Blog
This is a subtitle for your new post
New Paragraph
Housing secretary Michael Gove has said he is ‘unhappy with the principles’ of leaseholders paying for fire safety remediation costs – and suggested that ‘cowboy’ developers and manufacturers should cough up.
Speaking at the Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee yesterday, Gove distanced himself from his predecessor Robert Jenrick’s approach to the cladding crisis – saying that he has taken a ‘couple of steps back’ from the proposed loan scheme for leaseholders.
‘No matter how effective a scheme might be in capping [leaseholder] costs, my prior question is: “Why do they have to pay at all?”,’ he said.
He added he was seeking to amend the Building Safety Bill to embed a ‘polluter pays’ approach to fire safety problems.
‘The Grenfell inquiry has uncovered examples of tests of the safety of a product being manipulated in order to evade responsibility’
But Gove said that, while central and local government had made mistakes in poorly regulating fire safety, they were not to blame for fire safety problems. ‘It would seem to me that developers and construction product manufacturers, if they say they are squeaky clean, are wrong,’ he said.
‘The sheriffs might not have been on the ball, but the cowboys were behaving like cowboys
in an unregulated way.
To read this article in full and on its original source website please click here
