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Camden Council’s fire safety work to cost £80m

Camden Council has estimated that fire safety work in the borough will cost it around £80m.

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The Chalcots Estate in Camden
The Chalcots Estate in Camden
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Camden will install solid aluminium cladding on the Chalcots Estate #ukhousing

The council could spend up to £22m on the Chalcots Estate alone #ukhousing

Camden still hasn’t started post-Grenfell fire risk assessments on many tower blocks #ukhousing

Among other works, the authority is set to spend up to £22m on solid aluminium panels for the five tower blocks on the Chalcots Estate that had been covered in Grenfell-style cladding.

This, in addition to the £30m already spent on evacuating residents on that estate and removing the previous cladding, means the estate makes up most of the total spend.

A report to the council’s Housing Scrutiny Committee admits that it does not yet know where the money will come from.


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A council spokesperson told Inside Housing that Camden had submitted detailed information about the works required to the cabinet.

The Chalcots’ new cladding would look very similar to the previous one, but rather than having a flammable polyethylene core, it would be solid aluminium.

The council estimates that installing the cladding will cost £16m, and additional fire-stopping work to the towers could cost up to £6m.

The aim, should the council’s cabinet approve the work, is for work to start on site in July and finish in August 2019.

The government has so far been reluctant to help pay for fire safety work, turning down requests from Nottingham and Croydon Councils to fund the installation of sprinklers.

But civil servants revealed this week that four councils – as yet unnamed – will be granted financial flexibility “in the next few weeks” to pay for high-rise fire safety works.

The council’s report read: “The council is investigating funding all or part of the fire safety programme from potential legal liability payments and lobbying the government for funding and additional financial freedoms.

“If this is unsuccessful, the options to fund the safety works could include one or a combination of the following: increased borrowing; re-prioritising the current Better Homes programme; or generating receipts from disposals.”

Camden Council has already spent almost £10m on fire safety works in other parts of the borough and has carried out fire risk assessments (FRAs) on all its buildings that are 10 storeys or higher since the fire at Grenfell Tower.

In December, however, as reported by Inside Housing, 215 towers in the borough of between six and nine storeys had gone more than three years without FRAs.

Camden Council has yet to start its programme of checks on these towers, but it plans to carry out ‘Type 4’ FRAs on all of them, a more intrusive approach that has been adopted by a number of London councils.

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