United Kingdom cladding crisis

The cladding crisis or cladding scandal is an ongoing social crisis in the United Kingdom that followed the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 and the Bolton Cube fire of 15 November 2019. The fires revealed that large numbers of buildings had been clad in dangerously combustible materials, comprising a combination of flammable cladding (the outer covering) and/or flammable insulation. (The term 'cladding' here refers to the external covering and the insulation behind it.)

Additionally, many buildings have been found to be non-compliant with other fire-safety building requirements, such as missing cavity barriers around windows and a lack of fire barriers, which are intended to prevent fires from spreading horizontally and vertically into neighbouring flats.

As well as these buildings posing an immediate fire risk to residents, flat owners find themselves facing extensive and costly remedial work, rocketing buildings insurance premiums, inability to sell their properties for more than 7 years, and the possibility of 'waking watches': paying people to patrol buildings 24/7 to check for fires.

Mortgage lenders, struggling to quantify the fire-risks posed by different buildings, have ceased to lend money for the purchase of many properties unless their owners can prove the building is safe, usually by way of an 'EWS1' form.

As of February 2021, the UK government had pledged over £5 billion towards remediation works, but extensive costs were still falling on the shoulders of individual leaseholders of flats who had unwittingly purchased unlawfully constructed homes.

Background

In the 1980s, the Conservative Government introduced its Deregulation Initiative; in consequence, the Building Act 1984 reduced building regulations from 306 pages to 24.

In the same period, the government introduced compulsory competitive tendering, requiring local government to compete with the private sector in delivering services. Accordingly, in 1985, the National House Building Council became the first non-public sector body to be allowed to compete with local authorities for checking that building work complied with regulations. The Conservative government fully liberalised building control in 1997.