Major UK housebuilder estimates fire safety issues on buildings could take between 5-7 years to fix

Barratt Homes, one of the UK’s largest housebuilders and one of 49 firms that have signed up to the building safety pledge to protect leaseholders from the costs of remediation, has estimated that work to fix fire safety defects on buildings could take up to seven years to fix.

A news report from Inside Housing says that the “seven-year figure is precautionary”, with the aim that work “should be delivered over the next three to five years”.

The developer indicated that labour shortages and the rising cost prices of materials could contribute to potential delays.

Barratt Homes has put aside over £396 million for the remediation work according to its financial accounts, though the firm admitted it has “limited experience” of remediation work at its Annual General Meeting in October. To estimate costs, the firm has combined figures from the wider industry to get an average per building, which was multiplied by the number of plots where they needed to take responsibility for remediation, with some inflation and contingency on top.

End our Cladding Scandal (EOCS), who had a representative at the AGM, asked how many of Barratt’s buildings were impacted and how many had begun remediation measures. These questions were not answered, it says.

Regarding signing the building safety pledge announced by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities earlier this year, Chairman John Allan stated that the developer was acting out of “a sense of moral obligation” on building safety. It has not signed a legal contract, however, because “the draft from the Government is not in a form that any builder could sign up to”, while also noting that the Government didn’t need to threaten with commercial consequences if they didn’t sign the developer pledge.

Read the full report of the AGM from EOCS, here.

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