The Housing Podcast: The crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of flats which could grind the housing market to a halt
The Housing Podcast is a production of Inside Housing magazine, the UK’s leading publication for the social and affordable housing sector. Listen to find out more about the key issues in housing today, with input from the sector’s leading voices
The crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of flats which could grind the housing market to a halt
In June 2017, a terrible fire tore through the cladding on Grenfell Tower, claiming 72 lives. After the blaze, it emerged that other blocks of flats were covered in similar combustible materials.
Three years on, the scale of the crisis has grown to involve numerous types of external wall systems, affecting thousands of buildings across the country. Progress in fixing them is proving painstakingly slow as arguments continue over who should be made to pay and government funding comes up short.
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For the people living in these blocks, that means not only safety fears but potential financial ruin. Last December, the industry tried to come up with a solution in the form of the External Wall System 1 (EWS) process, but it is not working as the problems continue to spiral.
In this episode of The Housing Podcast – following the launch of new asks that make up our End Our Cladding Scandal campaign – we discuss the past, present and future of the EWS crisis with three people who are close to the issue.
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This week, Sir Martin Moore-Bick published his Phase One report from the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017. The 838-page report focuses on the events of that dreadful night: how the blaze started, how it spread so ferociously through the building, and how organisations including the emergency services responded.
Sir Martin has also produced recommendations aimed at preventing similar disasters from happening again. Our team has spent the last few days picking through the report, and in this episode of The Housing Podcast, we discuss the key points.
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The Housing Podcast team is joined by David Pipe from the Chartered Institute of Housing and housing columnist Jules Birch to rank the proposals in the Social Housing Green Paper out of 10. Edited by Luke Barratt.
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The government’s announcement this week that it will drop plans to change the way supported housing is funded brings to a close a nearly three-year cycle of lobbying against these proposals.
This week, The Housing Podcast looks back at this story, which began with a throwaway line in George Osborne’s Autumn Statement in 2015.
A brief history of council housing
In this week’s episode of The Housing Podcast we speak to John Boughton, social historian and author of Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, about the five phases of local authority housing – starting in the East End of London in 1900.
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The Housing Podcast team gets together to rank all the housing ministers of the modern Tory era, from Grant Shapps to Dominic Raab. There are a lot of them. Edited by Luke Barratt.
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The Hackitt Review
This week, Dame Judith Hackitt released the findings of her building regulations review, commissioned by the government in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire last June.
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