•’Guidance was partly at fault for the tragedy

• Developers to fix homes or face building ban

Michael Gove has admitted faulty government guidance was partly responsible for the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

In the first such concession by a government minister, made more than five vears after the tower block fire that killed 72 people, Gove said guidance on building materials “allowed unscrupulous people to exploit a broken system in a way that led to tragedy”.

A public inquiry is due to report later this year on how the blaze was able to spread through the building in west London. Gove said he expected it to apportion blame between the government, developers and cladding firms. He sug. gests this last group showed “an active willingness to put people in danger in order to make a profit”.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, the housing secretary also revealed:

• He wants the leasehold system of home ownership, which he calls

“an outdated feudal system”, to be scrapped by the end of this parliament

• Developers will have six weeks to fix unsafe homes or be blocked from the housing market

• He is “deeply sorry” for home owners stuck in homes with unsafe cladding.

Gove was appointed by Boris Johnson in 2021 – and reappointed by Rishi Sunak earlier this year – to deal with the cladding issue which emerged in the wake of the Grenfell fire. The tower block was covered in flammable panels that allowed the fire to spread quickly and it emerged that thousands of other high-rise buildings in England had similar materials.

Only 7 per cent of the 368,000 dangerous flats have been fixed.

Leaseholders of up to 1.5 million flats were stuck, unable to get mortgages or sell because they could not prove their blocks were safe. While ministers have agreed that residents will not have to pay to strip cladding, they have been unable to get property developers to make buildings safe.

Gove said he was “deeply sorry” for “the pain, the sense of disorien-tation” of people “who’ve had their lives frozen” because of the nationwide scandal.

In parliament tomorrow he will announce that dozens of developers who last year signed a £2 billion pledge to voluntarily remediate their buildings will be issued with binding contracts. They have six weeks to sign or face severe sanc-tions. The contracts will cover 1,500 tower blocks taller than 11 metres – 12 per cent of the total identified as dangerous. If developers refuse to sign, the government will pass secondary legislation to create a “responsible actor scheme”.

Developers who have signed will be admitted and those who do not will be blocked from getting planning or building control.

Cont in the paper edition of the Sunday Times…