Diagnosing the cladding crisis: the UK residents trapped in unsellable homes
Posted on: 28 January, 2025
The aftermath of the Grenfell Tower Fire continues to impact lives almost eight years on. But why has action been so slow?
The last decade has been a time of unprecedented change for the built environment.
In the wake of the Grenfell Tower Fire of 2017, the introduction of the Building Safety Act has brought with it a raft of changes to ensure greater accountability among professionals involved in construction. It’s also thrust the building control profession into the spotlight and brought forth a wide range of new regulations.
While the final report from the Grenfell inquiry was published in September of last year, the consequences of this disaster will continue to influence the construction and property landscape for many years come.
Almost eight years on from the fire, ‘the cladding crisis’ continues to rage on in the sector. As a result, residents of tower blocks and homes across the United Kingdom have found themselves trapped in dangerous homes they can’t sell. Here’s what’s happening.
What is the cladding crisis?
Since the fire, poor quality and defective cladding – the external material applied to buildings to provide thermal insulation and weather resistance – has been identified across thousands of buildings in the UK.
Investigations into Grenfell revealed that these buildings had the same fire safety risks, meaning hundreds of residents were living in high-risk properties and lives were in immediate danger.
In response, the UK government has issued significant funding to aid the replacement of dangerous and flammable cladding. However, progress in remedying the issues has been agonisingly slow.
The background: how it all started
Grenfell and similar incidents in recent years brought to light the major inadequacies in the built environment regarding compliance with building regulations.
Among many other conclusions, the final report from the Grenfell Inquiry found that the management of building safety in the country was ‘seriously defective’ and that the disaster ‘could have been prevented’.
In the immediate aftermath, building safety regulations were placed under review. For instance, the External Wall System Form (EWS1), introduced in 2019, aims to give lenders and buyers proof that assessment on external walls for suitable cladding has been carried out.
Another example is the Building Safety Act, announced in 2022 and implemented in 2024, which aims to ensure greater accountability in the early stages of the building lifecycle.
However, one challenge that quickly became clear as inquiries began was the sheer number of buildings with similar issues to Grenfell Tower.
The scale of the cladding crisis
There are various estimates to the exact number of buildings with significant fire safety issues.
According to GOV.UK, by July 2024 remediation had been started or completed on 2,299 buildings with ‘life-critical’ fire safety hazards, leaving 2,331 with no work done to them at all. This list includes both high-rise (18m+) and mid-rise (11-18m) tall buildings).
In March 2024, another analysis found that work has been done to just 142 (14%) of the 1035 buildings identified where developers had agreed to undertake remediation work.
Yet these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. In March 2021 it was estimated that as many as 1.5 million flats in the UK had fire safety issues or were clad in flammable materials. In 2022, half a million people were still living in buildings with some form of unsafe cladding, according to the Association of Residential Managing Agents.
Yet it’s not just the significant safety risk that residents of these flats have to contend with. Another devastating impact of the cladding crisis is the impact it has on their ability to sell or insure a property.
Residents of blocks identified to have dangerous cladding face enormous insurance bills, with many insurance providers leaving the market altogether and leaving few options.
The impact today: ‘living in a nightmare’
Oceana Boulevard is a block of flats in Southampton, Hampshire, with cladding on balconies and fire doors that do not fully seal.
However, fire safety work has not commenced. Residents of Oceana have faced ‘soaring’ maintenance prices but are unable to sell their properties without significant losses, and are essentially trapped in dangerous flats.
According to the BBC, work was due to start in September of 2024 to remove combustible materials from balconies and terraces, but this has been delayed. Once work begins, it will take 12 months.
Oceana is just one of the thousands of high-risk properties across the country where residents face this dilemma – ‘living in a nightmare,’ as one resident put it.
Over in Bristol, BBC also reported of another case at Clayewater Court, where residents have found it ‘almost impossible’ for potential buyers to get a mortgage because of inadequate fire safety.
This has left some residents trapped in the property for seven years. Yet despite this, the developer, Clayewater Homes, stated that the flat ‘met all relevant building regulations in force at the time’ it was built and sold, and that ‘we have no legal or contractual responsibility for any further works.’
Why is it taking so long to solve the crisis?
Part of what has made the cladding crisis drag on for so long is the inaction and blame game on the part of developers.
As Peter Apps notes for Inside Housing, a significant reason for delays is developers desire to do the ‘minimum necessary’.
“For the buildings which developers have taken responsibility for, the government’s contract only requires them to remediate in line with a “life safety” risk assessment. But such an assessment will often be controversial, because while the developer will want to do the minimum necessary to achieve a ‘tolerable’ risk to residents, the freeholder who owns the building may well want the failures remediated in full.”
There’s also the issue of disputes. In the same article, Apps points to a building in east London, where a dispute between the freeholder and developer has halted remediation work.
While the freeholder is understandably seeking full remediation to make the building completely safe, its residents find themselves stuck in a totally unsafe building until the dispute is resolved.
An ongoing skills shortage is also a contributor to the slow rate of change. It’s no secret that the built environment struggles to attract new talent. With complex processes like remediation, dozens of different perspectives and viewpoints are required, commanding expertise that the construction sector simply doesn’t have in large amounts at this moment in time.
These issues, coupled with a shortage of materials and supply chain issues, continue to delay action.
Is there an end in sight?
The Labour Government in the UK has been vocal about this crisis since becoming the ruling party last year, with building safety a major talking point of the 2024 General Election.
It has since announced a scheme that plans for all unsafe cladding to have either been removed or remediated by 2030 for buildings over 36ft (11m) tall.
However, the outlook remains bleak. The National Audit Office (NAO), a UK spending watchdog, predicts the crisis will take 10 years and £17bn to solve, and a Channel 4 investigation questioned whether the government was doing enough to address the problem.
Until stronger and decisive action is taken, it’s all too likely that the cladding crisis will continue to threaten lives and trap communities for years to come.
Building control is a key profession that emerged in the wake of building safety reform. Professionals in this field play a pivotal role in ensuring accountability in decision-making throughout every stage of the construction process, and their expertise helps all professions in the sector ensure buildings are safe, accessible and sustainable places for us to live in.
Onboarding more building control experts is one solution to the cladding crisis. UCEM’s BSc (Hons) Building Control programme and Level 6 Building Control Surveyor apprenticeship, designed in response to the Building Safety Act and changes in regulation, can equip the next generation of professionals with the skills and knowledge to uphold these crucial safety standards.
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