Gove’s cladding fix doesn’t go far enough

Michael Gove’s building safety announcement today addresses the two contrasting problems of the cladding scandal, but fails to provide any convincing solutions.

On the one hand, the Secretary of State for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (with the unmemorable acronym DLUHC – apparently pronounced ‘de-Luck’) has finally brought to an end the absurdity of people living in buildings of between three and six storeys (11 to 18 metres), which are clad in unsafe external wall systems, being required to take out loans to remediate homes that were never fit for the purpose of keeping them safe when purchased. And, on the other, he has tackled the elephant in the room of people living in perfectly safe homes (especially in buildings under 11 metres high) believing that they are not. Unfortunately, an exaggeration of the building safety crisis has swung the risk pendulum too far in the wrong direction.