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One of the UK’s largest house builders has offered to pay £1.3m to cover fire safety costs at a block it developed – around a tenth of the cost residents are facing to pay for the remediation of the dangerous cladding.
Barratt Homes has offered £1,308,543 to pay for internal fire safety works and the cost of the waking watch patrolling Royal Artillery Quays in south-east London.
It had initially offered £585,000 in March to cover the cost of waking watch, and agreed in principle to make a further payment to cover the cost of internal safety works.
But it will contribute nothing to the £13m cost of replacing an extruded polystyrene cladding system on the walls of the blocks. The bill for this is set to land on residents if it is not successful in a bid for limited public funding.
This is expected to cost around £45,000 each for the residents, who have been served Section 20 notices informing them of the forthcoming bills.
The offer is also almost £300,000 short of the bill to residents for works excluding the cladding removal, according to an assessment by managing agent Rendall & Rittner. Barratt - however - says that this balance is for works related to the cladding, albeit not for the actual removal.
A recent poll of the residents in the building showed that if they were made to foot the bill, 63% of the leaseholders would be facing bankruptcy.
Barratt has made profits of £2.24bn since 2017/18.
The firm claims that the cladding system “met the requirements of the building regulations at the time of construction in 2003”.
It said the development was signed off by an approved inspector and the render system “had British Board of Agrément certification for its use on buildings with no restriction on their height”.
However, official guidance in Approved Document B would not have permitted combustible insulation on buildings above 18m until 2006 – and even then, only as part of a system which had passed a large-scale test.
An application has been made to the severely oversubscribed Building Safety Fund for help with the cost of remediating the block.
The building is one of thousands around the country requiring major remediation work due to serious internal and external fire safety defects.
A spokesperson for Barratt Developments said: “We are sorry to hear of the difficulties facing leaseholders at Royal Artillery Quays. We believe that the managing agents have applied to the government’s Building Safety Fund, and hope that application is successful.
“Where internal remediation work has been identified, we will ensure leaseholders don’t have to meet the costs of that work. We can confirm that £1.3m has been paid to help support the leaseholders in this matter.”
Update at 13.45 on 14/11/2020
This story was updated to make it clear that Barratt believes the costs it is not covering relate to the need to remove the cladding.
Based on the recommendations of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee and backed by a range of sector bodies and MPs from across the political spectrum, these are Inside Housing’s 10 steps to End Our Cladding Scandal:
Organisations:
Individuals and experts:
Politicians:
Lord Young of Cookham (Conservative)