This week, Lee Rowley announced that the DLUHC‘s Recovery Strategy Unit (RSU) are investigating 19 rogue firms that have not complied with the Building Safety Act
Lee Rowley was questioned by a cross-party of MPs on Monday 20 March, over perceived gaps in the Building Safety Act 2022.
Last week, the government named 11 firms that had not signed up to the building safety contract, in a pledge to fix fire safety issues in buildings. Since then, a further three contractors have signed.
Rowley announced that a new Recovery Strategy Unit (RSU) had opened 19 inquiries and has received information relating to issues at many more properties.
The RSU was created in June 2022 to identify the worst cases of poor building safety conduct
The Recovery Strategy unit was set up by the DLUHC to ‘identify and persue’ the most egregious examples of poor conduct within the industry where companies have failed to contribute to fixing building safety issues.
“There are 19 live enquiries underway [within the RSU] at the moment. They are building up their capacity, building up their knowledge and experience.
“They are not a casework team, they won’t be able to take every single individual case but the purpose is one: that they will find specific examples to pursue to then demonstrate to the industry that we are willing to do that. And two: hopefully change behaviour on a broader scale for those who haven’t done the right thing.”
Developers and freeholders who do not sign up will be ‘named and shamed’ in the coming weeks
At the building safety remediation and funding follow-up, Rowley also stated that the government would name and shame the developers and freeholders who had not ‘stepped up’ to tackle fire safety issues in their buildings in the next few weeks.
“There is an element of the developer population who have not yet stepped up. There is an element of freeholders who are clearly doing unacceptable things in my view.
“There is an element of managing agents who are advising their freeholders things which in some cases are completely contrary to the Building Safety Act. They are either misunderstanding or choosing to misunderstand the Building Safety Act.”
