With the Medium Rise Scheme rolling out in 2023 now is the time to talk to experienced fire remediation experts who offer the full, through-the-line service says Gavin Lacey, CHPK Chief Operating Officer.
Homes England announced the pilot of its Medium Rise Scheme in November 2022, a £3 billion fund raised from the Building Safety Levy for fire safety remediation on buildings between 11 and 18 metres in height. The scheme is due to be rolled out across England early in 2023, bringing medium-rise residential blocks into line with those above 18 metres which are eligible for the Building Safety Fund (BSF) which was launched in 2020.
During that time CHPK has been working on over 50 cladding projects totalling in excess of £200m in remediation costs. CHPK FE, the group’s specialist fire engineering consultancy, has been instructed on more than 300 external wall (FRAEW) assessments. And more recently CHPK FE has been invited to participate in the Government’s ‘Medium Rise Fund’ pilot scheme.
‘We are the only operator in the market which combines fire engineering, building control consultancy, construction services and surveying under one roof.’
Breadth of offer
One of the key reasons for our clients choosing CHPK is the breadth of our offer; we are the only operator in the market which combines fire engineering; building control consultancy; construction services and surveying all under one roof. This means we can offer our client a seamless, through-the-line external cladding fire remediation service from start to finish, with no need for disjointed, time consuming handovers to external participants. It also means we can be flexible regarding up-front payment terms, absorbing initial costs as part of a wider project management fee later on.
CHPK has been trading since 2003, and during those 19 years we’ve gained an enviable reputation for our expertise and approach. Indeed, many of our directly employed colleagues are among the best qualified in their fields, including our five Chartered Fire Engineers. We are long-established experts in construction procurement and our expertise is delivered to our clients as a personalised service, in accessible, plain English.
Funding Support
Unlike some of the recent, opportunistic entrants into the market, we treat external cladding fire remediation as we would any other construction service, requiring the same high level of expertise and diligence as, say, acting as CDM Client Advisor and Principal Designer on the iconic Lloyd’s Building in The City of London or project management of internal and external cyclical refurbishment works to a twenty storey tower in London’s East End. We have lots of experience in securing BSF pre-tender support, securing the release of 10% of potential funding to enable the work to proceed on submitting the final application.
We are also working with a number of developers who, under the auspices of the Developer’s Pledge, have agreed to fund the remediation of buildings they were responsible for. Some of these instructions originated with our managing agent or leaseholder clients, who, part-way into the process of us applying for BSF funds on their behalf have been approached by the developer to take back the process.
In these cases, communication between the original stakeholder and the developer may not always have been constructive, in which case we have been retained to peer-review the developer’s proposals should they suggest project managing the process in-house. More often, however, we have been appointed by the developer to manage the entire process with the developer acting as funder only.
The Government estimates that 140,000 leaseholders in England are living in mid-rise buildings with ‘life-safety fire risks’ and that between 6,220 and 8,890 mid-rise residential buildings will require expensive full remediation, partial remediation or mitigation to alleviate the risk. If you are the property manager, managing agent or freeholder of such a building and you are looking for an experienced, reputable expert in the field please call either myself, Gavin Lacey, Group COO or Tom Moriarty, Group CEO. And, of course, if you’re responsible for a building over 18 metres tall and you haven’t made your application to the BSF as yet, we’d be only too happy to help
Call 020 7377 2739 or visit chpk.co.uk or email our experts on claddingteam@chpk.co.uk
‘CHPK has been trading since 2003, and during those 19 years we’ve gained an enviable reputation for our expertise and approach.’
