This was revealed in research published by Savills on behalf of the National Housing Federation (NHF), which suggested that the Building Safety Fund and Cladding Safety Scheme restricted social landlords from accessing funds as easily as private owners, who have received 90% of funding for remediation.
The Building Safety Fund is open to registered providers of social housing to pay for works on buildings taller than 18 metres. The Cladding Safety Scheme applies to medium-rise buildings between 11 and 18 metres and social housing providers can only access funds equivalent to what they would be entitled to from leaseholders. They can get funding to cover the full cost where their financial viability will be threatened.
Funding through the Cladding Safety Scheme is not available to social landlords where residential units are leased to another social housing provider, let on a weekly or monthly basis and no service charge is recoverable on a throughput basis.
A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) found the cost to remediate cladding-related safety issues in the social housing sector stood at £3.8bn. The NHF research said a subsidy would allow this to be used for additional new homes.
The NHF said there was “minimum public funding” to remediate flats occupied by social tenants, which affected the ability of housing associations to make buildings safer. It called for funding to be provided “fairly and not according to tenure”.
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It argued this would impact the delivery of affordable homes, including the supply of social rent, intermediate rent and shared ownership properties.
The NHF said: “We believe that the current settlement for building safety funding is unfair for social housing tenants, who are picking up the costs of building safety works through their rents.
“However, we also believe there is a sound economic argument for providing more building safety funding for social landlords: providing this funding would increase the capacity of housing associations to contribute to meeting the government’s target of building 1.5 million new homes.”
