Replacing Dangerous Cladding Could Cost up to £22 Billion, Watchdog Finds

Removing flammable cladding from multistory buildings in England could cost between £12.6 billion and £22.4 billion, the spending watchdog has said. The National Audit Office’s (NAO) report into the buildings remediation programme also said that progress on removing dangerous cladding and identifying other buildings that need to have cladding removed has been slow, with works unlikely to be completed by the government’s 2035 deadline. The NAO added that even though the Building Safety Act 2022 made it mandatory to register high-rise buildings (18 metres and higher), there was no mandatory registration for medium-rise buildings (between 11 and 18 metres) which are more numerous in number, meaning that “there is a risk that some may never be identified.”...