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The national health and safety watchdog has set up a team to visit buildings where the cladding is being replaced to monitor safety.
Fifteen inspectors from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) are planning to carry out unannounced visits to tower blocks, starting with mainly social housing, to ensure that cladding replacement is being done safely.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has provided HSE with a full list of buildings clad in aluminium composite material (ACM), the material used on Grenfell Tower.
It will be visiting the ones which are at higher risk, along with the local fire and rescue service, to consider various issues relating to the prevention of fire. This will cover between 80 and 90 buildings, around 20% of those on MHCLG’s list.
Ray Cooke, head of the construction safety team at the HSE, told Inside Housing: “The process issues are very much about what techniques of work are they going to choose to use. Are there safer techniques of work to cut down on the risk of fire?
“What are you doing with the material that you take off? How much are you keeping on site in any one day? What are your waste collection facilities? All of those sorts of things are process fire risks and that’s very much going to be the emphasis of what we look at.”
Mr Cooke added that the HSE will be writing to the owners and managing agents of the buildings explaining the standards that it will expect when it visits these buildings.
Although the team’s remit covers all buildings clad with ACM, in the social and private sector, Mr Cooke said that it would inevitably begin mainly with social housing because social landlords make up the vast majority of those who have started remediation work.
In June, Claire Curtis-Thomas, chief executive of accreditation body the British Board of Agrément, told MPs that many tower blocks were being left unsafe after the removal of cladding.
Mr Cooke said: “What you can’t do is leave the insulation exposed, as that’s likely to get wet and fall off the building. I hope people, when they have been taking stuff off, have thought through what they’ve been taking off and have done it in a correct way so they’re not creating other risks.”
In the days following the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017, Inside Housing launched the Never Again campaign to call for immediate action to implement the learning from the Lakanal House fire, and a commitment to act – without delay – on learning from the Grenfell Tower tragedy as it becomes available.
One year on, we have extended the campaign asks in the light of information that has emerged since.
Here are our updated asks:
GOVERNMENT
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
LANDLORDS