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Clarion triples fire safety budget
The UK’s largest housing association has tripled its fire safety budget as a response to the Grenfell Tower fire.
Dan Hollas, project director for fire at Clarion Housing Group, revealed the budget change at a session on fire safety at Housing 2018, the Chartered Institute of Housing conference and exhibition.
He said that previously the fire safety budget was £12.5m over 18 months and now it is £61m over two-and-a-half years, almost three times as much on average per year.
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Mr Hollas said: “I started this role nine months before the Grenfell Tower fire, with Clarion, so we knew that we had an issue at the time in terms of our fire safety approach. And that gave us a bit of a head start, in terms of how we were going to manage it.
“Post-Grenfell, we needed to shift our resources and we did a significant amount of work on our 10-storey-plus buildings. We’ve got 42 which are that height and above. We’d largely completed the work that we needed to do to make the buildings safe by March, and we’re working on the six-plus storey.”
London’s largest housing association, L&Q, revealed last August that it had set aside £50m over three years to pay for fire safety works in its tower blocks.
The government has since said it will pay for the replacement of all dangerous cladding on social housing tower blocks, estimating that it will cost £400m.
It has not made similar promises for any other fire safety works, and many social landlords have been installing sprinklers, replacing fire doors and taking other measures to make their buildings safe.
Asked at the same session whether £400m was enough to replace dangerous cladding, Robin Lawler, chief executive of Northwards Housing, an ALMO in North Manchester, said: “Who knows? It comes down to when you’ve taken the cladding off, it may not just be a case of replacing the cladding.
“Certainly the experience of some of the landlords in Greater Manchester is they’ve had to look at the fire stopping and other arrangements on there, and it depends whether the insulation is compliant or whether they have to replace that as well.”
