🏢 Regulatory Pressure: The Cladding Crisis Impact

Monday 20th January 2020

The EWS1 Form – How the Cladding Crisis Stopped High-Rise Sales and Blocked Our RMI Work
While the Grenfell tragedy occurred in 2017, the crisis reached a critical point for the wider residential market in January 2020 when the government issued the Consolidated Advice Note (CAN). This guidance essentially broadened the scope of fire safety concerns from high-rise ACM cladding to include all external wall systems on buildings of any height, causing mortgage lenders to panic.

Robbins Construction Ltd primarily focuses on lower-rise extensions and refurbishment (RMI) work, but this crisis still hit us hard through two indirect but powerful channels:

The Funding Freeze: Thousands of existing flats in medium-to-high-rise buildings suddenly became 'un-mortgageable' without an EWS1 (External Wall System Fire Review) form. The lack of forms—and the cost of remediation—created a massive, unexpected block in the housing chain. People couldn't sell their flats, which meant they couldn't buy the houses where we would typically build their extensions. The market flow seized up.

The Skills Drain: The government pledged billions (£5.1bn by 2021) to fix the problem, creating massive demand for fire engineers, cladding specialists, and surveyors capable of complex external remedial works. This high-priority, high-fee work pulled skilled workers away from the standard residential market (our RMI sector), exacerbating the labour shortages we were already feeling.

Our Opinion: The need for safety is non-negotiable, but the initial political response created a financial and logistical disaster for hundreds of thousands of leaseholders. The burden of proof (the EWS1) was placed entirely on residents and the system lacked the workforce (surveyors/fire engineers) to handle the demand.

Debate Point: Given the severe bottleneck in fire engineering expertise, should the government have focused its funding purely on accelerating the training and accreditation of thousands of new external wall system inspectors and surveyors, rather than just funding the build remediation itself?