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Government pays out just £1m of £200m private cladding fund in first year
The government has only paid out just £1.4m of a £200m cladding fund set up last May to speed up the removal of Grenfell-style cladding from private sector blocks, a new report by the National Audit Office has revealed.
In a report published today investigating the pace of the government’s plan to remediate buildings with dangerous cladding, the public spending watchdog revealed that only £1.42m, just 0.7% of the £200m fund, had been handed out by the end of April.
Last year, the then housing secretary James Brokenshire announced he would be creating the fund to speed up work. Saying that he was calling time on delaying tactics by “reckless building owners” and allowing the government to step in to speed up the process.
However, since the fund was officially launched last September, leaseholders in affected blocks have complained of issues with the fund, including having to get all leaseholders in a block to fill out state aid forms before buildings can apply.
According to the report, the government had approved applications worth £24.9m but this still only accounted for 12.5% of the total fund.
The government’s Building Safety Programme figures from April said that only 9 of the 94 buildings in scope to claim money had been approved for funding.
This contrasts with a similar fund set up in May 2018 for social housing landlord. The government has so far handed out £133m, around 33% of the fund, to social landlords.
The slow pace of remediation is shown in the number of buildings covered in ACM that have been fully remediated, more than three years after Grenfell. The ACM has been identified as the key reasons for the rapid fire spread on the night of the fire.
Of 456 buildings found to have the ACM cladding only 149 have been full remediated so far.
Commenting on these findings, Gareth Davies, the chair of the NAO, said the pace of progress still “lagged behind [the government’s] expectations” and it had a long way to go until high-rise buildings were safe for residents.
The slow pace of work is particularly true for private sector blocks, where only 28 (13.5%) of the 208 buildings have seen ACM cladding full removed so far. This is compared to 46.8% of social sector buildings and 66.7% in student accommodation blocks.
The report revealed that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has estimated that all buildings within its scope for ACM funding would be completed by mid-2022, with over 95% finished by the end of 2021.
Nevertheless, the NAO pointed to the fact that this estimate didn’t take into account that the COVID-19 epidemic had slowed the pace of remediation and more than 60% of re-cladding projects were paused in April.
The report also showed the ineffectiveness of trying to recoup costs from contractors, with the department admitting it could take years for building owners to recover costs through legal proceedings. So far, the department has only recouped £0.8m from contractors for buildings in the private sector and £6.4m from contractors responsible for the installation of cladding in the social sector.
Earlier this month, the government launched its £1bn building safety fund aimed at assisting the removal of dangerous non-ACM cladding from high-rise buildings across the country. It has had 458 buildings register in the first two weeks.
According to MHCLG, it aims to commit the full £1bn from the fund by the end of March 2021.
However, the report warned that the administration of the new scheme may present significant challenges given how demanding the management of the existing ACM funds had been, despite being only half the size of the new fund.
Mr Davies said: “Going forward it is important that the Department successfully manages the administrative challenges of funding building owners to carry out work, particularly given its intention to commit a further £1bn in full by the end of March.”
An MHCLG spokesperson said: “We are clear that building owners must keep their residents safe and we are providing them with unprecedented support to do so.
“The government has provided £1.6bn to ensure unsafe ACM and non-ACM cladding is removed swiftly from high-rise buildings, and is bringing forward the biggest change in building safety in a generation.
“We have made progress with the removal and replacement of ACM cladding, but it is clear there is much more still to be done and building owners have a legal responsibility to ensure their building is safe.”
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