Six more years before dangerous cladding on Bristol tower blocks is replaced
The cladding won't be removed until the next decade
Council tenants living in tower blocks in Bristol will have to wait six more years before dangerous cladding is replaced.
Bristol City Council is planning to remove all the dangerous cladding from its tower blocks faster than initially hoped for, but still not until the next decade.
Eight years ago 72 people died after Grenfell Tower in London caught fire.
The flammable cladding wrapped around the block of council flats contributed to the rapid spread of the blaze, sparking concerns across the country that similar cladding had been used on other buildings.
But due to a range of reasons, including a shortage of skilled workers, risky cladding remains on many buildings.
New government guidelines say cladding should be removed by 2030. Housing chiefs in Bristol reckon they will get all the removals done by 2031 from council tower blocks.
However the changes mean that some tower blocks see scaffolding go up, then taken down, then put back up again to do more work — instead of contractors just doing all the work at once. An update was given to councillors on the housing policy committee on Friday, July 18.
Clare Gibb, director of building safety, said: “Some blocks will require the scaffolding to go back up in order to do other external works. But the overall time per block that scaffolding will be in situ is being reduced from between nine and 12 months. Instead of scaffolding being up for three years, it will go up for nine months, it will come down, then go up for another year.”
This is because the money for removing the cladding is coming from a government grant. Homes England previously told the council that grants would be reduced if the scaffolding was used to do other work, other than just removing cladding, such as installing new windows. The fast-track programme will affect 21 high-rise blocks of council flats in Bristol, although it’s unclear which.
Green Councillor Barry Parsons, chair of the housing committee, said: “While we are almost a quarter of the way through our programme of removing cladding from council-owned blocks, we recognise the urgency to accelerate this work further.
“This new approach ensures that we deliver a programme that is cost-effective and makes good use of the resources available to us. We will continue to work with local and national partners to address the barriers to removing unsafe cladding and addressing other safety issues quickly — ensuring that all our residents live in safe buildings as quickly as possible.”
The previous “whole block” approach, where all the issues were done at once, would mean tower blocks still having unsafe cladding until 2042. 10 blocks have already had their cladding works finished, costing around £13.5 million. Delays so far are partly down to supply chain issues, with a shortage of staff and materials, plus a huge demand nationwide post-Grenfell.
Small local companies, contracted by the council, have struggled to put enough resources into their projects, as well as finding the council’s bureaucracy difficult to navigate. This has also led to a concern about the cost of hiring companies for the work. The new approach could hopefully attract larger companies to bid for contracts, speeding up the removals and cutting costs too.