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Building Safety Fund opens to applications from social landlords
The government has published guidance for social landlords on how to apply for a £1bn fund to pay for the removal of dangerous cladding without billing leaseholders.
The Building Safety Fund, announced in March, offers government support to social landlords and private building owners for remediation work where they would otherwise pass on costs to leaseholders.
Today the government has provided specific guidance for social housing providers seeking to apply, available here.
The fund is limited to £1bn, which the government accepts will not be enough to cover work for all of the estimated 1,700 buildings affected. Owners of more than 1,000 have already registered an interest.
Guidance published today says the government will prioritise funding for building owners who can demonstrate that the contractor will start work on cladding remediation by 31 March next year. This means the commencement of actual cladding removal, rather than any interim measures.
The claims process is open from today until March, but online forms must be completed by 31 December to be considered.
Social landlords will need to provide:
- Confirmation that evidence is available to support submissions regarding eligibility of height and materials.
- Confirmation of costs of the project – this could be a report from a cost consultant, together with the basis on which costs attributable to leaseholders have been calculated.
- Confirmation that they have the legal right to recharge leaseholders – this could be evidence in the form of a copy of a lease agreement that contains the legal right to pass cost back to leaseholders. Social housing providers will be expected to show a representative sample demonstrating that the ability to recharge is across all leases.
- Certification that the project will be on site and remediation work will have started by 31 March 2021.
They will not need to impose a formal ‘Section 20’ order claiming for the funds from leaseholders in order to recoup them.
The costs that will be covered will be informed by an industry standard approach, benchmarked to comparable projects. The guidance says higher-than-expected costs will be “challenged and will be subject to further scrutiny”.
The funding is not available for buildings below 17.7m in height. Replacement work for any combustible window sets or balconies are not eligible for funding.
The Building Safety Fund covers all combustible cladding systems that are not made of aluminium composite material (ACM).
Those products were initially funded through a £400m scheme for social housing, carved out of the grant programme and announced in May 2018, and a further £200m for private buildings announced in May 2019.
The government initially refused to pay for any non-ACM towers, insisting ACM was a uniquely dangerous material, but caved in to pressure after concerted campaigning by affected leaseholders and their MPs.
This campaigning work Inside Housing’s End Our Cladding Scandal campaign, which has called for a building safety fund since its inception alongside key leaseholder groups in April 2019.
