PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Housing: Insulation (6 November 2020)

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what recent steps he has taken to support leaseholders in replacing cladding on their properties when they are unable to secure financing from their mortgage providers.

Asked by:
Darren Jones (Labour)

The Department has made £1.6 billion available to support the remediation of unsafe cladding, and a large proportion of this will protect leaseholders from these costs and will deal with some of the highest risk and highest cost safety defects on high-rise buildings.

To support the valuation process for high-rise residential buildings with cladding, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors designed the EWS1 process. The EWS1 process is not a regulatory requirement and the Department does not support a blanket approach to EWS1. The Department is working with mortgage lenders to support a more pragmatic approach in their valuation of homes within multi occupancy, multi storey residential buildings. We are encouraging lenders to accept a broader range of evidence to assure themselves of a building’s safety.

Answered by:
Christopher Pincher (Independent)
16 November 2020