Galliard Homes has caved in to pressure and signed the government’s building safety pledge.
Galliard accused the housing secretary Michael Gove of acting like “Al Capone” and “the mafia”, but has signed the agreement, after being singled out by officials.
Executive chairman Stephen Conway had refused to sign a pledge promising to repair fire-safety problems with flats built over the past 30 years on the basis that it could amount to an open-ended legal liability.
About 35 housebuilders have so far agreed to provide some £2bn to repair buildings taller than 11 metres. Last weekend, Whitehall officials singled out family-owned Galliard as the highest-profile developer to have declined. An internal government document said the first step in response would be to “begin advising consumers formally” not to buy properties from Galliard where the process of obtaining planning permission had not yet begun.
Conway said the £1.3m sale of a penthouse flat in London’s Soho had fallen through in the days after the story as a prospective buyer took fright. This weekend, the company gave up its resistance and wrote to Gove promising to join his scheme. “We have signed the letter, and if he wants to take credit for it being signed, that’s OK,” Conway said.
Conway estimated that Galliard would end up committing £15m to £20m. He said it was prepared to pay, but he was highly critical of Gove’s methods.
He said: “I’ve got letters saying we won’t give you any more planning permissions, we won’t provide you with building [regulations], we have a duty to advise everybody that buys flats off-plan from you that they shouldn’t. It goes on and on and on, like he’s the mafia. And it’s a complete nonsense, the way they’ve handled it. They’ve given it to politicians who do not know what they’re doing, instead of finding someone who was prepared to come out of housebuilding and deal with it, and it would have been dealt with.”
Conway said a better solution would have been to introduce a special new stamp duty for all developers of new-build properties to pay for fire-safety works. Gove, he said, “didn’t ask the people who understood it how to do it”.
