Newham Council Cabinet have approved a five-year strategy to make the borough’s 87 high-rise residential buildings compliant to the Building Safety Act
Newham Council’s five-year Residential Building Safety Strategy–High-rise Buildings consists of 5 key priorities:
- Building safety to comply with statutory obligations for occupied higher-risk buildings.
- Resident engagement to meet the commitment to keeping residents safe through engagement and sharing building safety information with them.
- Organisational structure to develop operational structures to deliver safe homes now and for the future.
- Data and system to ensure those working on design and building projects and on or in higher-risk buildings are competent to do so.
- Policy and strategy to ensure that buildings are managed in line with legislation, regulation, and the Council’s documented safety management system for building safety.
Newham Council was the first to prosecute a rogue building owner
Since the Building Safety Act 2022 came into force in April 2023, Newham Council has been working with the Building Safety Regulator to work up a plan to make sure the legislation that is intended to improve the design, construction and management of higher-risk buildings across the Borough.
The Council has already registered and submitted all the key building information of all 87 high-rise residential buildings in the borough with the Building Safety Regulator ahead of the official visits from April 2024.
Newham Council initiated legal action against Chaplair Ltd under the authority of the Housing Act 2004, following Chaplair’s failure to comply with the given deadline in an improvement notice issued by the council in September 2020.
Remediation works took place in May 2021 and were complete by February 2022- missing the March 31 2021 deadline originally set by the Council.
“Another huge milestone in our efforts”
Councillor Shaban Mohammed, Cabinet member for housing management and modernisation, said: “Securing approval for our very important building safety strategy to ensure our housing blocks are safe for residents today is another huge milestone in our concerted efforts to prioritise investment in our housing stock to improve the quality of life for residents and to protect our homes for future generations.
“We have already taken considerable actions to make our residential buildings safer with our first successful cladding prosecution last year and are continuing to identify high-risk buildings and removing unsafe cladding.
“We will shortly be starting to engage with our residents to ensure they understand what the new regulations might mean for them and their homes along with providing new resources to find information and log complaints.”
