Building safety

The Building Safety Act (BSA) is reshaping how projects are procured and delivered, forcing contractors, consultants and clients to collaborate earlier and more transparently, speakers have told an industry conference. Lilly Gallafent, chief operating officer at Cast Consultancy, said the act was “the most significant thing” to happen to the…

Fire chiefs are warning the government that progress on building safety is “not where it should be” eight years on from the Grenfell Tower disaster. The National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) has made a series of new recommendations to ministers after claiming that remediation efforts are being “hindered by deep-rooted…

Ealing Council is set to appoint Axis Europe and W.G. Wiggingtons to deliver repairs to residential mechanical and electrical (M&E) systems worth up to £185m over 10 years. The programme aims to address serious safety risks in its Higher Risk Building (HRB) stock, which have been identified in the council’s…

The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) will clear its backlog of legacy gateway two building control applications, covering 22,000 new-build homes, by January, it said today. A total of 91 new build cases submitted under the BSR’s scrapped “franchised” multidisciplinary teams (MDT) model remain in the system, but most will be…

Subcontractors will be liable for up to £204m in potential cladding claims against Ardmore’s construction arm, rather than the parent group, according to its administrators. A new report by Begbies Traynor, published on Companies House on 15 October, said Ardmore Construction Ltd, which went into administration in August, faces cladding…

A London contractor has been given a suspended prison sentence after he ignored official warnings and put lives at risk, according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The HSE ordered Mohammed Mehdi Ali to stop working at a construction site in Willesden on 7 September 2018 after inspectors found…

More than 1,000 claims have been made over the past six months to Scotland’s Cladding Remediation Programme (CRP), it has emerged. The scheme was launched to protect homeowners and residents by addressing the risks to life and other impacts associated with unsafe external wall cladding systems, following the Grenfell Tower tragedy…

Taylor Wimpey has launched a £40m legal action at the High Court against Ardmore Construction and its parent companies after it failed to complete remediation works on a North London residential development. The housebuilder is claiming damages over alleged fire safety and design defects affecting 72 properties at Morea Mews,…

Severe delays to a key safety approval process have stalled more than 150 high-rise residential construction projects across the UK, threatening Labour’s pledge to deliver 1.5 million homes, the Construction Plant-hire Association (CPA) has warned. The bottleneck stems from the gateway two regulatory checkpoint introduced under the Building Safety Act…

An independent review into Camden Council’s Chalcots Estate has entered its second phase to investigate how the original refurbishment was delivered under a private finance initiative (PFI) contract before residents were evacuated in 2017. The review, chaired by architect and barrister Bart Kavanagh, will run for about three months and…