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Building owner ordered to pay out £60,000 over cladding removal delays
The owner of a tower block in east London has been ordered to pay out just over £60,000 after a successful prosecution for a delay in removing flammable cladding by a London council.
During a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court yesterday, Chaplair Ltd was fined £30,000 and ordered to pay costs of £30,000, along with a £190 victim surcharge.
It comes after Newham Council brought the case for failing to meet a deadline to remove dangerous cladding from its Lumiere building at 544 Romford Road, London.
The local authority is the first to use its powers under the Housing Act 2004 to successfully prosecute a building owner for delays in dealing with flammable cladding.
Imposing the fine, deputy chief magistrate Tan Ikram, at City of London Magistrates Court, said that the cladding on the Lumiere building was highly dangerous and that Chaplair had not taken the risk it posed seriously enough.
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He acknowledged that the failure came in the wake of “evolving” government policy and at a difficult time as the country emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rokhsana Fiaz, mayor of Newham, said: “We welcome this ruling and we pursued this case to make it abundantly clear to building owners in Newham that there can be no exceptions to the safety of our residents living in their properties and the issue of safe cladding remains paramount.
“The outcome of this legal case raises the crucial importance of safety standards in the homes people live in and is a warning to all housing providers that where appropriate and necessary Newham Council will use all the powers available under existing legislation to make homes safe.”
The law firm that acted on behalf of Chaplair told Inside Housing that it had not been instructed to respond to the ruling on behalf of its client.
Following a number of earlier hearings, the court heard that the block of 71 flats had four types of flammable cladding in 2019, including the same aluminium composite material that was on Grenfell Tower.
Newham Council issued an improvement notice in September 2020, but work had not started on the block by the time the 31 March 2021 deadline passed, prompting the local authority to launch legal action.
Last week, Mr Ikram found Chaplair guilty of failing to comply with the improvement notice.
The company said the delays were unavoidable, after it could not agree a deal with Willmott Dixon, its original contractor for the work, and eventually replaced the firm.
It argued that it also faced a £1m funding shortfall because of government delays and pointed to a requirement to get Network Rail to agree to the works as also contributing to missing the deadline.
Work eventually began in May 2021, with dangerous cladding removed by February 2022. The council said there was no reasonable excuse for the delay.
The latest London Assembly figures in October revealed that more than a quarter of London’s high-rise residential buildings with dangerous cladding are yet to have remediation work completed.
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