Fire safety campaigners have appealed to the Labour Party to commit to justice for leaseholders following the cladding crisis that caused 72 deaths in the 2017 Grenfell blaze.
Panels made from plastic and aluminium were installed on the sides of Grenfell Tower in London, an inquiry was held in 2021 following the tragedy. It has been found that the highly flammable cladding has been blamed for helping flames to spread when fire broke out in June 2017, and it has since been discovered the same material has been used in hundreds of high-rise buildings and homes in the UK.
The End Our Cladding Scandal team have released a statement imploring Labour to ensure the Building Safety Act 2022 would ‘operate as intended’ to protect leaseholders after the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill stated that ‘collectively enfranchise or manage the buildings containing their flats’.
The organisation say the General Election has left ‘600,000 people living in homes that are unsafe’ and that 3 million people are ‘trapped with homes they cannot sell’.
The End Our Cladding Scandal manifesto outlines an action plan for the next government after estimates of 10,000 unsafe buildings in the country were reported after news outlet LBC obtained government figures. Nearly 4,400 buildings are being monitored by the government in a pace the End Our Cladding Scandal bosses are calling ‘glacial’.
A representative from the organisation has said: “We already know what Rishi Sunak thinks after he told the Treasury Select Committee that leaseholders are “regular sources of funding” in November 2021. He has chosen to listen to powerful vested interests, including Conservative party donors, rather than the ordinary people he was supposed to protect.
“We are now asking Sir Keir Starmer to renew his commitment – last made over three years ago – to protect all leaseholders. In early 2021, Sir Keir said: “Millions of people have been sucked into this crisis due to years of dither, delay and half-baked solutions from the government.” Now, Labour’s final policy platform explicitly states: “Leaseholders should be protected from the costs of remediating cladding and non-cladding defects in all buildings irrespective of circumstance.”
“In January 2023, Michael Gove finally admitted what we had all known for years: that faulty and ambiguous guidance caused this crisis. As Dame Judith Hackitt said in 2017, building regulations were simply not fit for purpose. Successive governments ignored multiple warnings as they focused on the interests of industry, with bad practice accepted as the norm. But leaseholders are still being forced to pay.
In 2022, Michael Gove revealed a plan to reset the government’s approach which included opening up the next phase of the Building Safety Fund to drive forward taking dangerous cladding off high-rise buildings, prioritising the government’s £5.1 billion funding on the highest risk
Gove claimed that ‘those at fault will be held properly to account and that a new team was being established to pursue and expose companies at fault, making them fix the buildings they built and face commercial consequences if they refuse’.
