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ROOFING, CLADDING & INSULATION
The recently confirmed government funding announced for the remediation of non-ACM buildings is relatively modest at £967m
Cladding remediation Public sector cladding remediation: Why is the grant application process still so painful? Peter Johnson, Chairman of Vivalda Group (the UK’s leading distributor of non-flammable façades), believes that the good intentions of The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (now The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities) are being undermined by an onerous and over-complex application process.
T
he Grenfell Tower disaster happened more than four years ago. Yet it still casts a long shadow over the UK’s social and private housing sectors. Back in 2020, the then Housing Minister Robert Jenrick (now replaced by Michael Gove) announced a fund of £1.6bn to fix affected high-rise
buildings. Then in February of 2021 we saw an additional £3.5bn — designed to kickstart building contractors to commence work on unsafe buildings over 18 metres. Since then, progress from the local council and contractor’s perspective has been frustratingly slow. While the funds initially sound impressive — it is now
widely considered that the £5bn figure will need to increase significantly (some say tenfold) to adequately make good all of the buildings at risk as a result of hazardous cladding. Gove’s recent announcement that he would be ‘going after’ those businesses that profited from the sale of unsafe cladding products
