You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Government has ‘limited’ powers to force overseas building owners to remove dangerous cladding, says MHCLG chief
The government’s ability to make overseas building owners remove dangerous cladding is “very limited”, MPs have been told.
Jeremy Pocklington, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), told the MPs on Monday that cladding remediation work is slower in the private sector partly due to “incredibly complicated ownership structures involving overseas financial investors”.
He was speaking at a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) session investigating the government’s progress in removing dangerous cladding from buildings following the Grenfell Tower fire.
He told the PAC: “It’s a sad reality that our ability to seek redress from an overseas financial investor is, of course, very, very limited.”
Mr Pocklington said that often these investors do not have “any interest in the welfare of residents or leaseholders”.
The government had originally aimed to have remediation of dangerous Grenfell-style cladding completed by June 2020 but recently backed down from that deadline. Mr Pocklington said it now aims to have remediation work done by the end of 2021.
READ MORE
Another factor in the slow progress of remediation work is a lack of expertise among building owners to begin work, the PAC was told.
Neil O’Connor, director for the building safety programme at MHCLG, said: “We have been surprised, as have our delivery partners Homes England and the Greater London Authority, at the lack of expertise and competence among building owners to conduct these projects.”
Asked by MPs why MHCLG had opted for a first-come-first-served approach to its cladding remediation funds, the civil servants said that taking a risk-based approach would require assessing individual cases, which would slow down remediation work on the whole.
Mr O’Connor also said the ministry “would not rule out” that there could be more buildings found to have aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding.
He said: “We would not say, ‘absolutely there’s no chance of any other buildings being identified with ACM’ – it’s possible.”
“We do believe that we have identified and reached a position of reasonable confidence that the vast majority of such buildings have been identified.”
Mr Pocklington highlighted the impact coronavirus has had on remediation work – works on 81 active sites have been paused during the lockdown period.
There are currently 23 sites where works remain paused but MHCLG intends to get these back up and running before the end of the year and is aiming to have all unsafe ACM removed by the end of next year.
