26th
Jan 2022
An industry body is at loggerheads with the government in trying to find out whether PRS landlords will be eligible to claim any of the soon to be available funding to help leaseholders with cladding remediation.
The Housing Secretary Michael Gove recently announced a new £4bn fund to rectify the cladding of towers under 18.5 metres and for those over 11 metres high should be relevant for owner occupiers and landlord owners.
However in his announcement Gove made it far from clear if PRS landlords would be able to claim funding for their affected properties.
Gove says: “We have scrapped the proposal for loans so that leaseholders living in their own medium and high-rise buildings should not pay a penny to fix dangerous cladding.
“Working with members of both Houses, we will look to bring a raft of leaseholder protections into law through our Building Safety bill.
“And we will restore much needed common sense on building safety assessments, ending the practice of too many buildings being declared unsafe.”
“More than four years after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the system is broken. Leaseholders are trapped, unable to sell their homes and facing vast bills.
“But the developers and cladding companies who caused the problem are dodging accountability and have made vast profits during the pandemic whilst hard-working families have struggled.”
The sticking point for landlords is that it has not been clarified in Gove’s statement when saying: “leaseholders living in their own medium and high-rise buildings…” as it could mean that landlords will not be eligible to apply for funding.
Following this the industry body wrote to Gove’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities requesting a conclusive statement on the matter.
The letter from the industry body includes: “We are concerned as to why the government is so reluctant at present to commit to landlords, who are leaseholders, receiving the same support as owner-occupiers. Both groups have faced the same problems, and both should be treated equally. We are calling on the government to rectify this problem as a matter of urgency.”
Later in the correspondence it asked:: “We question also how this situation would be fair to accidental landlords who were forced to rent out their properties because they could not sell due to cladding uncertainties. I should be grateful for urgent clarification on this point and for an opportunity to discuss this with the department.”
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