A selection of last week’s cladding coverage:
Cladding flat owners told not to talk to press
The agreement, between the building owner or leaseholder and the government, says: “The Applicant shall not make any communication to the press or any journalist or broadcaster regarding the Project or the Agreement (or the performance of it by any Party) without the prior written approval of Homes England and [the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government ]” and its press offices.
Millions are stuck with fire-trap homes after Grenfell blaze
Scandal has left families stuck in fire traps facing repair bills of up to £115,000 Daily Mail calling on ministers to fix Britain’s dangerous homes within 18 months Tory MPs Stephen McPartland and Royston Smith leading backbench rebellion Homeowners in dangerous buildings are being hit with crippling bills because ministers have ‘buried their heads in the sand’ since the Grenfell disaster.
Neighbours locked in cladding nightmare face bills of up to £40k EACH
Neighbours living in a development in Manchester face bills of up to £40k each In the wake of Grenfell disaster, dangerous cladding was found on five blocks The young professionals are stuck in a fire traps and cannot sell their homes Now, The Daily Mail is campaigning to end the nationwide cladding scandal The sales brochure called it ‘an exceptional development for modern living.’
Building firms’ £15bn bonanza since Grenfell disaster
Success of property developers has allowed them to pay £5billion in dividends Biggest ten firms paid their chief executives an average salary of £2million Leaseholders have spent another Christmas in unsafe, unsellable properties Building firms linked to Britain’s unsafe housing crisis have made more than £15billion in profit since the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Buy-to-let investors’ pension plans wiped out by the cladding scandal
Hundreds of dangerous buildings still not fixed since the 2017 Grenfell fire Government set aside £1.6bn – but MPs estimate the total cost will be £15bn Families have been left stuck in fire traps or been unable to sell their homes Hundreds of thousands of leaseholders in unsafe flats hit with crippling bills One pensioner faces a total bill of £136,000 to fix serious safety defects Faced with dwindling interest rates on savings, John and Veronica Lerston decided to invest their modest retirement savings in property.
BEN WILKINSON: Cladding scandal has seen homeowners bitterly betrayed
Home ownership is a dream that takes a lot of hard work and sacrificial saving for many of us to realise. It is supposed to mean security, and it is meant to be one of the first big steps towards a bright financial future.
Grenfell inquiry: Kingspan cladding firm tied to trade body
A building materials company criticised at the Grenfell Tower inquiry over misleading fire safety claims sits on a construction industry integrity group.Kingspan, whose K15 foam insulation was fitted on the London tower block, has been accused at the public inquiry of marketing “lethally combustible
Thousands of new hospitals, flats and schools at risk of fire
A new block at Great Ormond Street Hospital and a school in Boris Johnson’s constituency are among nearly 1,400 public buildings with walls that could have fire risks, an investigation shows. The most comprehensive snapshot yet of the safety scandal exposed by the 2017 Grenfell Tower inferno also reveals that almost 20,000 new mid-rise flats are wrapped in flammable materials but remain unidentified by the government.
Jeremy Clarkson: Is there anyone honourable in government who’ll take on this deadly cladding disaster?
What a winter. America is teetering on the brink of civil war, a more infectious new strain of the virus has arrived from South Africa, we are all locked up like hedgehogs, Brexit is messing up food supplies to Northern Ireland and the normally placid state of Denmark has been rocked by a children’s animation featuring a man with an enormously long penis.
Hidden Housing Scandal: join our Safe Homes for All campaign
A home should be a place of safety. However, as The Sunday Times has revealed, not only are 700,000 people still trapped in flats wrapped in many kinds of flammable materials, but as many as 3.6 million face a wait of up to a decade to sell their flat or get a new mortgage.
Neighbours locked in cladding nightmare face bills of up to £40k EACH
Neighbours living in a development in Manchester face bills of up to £40k each In the wake of Grenfell disaster, dangerous cladding was found on five blocks The young professionals are stuck in a fire traps and cannot sell their homes Now, The Daily Mail is campaigning to end the nationwide cladding scandal The sales brochure called it ‘an exceptional development for modern living.’
Leasehold high-rise flats: who pays for fire safety work? – House of Commons Library
This paper considers the debate about who is responsible for paying for fire safety works on blocks of flats in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire. It covers progress in implementing the Government decision to fund remediation work for affected blocks with ACM cladding in the social and private sectors.
Related posts:
The Times saturation coverage of cladding scandal
The Sun / The Times urge caution over leasehold purchases, while The Times / Guardian / Mail report Barratt paying out £2m at Citiscape
Grenfell is becoming our worst corporate scandal, says Dominic Lawson in Sunday Times
Sector announces new building safety test for leasehold blocks to ‘keep the high-rise property market flowing’
John Healey says it’s ‘wrong’ for leaseholders to have to pay to remove Grenfell cladding
RICS and lenders ease EWS1 for under-18m blocks which has blighted the re-sale market
I found this plea for funds in an indepedant newspaper today….
Journalism in Britain is under threat. The government is becoming increasingly authoritarian and our media is run by a handful of billionaires, most of whom reside overseas and all of them have strong political allegiances and financial motivations.
Its probably no mystery as to where the gagging order came from.
The idea that this gagging order is nothing but a commonplace building industry standard thing is a load of codswallop, if they have nothing to hide what is the problem?
It looks like a gov department has been nobbled again….. in future the noble Lord will read… the nobbled Lord.
…but this is the way the leasehold market works, keep information obscured, don’t let them know who the actual owner of YOUR HOME THAT YOU PAID FOR ACTUALY IS ! keep the victims in the dark,………….. less knowledge less power,………… behind the scenes lobbying………. back door policies let through with no problems whatsoever……..building materials knowingly dangerous installed…….., a cavalier attitude to building regulations ….contracts awarded on the borderline of legality……..panel solicitors in the pay of developers….doubling ground rents….selling of freeholds for fleecehold purposes….insurance scams…..landed gentry MP’s…
Cronyism is rife in this game.
It wasn’t long ago that the gov didn’t actually know how many leasehold homes there were, it turns out they were at least a couple of million out! I wonder where the gov got its original figures from? …. it took LKP to find the facts,
And then the revelation that the gov’s Leasehold advice beaureu was being run as a forum for freeholder companies to educate their members to get the maximum from leaseholders all done with taxpayers money, all made to look respectable.
We are being used. This builder/developer/freeholder management system is rotten to the core…and this gagging order is another example of that rotteness.