More than six years after Grenfell and 15 months after the Building Safety Act, how does Labour Wales compare with Tory Westminster over fixing badly built blocks of flats?

By Mark Thomas
Welsh Cladiators

On the 14 June of last year, a small group of Welsh citizens caught up in the long running building fire safety crisis met at the Welsh Senedd to pay respects to the 72 victims of the horrific Grenfell Tragedy.

In a short and solemn vigil, during which the names and ages of all the victims were read out, the Welsh Cladiators were joined by a cross-party group of Senedd Members including Jane Dodds, Janet Finch Saunders and Rhys ab Owen. Most notable however, was the absence of any Welsh Labour MS.

For many of the Welsh victims attending the failure of Welsh Labour to support the event was symptomatic of a long-running sense of indifference displayed by the Welsh Government towards the plight of private leaseholders.

While the Government has quietly gone about funding the remediation of defective social housing developments and orphan buildings, it has left private leaseholders with just two options: Litigate against rich and powerful developers with all the attendant costs and risks, or rely on the vagaries of a weak and ineffectual developers’ legal contract with the Welsh Government to deliver a solution.

Welsh leaseholders have grown increasingly irritated by the upbeat Senedd announcements of Minister Julie James that bare little relationship to the daily reality of private sector victims.

Residents living in problem-hit flats paying up to £7,000 service charges

Leaseholders at Celestia in Cardiff feel the Welsh Government needs to do more to bring developers in line

After 18 months, her much publicised and media hyped leaseholder buy-out scheme has resulted in some two leaseholders about to cross the line with a small handful still trying.

In the last week we have heard of one long suffering Welsh Cladiator who has after 18 long and weary months managed to sell her home to a Welsh Housing Association under the buy-out scheme. We know of no other successful applicant.

In a January 2022 Welsh Housing Quarterly article, Welsh Cladiators predicted that the scheme would be a waste of resources and an abject failure. Considering the scheme’s dismal outcomes, the Minister recently announced that the terms of the scheme were being reviewed on a three-month basis.

While the Minister’s has continually made pronouncements that the Welsh crisis and context were different to England, she nonetheless copied Michael Gove’s English Developers’ Contract word for word. However, she then failed to enact important sections of the English Building Safety Act that would have enabled Welsh local authorities & fire and rescue services to issue enforceable Contribution and Remediation Orders against building developers and freeholders as English authorities can and have been doing now for months.

This would have prevented the need for some Welsh leaseholders to engage in highly expensive and risky litigation.

Unlike the UK Government, for some inexplicable reason Minister Julie James and the Welsh Government have rejected the need to legislate to protect innocent Welsh citizens and are instead relying on a collaborate approach with an industry that for years persistently sought to obfuscate any sense of responsibility and accountability.

It was only after Michael Gove called their bluff and threatened to put developers out of business unless they accepted accountability that they came to the table.

To add further insult to besieged victims Julie James has extended a £20m interest free loan facility to developers to assist with their cash flow and to “incentivise” them to remediate their fire defective homes.

In announcing the £20m loan facility Julie James stated that the loan was to:

• reduce the number of medium and high-rise residential buildings blighted by fire safety issues.
• provide assurance to leaseholders that works will be undertaken as swiftly as possible.
• enable reductions in service charges and insurance costs.
• remove barriers so leaseholders can access financial products such as mortgages.

The facts are that so far, no developer has accessed the £20 million and none of the above is happening.

Indeed, in spite of the Minister’s optimistic announcements leaseholders continue to face huge difficulties in accessing mortgages and continue to face ever increasing costs associated with the crisis and cost of living.

In a recent meeting between Aviva Insurance executives and English, End Our Cladding Crisis representatives, the insurer advised that leaseholders could not expect significant reductions in their building insurance even after any remediation works was completed!

In March of this year, it will be 12 months since the developers’ contract was signed in Wales and despite the Minister’s continued upbeat Senedd statements there is little evidence that any significant amount of remediation is taking place in private developments.

Despite the contract stating that developers were required to go back to leaseholders, within 40 days, with a remediation plan, that included both start and completion dates, the evidence is that many developers failed and so were in breach of the contract from the outset.

In most cases the remediation plans presented comprised little more than high-level project methodologies involving standard procurement and build processes.

Given that we are years into the crisis, the lack of developers’ detailed understanding of their buildings’ defects tells us everything we need to know about their best intentions.

As far as we are aware no developer has yet given an estimated completion deadline.

In one example, a date has been given to leaseholders to complete a procurement process by Christmas 2023 with site work commencing at the end of summer in 2024!

There is an increasing realisation that this crisis will rumble on for years and continue to wreak havoc on lives and an increasingly troubled housing market. English victims will be all too familiar with the pedestrian pace of developers’ remediation works.

In Wales a lack of joined up thinking is everywhere. Over the last 18 months the Minister and Welsh taxpayers paid a consultancy PRP to carry out extensive building surveys on affected Welsh buildings.

The Minister argued the surveys would provide for a consistency of approach and streamline the WG approach to the crisis.

But PRP’s surveys have no contractual status and developers are paying scant attention to them. Instead, they are carrying out their own investigations by hiring yet more consultants. This duplication and rework will only prolong the entire process and crisis. It also totally undermines the Minister’s original survey strategy. What have PRP achieved?

Regarding orphan buildings (where the developer is unknown or ceased trading) Julie James announced in March of this year that some 28 buildings had been identified.

It is expected that funding for this remediation programme will be paid for out of the £375m Welsh Building Safety Fund. One can only hope that the PRP surveys will be put to some value on this part of the crisis. But who will carry out these works remains unknown. There is little evidence that the Welsh Government has the capacity or resources again to oversee and programme management so many complex construction projects.

For private developments, the reality is that developers are currently conducting their own surveys and investigations using the highly judgemental PAS 9980 methodology.

Across England there are increasing concerns among leaseholders and legal advisers that developers, builders, and freeholders will seek to use PAS 9980 to wriggle out of important remediation works. Given the conduct of developers in the past, the future is likely to be one of immense argument and dispute.

The English developers’ contracts only address remediation works necessary to rectify life critical fire defects. It does not address ancillary costs.

The Welsh version, being a straight copy, is the same. Julie James has however said that she hopes and “encourages” all developers will pay for ancillary costs, eg past waking watches and fire alarms that leaseholders have been charged for or may require in the interim. This is the epitome of hope over experience. If all that was needed was encouragement, what on earth are the contracts and Building Safety Act for?

Again, like English victims there is real concern in many Welsh developments because serious, non-fire related build defects are not covered under the WG contract.

A good example of such a defect would be the defective Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) currently closing Welsh hospitals. The expectation is that buildings that have other construction defects will become subject to huge disputes.

One high profile Cardiff Bay development has already experienced a significant render failure that seriously damaged a parked vehicle, yet this defect would not fall within the terms of the Welsh Government contract.

The experience of engaged leaseholders is that the Welsh Government is ill-prepared and simply not resourced to manage the contracts it has entered into with a raft of developers.

Welsh Cladiators have already experienced lengthy delays to the most basic and elementary questions surrounding the contract.

Legal advice on the contract has even been outsourced to a private law firm, Blake Morgan, but we know the firm did not draft the contract: it is just a copy of the contract drafted by London firm Slaughter & May for Westminster.

We wonder whether Blake Morgan was provided with guidance notes on how the contract is supposed to work. Or do they go away and scratch their heads every time someone asks a question?

It seems ironic that the victims of this crisis are not party to the Welsh Government contract. Anecdotal evidence suggests developers are more focused on the Welsh Government contract rather than the more urgent and critical needs of their former customers.

On 1 August this year Wales Audit published a report, “Cracks in the Foundations – Building Safety in Wales. The report is scathing in its criticism of building control functions across the Welsh local government sector.

It questions the capacity of local authorities to implement the new Building Safety Act in Wales and identifies major deficiencies in financing, resourcing, staff capability and training. Sadly, the report came as no surprise to leaseholders. We know one very engaged and concerned Cardiff Bay leaseholder had already raised similar issues in a detailed letter sent to Cardiff Council Housing Cabinet lead, Lynda Thorne in March 2022.

In the late summer of 2022 Cardiff Labour derailed cross party efforts to set up an All-Party Policy Group (APPG) on building safety in Cardiff Council.

Lynda Thorne and associated officials repeatedly failed to attend meetings organised by the then Cardiff Liberal Democrats leader Rhys Taylor. It was reported there were concerns that the APPG would be used to scrutinise the council and that Cardiff Labour were not comfortable!

To the deep concern and alarm of many leaseholders living in Welsh fire risk buildings the Wales Audit report reported that the Grenfell Tragedy was “waning” in the memory of building control professionals.

The Welsh Government welcomed the report, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was a massive criticism of their efforts on building safety. Worryingly, the report supports the view of many private leaseholders that little appears to have changed in Wales since the horrific Grenfell tragedy.

In March of this year, Welsh Cladiator representatives appeared before the Senedd Local Government Housing Committee and again appealed for the WG to set up a Welsh wide victims’ group to share issues and experiences. The Minister’s response was to set up an email newsletter!

While English victims regularly come together to meet with UK Government officials and Michael Gove, Welsh victims are left to scramble around on social media as they also battle 24/7 with developers, builders, regulatory authorities, insurance bodies and the Welsh Government.

On 29 November last year, the Welsh Minister made another optimistic and upbeat statement on the crisis.

There were some positives – she is going to strengthen local authorities building control and inspection competencies and powers – more money is being allocated to orphan buildings. But most private sector victims failed to recognise the rest of her almost triumphant language that Wales had resolved the crisis.

Sadly, Wales is at least a year behind England in tackling the crisis and we mirror the exact same frustrations and concerns that hundreds of thousands English victims have. For the Minister to suggest otherwise is deeply misleading and insulting to those whose lives have been totally blighted and overtaken by this crisis.

While huge numbers of new homes currently being built at speed across South Wales and new high-rise developments being announced for Cardiff, what long suffering leaseholders demand is a far greater sense of urgency, pace, and resourcing around the crisis. But like so many fellow English victims, the key question is does anyone in power really care?