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Country’s largest housing association reveals £20m fire safety spend
The country’s largest housing association has revealed that fire safety work is set to cost it around £20m in 2018/19.
Clarion Housing Group revealed that its expected fire safety spend for the year is already £18m, and that number is expected to rise to £20m by the end of the month.
The figures were given to Inside Housing following a presentation by Dan Hollas, project director for fire safety at Clarion, at last week’s Total Housing conference, run by the Chartered Institute of Housing.
The total includes around £12.8m on passive fire protection including door installations, compartmentation work and fire-stopping work, and approximately £4.5m on active fire protection such as the installation of alarm systems.
The presentation by Mr Hollas also included details of the work the association had been carrying out over the past 12 months, including the removal of cladding from a number of its high-rise tower blocks.
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This included work to remove aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding from its Messenger Court building in Southwark, south-east London. The building, which is 17.95 metres tall, is under the government’s threshold of 18 metres for removal work, but Clarion made the decision to remediate and the cladding has now been fully removed.
Mr Hollas also revealed that the association had carried out work on its Gladstone Place development in Tower Hamlets, which included blocks with five types of cladding including ACM, high pressure laminate (HPL) and timber.
The 125,000-home landlord has removed the cladding at the development already, and is considering whether to remove the other materials.
Last week it was revealed that Notting Hill Genesis would be removing HPL cladding from one of the blocks in the east London development that includes the iconic Halo Tower.
Clarion currently has 24 buildings of over 10 storeys that have undergone passive fire safety work totalling around £6.5m, and 116 buildings between six and nine storeys. Fire safety work carried out on these buildings has cost approximately £3m.
Passive fire safety work across all Clarion stock has included the replacement of around 1,400 fire doors, compartmentation inspections on 295 blocks, fire-stopping work on 113 blocks and the installation of more than 1,000 overhead closing devices.
Active safety work has included the removal of 180 fire alarm systems that were not appropriate for the building type and the installation of 162 fire detection systems.
As part of Clarion’s plans to improve its fire safety work in the future, Mr Hollas also revealed that the association would appoint a building safety manager to oversee the fire safety improvement work in its high-rise buildings.
The £50,000-a-year job will see the manager responsible for fire safety performance on a number of Clarion’s buildings.
