Recommendation 3

The Department has no knowledge of how many care homes below 18 metres in height have dangerous cladding. The Department has published advice that the risks of unsafe cladding are increased for buildings, such as care homes, where there are residents who need significant assistance to evacuate. The Department is confident there are no high-rise care homes (above 18 metres in height) with dangerous cladding. However, while it estimates there are around 40,000 care homes, sheltered homes and hospitals below 18 metres in height—of which around 800 are between 11 and 18 metres—it has no data on whether any of these have unsafe cladding. While it plans to commission a data collection exercise to estimate the prevalence of unsafe cladding on residential buildings between 11 and 18 metres, it has not said it will prioritise care homes in this exercise. Nor has it announced any plans to find out what cladding is on the thousands of care homes below 11 metres. Recommendation: The Department, working with the Care Quality Commission and local authorities, should make it a priority for its forthcoming data collection exercise to identify any care homes below 18 metres which have dangerous cladding. The Department should write to us by the end of 2020 setting out progress on this and on its wider data collection. Residents of buildings with unsafe cladding face huge financial burdens, with little say in the process. Many say they are not being kept informed about the process of having their buildings made safe. In addition, residents who own their properties are incurring huge costs for safety measures, passed onto them by building owners. A major source of costs are interim fire safety measures, such as ‘waking watches’ (overnight patrols to evacuate residents in case of fire) which the Department has previously estimated at between £12,000 and £45,000 per week, per building. Leaseholders may also face significant costs for correcting wider fire safety issues revealed during t