Let’s start with a simple statement of the problem. Around the country, between 9,000 and 12,000 medium or high rise buildings have fire safety problems with their external façade severe enough to pose a risk to life.
Of these, just 1,482 have completed works and just 5,025 have been formally identified. The identified buildings account for 273,000 individual homes, which means there are likely around 500,000 homes overall, which means something like 1.5m people sleep in blocks that might kill them in a fire.
Currently, we’re completing about 10 buildings a month which means that if we don’t speed up, we’ll finish the last building somewhere around 2100 (assuming the sea level rises don’t come for us first).
And while we have some idea how to pay for these repairs (a messy combination of developers, taxpayers, freeholders and leaseholders), we don’t have anything approaching a financial strategy which matches the estimated £16.6bn price tag of the problem.
Our process of assessing buildings and working out what needs to be done is also deeply flawed, unregulated and currently the subject of predictable scandal.
This is a big problem, and demands a big strategy.
So far, the government has been unwilling to introduce big changes – sticking instead with the basics of the approach the preceding administration set in motion, albeit with some tweaks aimed to make it run faster.
This is not really good enough and represents (in my view) a classic embodiment of the sunken costs fallacy.
The building safety crisis is a complex and multifaceted one which evades a perfect or easy solution. But there are ways of approaching it which are less flawed and easier than the current mess.
The answer is to set up a system which offers three things the current one fails to: consistency, clear funding and control.
The current approach is inconsistent and unpredictable. The use of loose, bespoke guidance same building may be considered in need of remediation by one assessor, and cleared by another. The means of fixing the problem may also be different.
This causes an enormous amount of delay – because different parties fight over exactly what needs to be done to the building instead of just doing it.
A new approach would acknowledge a few simple facts. The first would be that we simply cannot fix every building. A combination of sloppy government guidance and industry malpractice means we have used combustible materials ubiquitously in the built environment for 40 years.
The government’s approach since the very early days of this crisis has been to say that building owners need to work out what to do based on professional assessment, instead of being told what to do by the state.
There is some logic behind this – all buildings are different and prescriptive rules can have messy, imperfect results.
But the reality is that the industry – with all its many conflicts of interest and incompetencies – has proved itself incapable of this task.
It is also true that while all buildings are different, most of them are also quite similar and what is a fire risk in Building A will also be a fire risk in Building B, C, D, E and F.
So we should have a basic, government-mandated system of scoring – with points added for factors like height, building occupancy, cladding material, extent of cladding, presence of combustible balconies and so on and taken off for sprinklers, fire alarms, second staircases and other features which reduce the risk. Score over a certain level, and you would need to bring the numbers down with the addition of risk mitigation – which may or may not involve full building regulation.
The next step is certainty of funding. Building remediation only really gets going when we have agreed how to pay for it. And the current bunfight over responsibility makes that very hard and very slow to define.
The answer is for Rachel Reeves to borrow the cash up front and over a long period of time.
But before someone screams the words “self-imposed fiscal rules” at their screen, she should also create a mechanism for getting it back – a long-term, statutory levy on companies across the various areas of the construction sector which have contributed to the mess.
Thanks to her tweaking of debt rules last autumn, this would actually give the government a pass to write the borrowing off.
And finally, control. In Victoria, Australia, a cladding taskforce has overseen and in some cases directly delivered the works to buildings. A regulator with powers to get a grip on the works, setting timescales and issuing fines for non-compliance, would force those who are delaying unreasonably to pull their fingers out.
Put all of these things together and you would have a system which focuses us on the most dangerous buildings, funds the work for them and gets it done. This does not need to be a process which drags on forever. But unless we take a new approach, it will be.
