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. Compulsory competitive tendering was sustained (and adapted) under the subsequent Labour government through the Local Government Act 1999 and its Best Value policy.
On 19 March 1997, the Building Research Establishment was also privatised, meaning that the safety testing of building materials was no longer conducted by the public sector, but by a charitable trust, increasingly by the manufacturers of building materials themselves.
From the 1990s, the ability to certify building work as following regulations was increasingly passed from independent bodies to the builders themselves. The Building Regulations Act 1991 enabled gas-heating appliance installers to self-certify that their work was safe and legal, and in 2002–2010 Competent Person Schemes were implemented to enable builders to self-certify that their work met regulations in eighteen different fields. By 2019, an estimated 85% of all building work requiring the notification of building control bodies was self-certified, and therefore no longer subject to external inspection.
The Housing Act 2004 introduced the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, enabling flexible 'risk-assessment'-based safety standards for rental properties. This was followed by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. Prior to the Order, all public and commercial buildings, and all non-single-household domestic dwellings (apart from houses in multiple occupation), were required to hold a valid fire safety certificate issued annually after an inspection by the public-sector Fire Service. This regime was replaced with assessment by third-party fire-risk assessors contracted by building owners and landlords, with no mandated timeframe for checks, and no mandated professional qualifications. In 2013, the Fire Service found that 14% of risk assessments were non-compliant with the law, and in 2018 it was found that 500 out of 800 of the UK's fire risk assessors were not registered with accredited bodies.
In 2006, changes to UK building regulations, intended to facilitate greater energy efficiency at lower cost, arguably made combustible cladding and insulation in buildings over 18 m legal, and opened the way to its widespread use.
Extent of problems Shortly after the Grenfell fire, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) established the Building Safety Programme. In the short term, this scheme sought to identify and remediate buildings with unsafe cladding. The problems that it variously exposed, compounded, and remedied constitute the cladding crisis. The programme is, longer-term, leading to a new regulatory framework for building safety, a Building Safety Bill, and a new Building Safety Regulator. In June 2020, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee estimated that thoroughly remediating fire safety defects in UK buildings over 18 metres alone might cost around £15 billion.
ACM cladding
The type of cladding that first drew attention was the specific kind used on Grenfell Tower, aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding.
Scottish building regulations and planning law had prevented the extensive use of ACM cladding. While Welsh and Northern Irish law was similar to English, Wales had relatively few examples of ACM-clad high-rises, and by December 2018 had arranged remediation of them all, at the expense of the developers or building owners rather than leaseholders. Northern Ireland had none, though some remediation measures were still necessary.
In England, however, the Government had by 30 November 2019 identified 446 residential and publicly owned buildings over 18 metres in height 'with ACM cladding systems unlikely to meet Building Regulations' of the kind used on Grenfell Tower. At that time, 127 had completed remediation works, mostly social-sector and student accommodation blocks. It was estimated at that time that the remaining buildings comprised up to 23,600 flats and were inhabited by around 56,000 people. As of January 2021, the Government had identified 461 residential and publicly owned buildings in the same category; by that time, 329 had at least removed the cladding, including 231 that had completed remediation works, mostly social-sector and student accommodation blocks.
Although reporting focused on residential buildings, other types were also affected, such as the 52-bed trauma unit at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, which closed temporarily due to concerns over flammable cladding on the building and other "serious and embedded" fire safety issues. It was also immediately apparent that some buildings had fire-safety issues other than cladding. For example, in August 2017, four 13-storey tower blocks built in 1968 to 1970, containing 242 flats, on the Ledbury estate in Peckham had their gas supplies cut off as a precaution: in the event of a gas explosion, they could be at risk of collapse, since they used the same "large panel system" as Ronan Point that had partly collapsed in May 1968 after a small gas explosion in a flat knocked out a load-bearing exterior wall.
Wider problems
Investigations in the wake of the Grenfell Tower inferno, the Barking Riverside fire in June 2019, and the Bolton Cube fire in November 2019 (which enveloped a building under 18 metres tall, which used combustible materials other than ACM cladding) led to the realisation that far more UK buildings than the ACM-clad ones were not fire-safe, partly due to materials being marketed as meeting regulations which in fact did not, and partly due to builders' failures to comply with regulations in design and construction. Problems included the combustibility of other cladding materials such as high-pressure laminate, combustible balconies, lack of firebreaks in the cavities between walls and insulation, non-regulation-compliant firedoors, and a wide range of other problems. This included some buildings that had already had their ACM cladding replaced with alternatives which themselves turned out to be unsafe.
In June 2020, the UK government offered what the trade magazine Inside Housing characterised as 'a very loose estimate of 1,700 buildings' in England alone which were over 18 metres and high-risk, requiring urgent remediation, despite the ACM-remediation works that had taken place up to that time. The Parliamentary Housing Committee noted that a further 9,600 buildings were likely to have combustible cladding. Inside Housing estimated that this implied 377,600 people living in high rises with dangerous cladding. However, the magazine estimated that the problem in England was greater than this, suggesting 274,000 high-rise flats house up to 657,000 people were affected. Buildings elsewhere in the UK were also affected; for example, on 20 September 2017, it was revealed that combustible cladding had been identified on 57 buildings across Glasgow.
The magazine reported that the scale of the problem regarding the c. 100,000 medium-rise buildings between 11 and 18 metres was as yet unknown. In July 2023, the UK government launched the Cladding Safety Scheme with £5.1 billion allocated and now covering all buildings over 11 metres in height. The scheme has drawn criticism for failing to address those living in buildings under 11 meters.
Short-term responses
A key short-term response to identifying unsafe construction in tall buildings was to change the fire evacuation policy. Most had been designed to contain a fire within a single flat, such that in the event of a fire, only the inhabitants of the relevant flat should evacuate. The Grenfell Fire showed how disastrous this policy could be in buildings which did not meet safety requirements. Evacuation policies were widely changed such that all inhabitants should evacuate in the event of a fire. A key problem with this change was that buildings' alarm systems were not designed to alert all residents to a fire and facilitate total evacuation. Until such alarm systems could be installed, buildings required a 24-hour 'waking watch' by fire wardens who patrolled the building checking for fire. In January 2021, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government found the median waking watch cost in England to be £11,361 per affected building per month, or £137 per dwelling.
Confidence among mortgage lenders and insurers
As the realisation grew, during 2019, that large numbers of buildings, of all heights, were likely to be subject to unknown fire-risks and remediation costs, mortgage-lenders concluded that they could not reliably lend money for the purchase of such properties. This led to collapse in sales of a significant proportion of the UK housing stock in late 2019 which as of February 2021 was unresolved. Since flats are often the first step on the UK housing ladder, this had consequences for the whole housing market; for example, the majority of first-time buyers who had bought property using the UK government's help to buy scheme found themselves unable to sell their properties.