Is this proposal from Michael Gove a potential solution to the post Grenfell fire safety issues?

Question

Are you concerned by the reference to all residential buildings over 11m high constructed in the last 30 years? Or is this a potential for even more litigation and money being diverted from actually solving the problem?

Iain McIlwee · Answer

There are a number of concerns thrown up in Michael Gove’s letter, but more than the hardball on cladding it is about the timing, wider policy areas and what comes next in terms of other elements of building safety.

To really move on in a solutions driven way, we need to accept systemic failure and try to stop the generic blame game and threats.

A Building Safety Levy should be thinly spread over a long period through e.g. Insurance taxes (IPT) and managed in a similar way to the Pension Protection Fund.

Yes there are times when individuals and organisations have operated outside of what is acceptable, but this needs to be looked at in a structured way. The Pension Protection Fund provides mechanism to do this centrally and it has ultimately worked well. We should learn lessons.

Other concern centre on retrospective extensions to the Defective Premises Act. In an environment where regulation was opaque and elements of the design, procurement and construction process driving behaviours at odds with collaborative mechanisms to deal with circumstance on the ground and instead contracts being tweaked, documents carefully prepared to shift the risk, it may well when the music stops not be the people morally and economically who should be paying, but those least empowered or funded to push back on the contract.

Hard lessons from PFI give us insight into how this will unravel. It will lead to further conflict in construction, further compound insurance issues and ultimately is the death knoll for some businesses.

Is this proposal from Michael Gove a potential solution to the post Grenfell fire safety issues?

Litigation

Residential

grenfell-tower

firesafety

residentialbuildings

Tom Spilsted

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