Cladding Scandal (2026 Update) – 231,000 Unsellable Homes

Transcript

Hi, I’m Ruban Selvanayagam from Property Solvers.

According to the government’s own data released earlier this year, there are currently 4,310 residential buildings over 11 metres in England identified with unsafe cladding – containing an estimated 231,000 flats.

Behind every one of those numbers are real people – families, couples, first-time buyers – who bought in good faith, did everything right, and now can’t sell, can’t refinance, and can’t move on with their lives.

In this video we’re going to break down how it happened, who’s been left to pay the price, and where things actually stand today.

Let’s get into the detail…

Walk through any town or city and you’ll probably pass cladded buildings without a second thought. It’s simply the outer layer of a building, fixed to the structure for insulation and weather protection.

What you may not know is just how dangerous the specific material being used can be. And neither, in many cases, did the people living inside those buildings.

On most, you’d barely notice it. But on thousands of tower blocks built or converted from the 1980s onwards, it became something far more serious.

The specific problem was Aluminium Composite Material or ACM cladding. Relatively cheap, lightweight, and fairly modern-looking, it was used widely as a cost-saving measure for new builds and conversion projects across the country.

It also contains a polyethylene plastic core that behaves, in a fire, essentially like solid fuel.

On the 14th of June 2017, a fridge freezer fire broke out on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower in West London. The cladding caught on fire which spread outward and upward rather than being contained floor by floor as the building was designed to ensure.

72 people lost their lives. Millions watched the aftermath unfold on their screens.

But here’s the thing that turned a tragedy into a scandal. In the days and weeks that followed, fire inspectors began testing cladding on other tower blocks around the country.

What they found was that Grenfell wasn’t an isolated freak accident. The same material – and other combustible variants – was on hundreds of buildings. Possibly thousands. And nobody – not the developers, not the councils, not the government – had any idea how many.

Grenfell didn’t cause the cladding crisis. It revealed it.

The scale of what was uncovered is staggering. Some estimates put the total number of flats with some form of cladding or fire safety issue at 1.5 million. And on the 231,000 homes I mentioned at the start – the ones formally in a remediation programme – work hasn’t even began on nearly half of them.

The total bill for fixing everything is estimated at somewhere between £11.8 and £22.7 billion. And the government still doesn’t know how many buildings will ultimately need remediation – current estimates range from 5,900 to 9,000, with more being identified all the time.

And the target date for completing all remediation work is 2029 for the highest risk buildings – with some potentially not resolved until well into the 2030s. That’s almost twenty years after Grenfell.

Now – this is where it stops being an abstract policy story and starts being a very personal one for hundreds of thousands of people.

Because one of the other unintended consequences of the cladding scandal isn’t just the fire risk itself. It’s what it did to the property market overnight.

In December 2019, a document called the EWS1 form was introduced. EWS stands for External Wall System.

It came about because after Grenfell, mortgage lenders became increasingly nervous about lending on flats in buildings that might have dangerous cladding. They needed a way to assess the risk before agreeing to lend.

So in 2019, the government asked RICS – the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors – to work with lenders and the Building Societies Association to devise a solution. The result was the EWS1 form – a standardised fire safety assessment of a building’s external walls, signed off by a qualified professional.

On paper, a sensible idea. In practice, it froze the market for hundreds of thousands of people.

Almost immediately, things started to unravel. When it launched, the EWS1 form only applied to buildings above 18 metres. But a Government advice note in January 2020 brought all residential buildings of any height potentially within scope – causing widespread confusion across the market.

Lenders began refusing mortgages on flats in buildings that didn’t have one. And because there was a severe shortage of qualified fire safety engineers to carry out the assessments, getting an EWS1 form could take months – sometimes years.

In November 2020, the Government, RICS and lenders agreed that buildings without cladding no longer needed an EWS1 form at all. But lenders continued requesting them anyway, leaving many flat owners still completely stuck.

RICS launched a fresh consultation in January 2021 and published new guidance in March 2021 in an attempt to narrow the scope of when forms were actually needed. That guidance came into force in April 2021.

Then in July 2021, the government announced that EWS1 forms should no longer be required for buildings under 18 metres. RICS pushed back – and not without reason.

Because height alone was never really the point. Buildings of any height with certain types of combustible cladding can still require an assessment. Removing the requirement based purely on height, RICS argued, would leave buyers unwittingly exposed to costs they hadn’t been warned about.

The back and forth between government, RICS and lenders went on for years. Every clarification seemed to create new confusion. And throughout all of it, the people trapped in effected flats simply waited.

Then, in April 2025 came the most significant update in years. UK Finance, RICS and the Building Societies Association released new guidance aimed at finally easing the logjam.

Older EWS1 forms – even those over five years old – were confirmed as still valid in many cases, meaning owners don’t automatically need to commission a new assessment just to sell or remortgage.

Lenders are now also required to be more flexible about accepting alternative evidence where a form isn’t available.

It was broadly positive news. But it arrived alongside something that exposed just how fragile the system had been all along.

A fire safety engineer named Adam Kiziak, trading as Tri Fire, had signed thousands of EWS1 assessments across hundreds of buildings. He was not properly qualified to do so.

Those forms were invalidated – leaving the owners of flats in every affected building back at square one, needing new assessments, facing fresh delays, and in many cases unable to sell all over again.

It was a reminder that the safety net designed to protect buyers had holes in it. And that for too many people, the crisis within the crisis just kept going.

The human cost of all this is something the statistics struggle to capture fully.

People unable to move for work. People who need to upsize for a growing family but can’t sell to do it. First-time buyers who used Help to Buy to get onto the ladder – a government scheme – now trapped in properties worth less than they paid, with remediation bills potentially running to tens of thousands of pounds on top.

And the insurance picture running alongside all of this has been equally brutal. Premiums on affected buildings rose by as much as 187% between 2016 and 2021, with some insurers leaving the market entirely and leaving residents with almost no options.

These are people who did everything right. And they are stuck.

So where does this leave things today?

The Building Safety Act passed in April 2022 – a direct response to Grenfell, five years in the making. Its provisions came into force in stages through 2022 and 2023, introducing new protections for leaseholders and placing greater legal responsibility on developers and building owners to fund remediation.

The current government has set a target of completing remediation on all high-rise buildings by 2029. Several major lenders have updated their policies and no longer automatically require an EWS1 form where a building is covered by a developer remediation scheme.

But the campaigners who have been fighting this since 2017 are clear – coming up to 2 years into the current government, nothing has materially changed on the ground for the people still trapped. The warm words continue. The pace doesn’t.

It’s also worth saying – and this doesn’t get mentioned enough – that being in this situation doesn’t mean you’re completely out of options.

There are routes available to sellers, even where the cladding situation is unresolved. But the professional landscape around these transactions remains complicated.

For instance, some solicitors and conveyancers are still reluctant to take on cladding-affected cases given the professional indemnity insurance implications – so finding the right legal representation alone takes more effort than a standard sale.

And if you are looking to sell, understanding exactly where your building sits – whether remediation is funded, underway, or yet to start – will have a direct bearing on what’s realistic and what isn’t.

That’s where getting the right advice early matters. Not after you’ve accepted an offer, not when a sale is falling through – but before you decide on your next move.

So if any of what we’ve covered today resonates and you’re not sure where to start, feel free to get in touch. The link to our page is in the description.

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