The government has lost patience with private owners of high-rise buildings who have failed to remove dangerous Grenfell-style cladding and has given councils the power to strip the materials off themselves and reclaim the multimillion-pound cost from the landlords.

The housing secretary, James Brokenshire, has acted after months of warnings to the landlords of at least 100 high-rise apartment blocks, hotels and student residences who have failed to produce plans to remove the dangerous cladding and have threatened to pass on the cost to leaseholders.

He announced on Thursday a change to housing health and safety regulations to force landlords to put things right.



A total of 289 privately owned high-rise residential blocks have been identified as using similar aluminium composite (ACM) cladding to Grenfell. At only 40 of these have the panels so far been removed or started to be removed. At a further 147 there are plans underway or in development to do so, but the status of 102 buildings remains unclear.

The new powers for councils to intervene are likely to come as a relief for thousands of leaseholders who have been faced with individual bills of tens of thousands of pounds from building owners to replace combustible cladding similar to that which spread the flames at Grenfell.

The government has spent £400m replacing such panels and insulation on social housing across England and said it would now provide cash to councils to carry out works on private blocks on the basis that they would have the powers to reclaim it.

“Everyone has a right to feel safe in their homes and I have repeatedly made clear that building owners and developers must replace dangerous ACM cladding,” Brokenshire said. “And the costs must not be passed on to leaseholders. My message is clear: private building owners must pay for this work now or they should expect to pay more later.”

Fran Roddington, a resident at the Green Quarter apartments in Manchester, where 342 leaseholders were each facing a possible £15,000 bill to replace combustible cladding, gave the move a cautious welcome.

“It has taken far too long for them to act,” she said. “We found out we had the cladding in July 2017. But anything from a financial perspective is very, very welcome news.”

A property tribunal had already ruled in one case that the leaseholders were responsible for the cost rather than the building owner, so Roddington said she remained concerned that even if the council intervened and billed the owner, it could still seek to pass on the cost.

Hemal Rawal, a resident at New Providence Wharf in Tower Hamlets, east London, said: “This is a great step by Brokenshire but we are still in the dark about whether the local authorities have the power to go in and do this.”

He said the freeholder, Ballymore, has told leaseholders they must share a bill of up to £3m to reclad the building.

Brokenshire also announced a ban on all types of combustible cladding, including ACM, with hospitals, care homes and high-rise schools included alongside all new high-rise housing.

In the first law change on building and fire safety since the June 2017 disaster, the government banned combustible materials in external walls of new buildings over 18 metres tall containing flats, as well as in all new hospitals, residential care homes, dormitories in boarding schools and student accommodation over 18 metres.

Previously builders could claim that, used in different combinations, some combustible materials would meet building regulations, a system that was widely criticised for leaving too much to interpretation.

However, doors, windows and seals and thermal break materials will not have to be non-combustible. Some of these elements have been shown during the Grenfell public inquiry to have contributed to the spread of the fire. The government said it was keeping this under review.

The ban on combustible materials will come into effect on 21 December. The policy is set to cost developers about £30m a year, the government estimates. New high-rise school premises built by the state’s centrally delivered building programme will also have to comply with the ban, but private schools will not be obliged to do so.

The move applies only to new buildings. That means uncertainty for people living in an estimated 160 apartment, hotel and student blocks built since 2013 with combustible materials in their rainscreen cladding systems which have not been stripped off because they do not feature the type of aluminium composite cladding used at Grenfell.

This week Brokenshire ordered an independent expert advisory panel on fire safety to review its advice to owners of buildings with other types of cladding “to determine if additional action or guidance is required”.

Officials are understood to believe that a bespoke response was required to strip off existing ACM panels as well as ban them in the future, because available evidence showed a marked difference with other types of combustible materials.

The announcement in parliament comes six months after Dame Judith Hackitt, the government’s reviewer of building regulations post-Grenfell, said “restricting or prohibiting certain practices will not address the root causes” of indifference and ignorance that had led to a “race to the bottom” in building safety practices, with cost prioritised over safety.

But the government faced widespread pressure from the bereaved, survivors and residents to ban the type of materials used on Grenfell and indicated it would do so. Seventy-two people died in the Grenfell fire.

Grenfell United, which represents the bereaved, survivors and resident of Grenfell said it will examine the detail of the announcement with its lawyers in the coming days.

“James Brokenshire must be under no doubt, for bereaved families and survivors this is only the very beginning,” a spokesperson said. “The government must show they will learn the lessons of Grenfell.”