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A weekly round-up of the most important headlines for housing professionals.
Good afternoon. Fire safety was once more at the top of the agenda this week with the surprise announcement by the government of a new £30m fund to help replace costly waking watches with fire alarms in affected blocks.
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The fund, which opens in January, will come as a welcome relief to those struggling with waking watch costs – some of which have been in place for more than three years. There are obstacles though: the size of the pot means many blocks will miss out and some insurance providers have insisted on watches continuing, even after the installation of alarms.
The news followed the discovery that the sister-block of Lakanal House – where six people died in a fire in 2009 – has been given a waking watch.
There were also worrying revelations this week about the government’s efforts to implement the Grenfell Inquiry’s recommendations, as it emerged that industry lobbyists pressured it to water down key evacuation measures, particularly in relation to people with disabilities.
Moving away from fire safety, other important news this week came in the alteration of the government’s algorithm for new housing targets, which it has changed under pressure from its backbenchers who didn’t like the idea of new homes in the shires. The result will be a push to further densify big cities.
We also got a glimpse of the bright sunlit uplands that await us once we are free from the shackles of the European Union next month (please choose your own level of irony with which to read this sentence). The government published a Procurement Green Paper that outlines plans for what it will do when it has the freedom to set its own rules.
You can read more here but in brief: buy British, scrap ‘red tape’. The details will unwind in due course and the important thing to remember is nothing changes next month except a switch from posting jobs in the Official Journal of the European Union to the new and proudly British Find a Tender Service. We summarised the big changes housing can expect from leaving the EU here.
Finally, the Scottish regulator produced a summary of the main reasons providers didn’t comply with regulations this year – with gas safety and homelessness cropping up.
That’s all for this week and indeed this year. Everyone at Inside Housing wishes you a happy, healthy and safe festive period and a brighter new year.
Pete Apps, deputy editor, Inside Housing
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