils face three key difficulties in getting private building owners to carry out remediation works. The first is identifying the correct person. Many buildings have complicated ownership structures and/or offshore company ownership. It is not always easy to find the right person to press for action and if the owners are uncooperative, which they generally are, this is an easy loophole to exploit

 

Second, the existing legislation is not fit for purpose. The Fire Safety Order’s ultimate deterrent is a prohibition notice. Evicting residents from a building is a difficult process and does not necessarily leave them in safer accommodation. The Housing Act requires a cumbersome inspection and enforcement process.

 

Third, when owners do act, the costs are often passed onto leaseholders. The Government has partially addressed this by providing funds, but that welcome funding is inadequate and has taken a long time to arrive. There are limited sanctions available to compel building owners to act. It is crucial to stress that leaseholders are not to blame for the failings that have led to flammable cladding being placed on blocks and they should not be expected to meet the costs of either interim measures or remediation.

 

It is also important to acknowledge that whilst there are many freeholders who have been slow to remediate cladding, freeholders are often not to blame for the dangerous cladding on their buildings, having acquired the building in good faith. Many smaller freeholders, including leaseholders who own the freehold on their building, lack the skills, experience and resources to address the problem quickly, even with the prospect of Government funding. Many are already being hit with exponential increases in insurance costs and for leaseholders who own their own freehold, these come on top of the costs of interim measures, the inability to re-mortgage their property and being unable to sell up.

 

I hope the information outlined above is helpful. In our view this is a crisis resulting from twenty years of inadequate building safety regulation. It needs to be addressed as a whole in a cost-effective manner, rather than through the piecemeal identification and remediation of flaw upon flaw in the built environment. For further detail, you might find it helpful to review the LGA’s response to the Housing, Communities, and Local Government Select Committee’s inquiry on cladding: progress on remediation. Our response can be read online. If we can be of further assistance, please not hesitate to get in touch with my colleague (jade.hall@local.gov.uk).   

 

June 2020