Housing Secretary Michael Gove had a busy weekend. After admitting that flawed government guidance regarding fire safety requirements for new buildings contributed to the cladding crisis which has exploded since Grenfell, Gove gave house builders a six week deadline to sign legal contracts which will require them to fix fire safety defects.
This is a huge step forward for homeowners trapped in unsafe blocks. It is also a significant development in terms of the Government’s position on the building safety scandal, which has seen tens of thousands of people living in buildings which are covered in flammable cladding and have other fire safety defects such as faulty fire doors or wooden balconies.
Gove said that building regulations were “faulty and ambiguous” before the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower killed 72 people. This is the first time a government minister has accepted that the state played a role in allowing the building safety scandal to occur in the first place by failing to regulate builders properly.
Until now, that has never been acknowledged. Indeed, even the Hackitt Review (an independent review of building regulations and fire safety ordered after Grenfell) stated that there was “inadequate regulatory oversight” but did not go as far as criticising the regulations themselves.
Gove, on the other hand, has now said that poor government guidance on building safety allowed “unscrupulous people to exploit a broken system”.
This change in rhetoric is significant. But if the state bears some of the responsibility for the fact that unsafe homes have been built, should it not also be bearing the brunt of costs to make them fire safe?
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So far, there has been government funding to the tune of £3.5bn for cladding removal on high rise blocks, but no contribution for other fire safety issues.
As things stand, some homeowners are still potentially on the hook for fixing the unsafe homes they bought in good faith because these new legal contracts are limited in their scope, focusing on cladding and not other fire safety issues such as fire doors and balconies.
Justin Bates is a barrister at Landmark Chambers where he specialises in housing and is currently working with homeowners caught up in the building safety crisis.
“What troubles me is that the contracts focus only on works which are ‘life critical’,” Bates explains after reading Gove’s demand for builders to pay. “The reality is that buildings often need a variety of works to make them safe, not all of which are ‘life critical’.”
Whether a fire safety issue is deemed “life critical” is complex and will likely depend on fire risk assessments.
“I worry that works which comply with the contract will just leave other safety works left still to be done and paid for by the freeholders or leasehold homeowners,” Bates adds.
Other expert housing lawyers have told me that the Housing Secretary talks a good game but warn that “talk is cheap”.
One, who wished not to be named because it could impact cases they are currently working on, said that Gove was “playing everyone” over the weekend in a bid to avoid bad press when the Grenfell Inquiry publishes its findings later this year.
This is because there were various warnings about the safety of Grenfell-style cladding long before the fire in West London claimed so many lives. No action was taken by governments at the time to heed those warnings.
“We all know that the governments going back to the Coalition bear some responsibility for terrible laws, guidance and a failure to respond to earlier tragedies such as the Lakanal House Fire in 2009,” one lawyer said. “The Grenfell Inquiry will make that criticism and all Gove is doing is drawing the sting from that terrible publicity when it comes by owning up now.”
It is now exactly a year since Gove wrote to builders and told them they had to pay for make buildings fire safe. Once again, the Housing Secretary is playing hardball but failing to stump up any extra government cash to make buildings safe once and for all which would free leasehold homeowners from the burden of having to pay for costs beyond those associated with cladding.
If it was, as Mr Gove says, a combination of state regulation failures and unethical building practices that caused the building safety scandal, the question of why any innocent homeowner could possibly have to cough up anything at all to make sure their home isn’t putting their life at risk remains. When the Grenfell Inquiry does publish its findings, that may be a question the Government is forced to answer.
Vicky Spratt is i‘s housing correspondent