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Only half of high-rise tower blocks have had dangerous ACM cladding fixed
Only half of the high-rise buildings known to have highly flammable aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding have been fully fixed, according to latest government statistics.
The data shows that at the end of March only 247 or 53 per cent of the 469 high-rise residential and publicly-owned buildings in England had fully completed remediation.
ACM cladding is the type which was responsible for the Grenfell Tower disaster in June 2017 and progress on remedying the situation has been slow.
At January 2018 three of the 318 buildings then-identified had been fully remediated and since then it has taken more than three years to complete another 244, with 31 coming since the end of December 2020.
Encouragingly a further 111 buildings no longer have ACM cladding systems in place, meaning 76 per cent of all identified buildings have now had their ACM cladding removed, with some remedial work remaining.
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And the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) data shows that by the end of March 93 per cent of all identified buildings had at least started remediation work to remove and replace the unsafe ACM cladding.
By the end of 2021, MHCLG estimates that 85 per cent of identified buildings will have completed remediation.
Of the 71 buildings not forecast to have completed by the end of the year, 31 are forecast to have removed their ACM cladding systems by the end of 2021 and a further seven are vacant.
Non-ACM cladding
However, there are still thousands of blocks which have dangerous non-ACM cladding.
According the latest MHCLG figures, 2,820 of these had applied for funding through the government’s £1bn Building Safety Fund for support to remove their non-ACM cladding.