How Labour can fix three buildings and - by extension - the country
In what will be the final post before a Labour government takes over, let's look at how it could act to actually fix the entrenched problem of dangerous buildings
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How Labour can fix three buildings…
Labour’s manifesto promised to “take steps to accelerate the pace of remediation across the country”, a promise which turns heavily on what “take steps” actually means.
So for this, the last in my pre-election series, let’s look at three real buildings around the country which are struggling with “the pace of remediation” and ask how they might be fixed.
(A note - these are all real buildings and the circumstances described are real. But I’m not going to name them, because residents can still a bit jumpy about being outed and because it smoothes what I can write on a blog which does not benefit from libel insurance.)
The first building we will consider is a marginally-above 18m block in east London built in 2007 by a major UK developer. Like many, it has had a long and frustrating journey to what is now basically a stalemate.
In the immediate aftermath of Grenfell residents were told they had nothing to worry about, but in 2020 - when the impact of shifting government guidance on the mortgage market brought thousands of other buildings into the story - they were told that their cladding was in fact problematic.
There followed a long and frustrating dispute over what the cladding on its walls actually was.
An initial fire safety engineering report had said it was ACM cladding - the kind used on Grenfell - which would have seen it qualify for government funding for a complete package of remediation work.
But this report had then changed to remove reference to ACM, raising suspicion that this was done deliberately to avoid embarrassment over its late identification.
There is still some confusion among residents about exactly what cladding is on the walls, but pictures they’ve sent me suggest it is some sort of sandwich panel - plastic insulation held between two thin metal sheets. This kind of material may not be an “ACM” like the one on Grenfell, but has still been subject to very fierce fires in the past. The building also has problems with missing fire breaks.
Following the discovery of this danger residents - like many around the country - were unable to sell and saw their insurance rise from £60,000 a year to £780,000 per year, around £3,000 a year each.
But there was Building Safety Fund money available and - better yet - the building’s developer was among the first to sign up to the government’s remediation agreements. Residents assumed there was light at the end of the tunnel.
Sadly, this is not what has happened. Instead of work promptly getting started, the developer and the freeholder (via its management company) have been locked in dispute about what level of remediation is appropriate for a complex facade with three different types of cladding across its elevations.
The developer wants to limit the cost and time of the work it needs to carry out, and believes it only needs to do what the government has told it to do: repair ‘life safety’ defects. But the building owner (who purchased the development mainly to get fat off ground rents and lease extension payments) wants to enforce its contractual right to a fully compliant building, so wants a much more thorough scope of works.
In this instance, the developer’s plan is to leave a good deal of combustible materials on the building, and do partial, cheaper removals to reduce the risk.
This may or may not be a sensible approach, but the trouble for the residents is that it will not be enough to placate the insurers. They have been told their premiums will still stay just as high, even once the work is complete.
A further complicating factor is that the developer’s remediation plan is based on design drawings, which do not take into account construction defects. So it is relying on fire breaks which may not be there. This may mean that the building does not pass an assessment at all after the remediation, even from a life safety perspective, and needs to be done again.
No one can agree on the appropriate scope of work. Lawyers are being paid. Residents are stuck.
“Your company signed a pledge last April to make good past failings,” said one resident of the building in an email sent to the developer in February 2023. “We are 10 months on from that and yet we still have a complete lack of action. This is frankly shocking… Lives are being seriously impacted and put at risk by inaction. Enough is enough.”
In March, work did sort of start. But residents believe this was a sham: the new Building Safety Regulator allows work to carry on with less oversight where there has been a “meaningful start”.
Scaffolding was quickly put up and work done to one balcony to get a “meaningful start” ahead of this deadline. Nothing has happened since.
Let’s consider another building, this time in Manchester. At this one, the property did have ACM cladding and did benefit from early funding to have it removed.
But work was very, very slow to start and what should have been a 10 month remediation job has ended up taking more than three years.
It has been a building site throughout, with scaffolding, workmen, sheets blocking out daylight, banging, rattling and general misery for those stuck inside it (including during lockdown).
The cladding was initially replaced with solid aluminium panels. But the use of combustible tape upset the local authority building control, so it needed to be remediated again to get rid of it.
The solid aluminium panels then deflected due to the replacement cavity barriers, which means they require further work to make them right. This probably isn’t going to be funded by the government scheme, and there is no clarity on who will pay.
The building also has 110 balconies with combustible materials on them. But the ACM fund did not cover the work to remove them as it was strictly limited to cladding. The upshot was 55 were removed and replaced because that was necessary enabling work to get the cladding off. But the other 55 remain.
This means the best result residents can hope for post-remediation is to be considered at the upper end of medium risk. It will still be very expensive to insure the building and hard to sell flats in it.
This is compounded by the fact that despite work finally being due to complete on 15 April, a long list of “snagging” defects have now been identified. Residents have no clarity on how long these will take to complete, whether they will fall within the scope of their government funding programme, and who will pay for them if they don’t. They have been told they may even need a “waking watch” of round-the-clock fire safety wardens reinstated.
The project has cost the taxpayer a sum stretching into the millions, and the result has not been a safe building.
Let’s consider a third building. This one was at one stage considered so unsafe that a temporary evacuation order was put in place and residents were required to move out into hotels or temporary housing.
But work did get going after that. The building has had £10.5m of work to make it safe, but towards the end of the job it emerged that the remediation plan required a variation: there were combustible materials around spandrel panels which needed an additional £1.47m of work to replace.
But this was rejected by the government’s building safety fund case worker. Residents will be
left with a building that has been 85% remediated despite having £10.5m of public money spent on it.
There are literally thousands of case studies like the three cited above around the country: remediation work which cannot be agreed, remediation work botched or partially completed and a grindingly slow, maddeningly frustrating process.
I think we can say now that the Conservatives have been unable to fix this problem. They have poured billions of public money into it, passed major new legislation, established an entirely new regulator and effectively held the construction sector to ransom to pay for its share.
But still we are stuck. Their efforts have come up short.
So how might Labour go about it differently?
I will say for the sake of balance that this problem was also going to be difficult. The post-Grenfell discovery of so many impacted buildings gave the state an incredibly difficult tightrope to walk.
Encouraging either risk aversion or a more “proportionate” approach came with major potential downsides. And I have no doubt that a Labour government would also have screwed it up to an extent.
But the big missing piece in the Conservative’s approach - more than money - has been an active role for the state.
Even now, it is standing back and allowing developers (the same developers who made this crisis) to determine what a “life safety” defect looks like.
This causes huge problems because their motivation (quick and cheap remediation) is different from the current building owner’s motivation (a properly fixed asset), the insurers motivation (removal of risk of a large payout due to fire damage), the fire services motivation (reduced chance of fighting a major building fire where compartmentation fails) and the residents’ motivation (not to be either bankrupt or burnt to death).
These disagreements cause major slowdowns and works which reach completion and are then deemed insufficient. We desperately, desperately need clarity about what work needs to be done and what we can tolerate.
In short, the system has always been crying out for a strong and impartial body, which can strong-arm those responsible and persuade the insurance and fire sectors to understand that a bit of risk is natural and can be mitigated in other ways.
We also need someone to set reasonable timescales with enforceable penalties, provide the tough oversight which was lacking when these properties were first built and to hammer anyone responsible for what the industry politely refers to as “snagging defects” (crap and lazy workmanship in less technical lingo).
The only party who can play any of these roles is the state. But the philosophy we have adopted from the start has been too hands off, too laissez-faire and too obsessed with the mad idea that the industry is best placed to work out how to fix a problem it made.
Labour, behind the scenes, recognises this. It is planning a bolder, more interventionist approach and may pick out some prime example buildings to demonstrate its sharper teeth relatively early on in its time in office.
A very quick start might also be to force the insurance industry into a more consistent approach, possibly using the Treasury balance sheet to reduce the risk of major payouts in big building fires. With the additional taxes taken from higher premiums in recent years, you can make this look like a nil-cost approach if you’re creative.
A word of caution though - if Labour does take a more interventionist role, it is not guaranteed to work.
Yes the state needs to get involved, but it also needs to get it right. Screw ups can be very costly and hard to unwind at a national level. That means (sorry Rachel Reeves) that this requires adequate resourcing. The Building Safety Regulator needs to tool up.
What I’m hearing from people behind the scenes is that they are currently majorly, majorly stretched and struggling with the current workload. If Labour will be asking for more from them (which they must) they must also see that it requires more investment.
The long-term benefit in terms of money saved by getting this properly fixed should be obvious, though.
… and - by extension - the country
This will be the last thing I write and publish under a Conservative-led government which has so far encapsulated my entire writing career, from the very early student paper days to now.
I’m not that enthused by the prospect of change, but if I do have some hope of the promised “change” it is along the lines of the answer I have given above. So many of our challenges, from health to housing to climate change, have come about because of the determined absence of a state acting in the interests of its citizens.
We have got used to a government that stands back, holds up its hands and asks the market to address problems that so obviously require democratic leadership to solve.
To quote our soon-to-be former prime minister: “Do we want to live in a country where the response to every question is: ‘What is the government going to do about it?’
“Or do we choose to recognise that the government has limits? Governments should have limits. If that is a controversial thing to say, then I am all the more glad to say it.”
The problem is Sunak and his peers have believed that too hard, set the limits too tight and as a result robbed themselves (and us) of the only genuine answer to many of the problems they are trying to address.
Labour will not be the big-investing, forward-thinking government I want them to be. But we must pressure them to let go of the limits placed around the state’s functions in recent years.
If we want things like social housing, properly fixed buildings and functioning healthcare we need a government that is willing to act.
I don’t doubt I will disagree with the next government a lot, be frustrated by them a lot, and write many lengthy Substacks about how terrible they are. But if they can push this line at least a little bit towards a solution to some of our most entrenched problems, some things will get a bit better. And that is a reason, at least, not to feel entirely miserable on a sunny Monday morning as we approach this historic election.
A thanks to Giles Grover at EOCS for help on this post and for buying me a tandoori chicken dosa while we talked through it. A true gentleman and probably the country’s foremost expert in how the cladding debacle actually works and could be fixed. If Labour is serious about fixing this problem, they could start by hiring him.
This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.
If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book. Or you can buy a copy here.