Health and Safety

Altrad has set aside £118m to deal with a string of historical allegations linked to asbestos exposure. Altrad Services, the UK arm of France-based Altrad and number 68 on the CN100 last year, said it “continues to receive claims” from insurance companies and individuals over historic alleged exposure to asbestos.…

More than 900 people affected by the Grenfell Tower fire – including the bereaved and those forced from their homes – have agreed a civil settlement with several companies including contractor Rydon and public sector bodies. The settlement, worth £150m according to ITV News, was reached after a claim lodged…

Peabody has announced it is seeking contractors to help it deliver £100m of fire remediation work across its projects. The housing association is launching a significant fire remediation programme to follow government guidance and carry out fire-safety assessments. Peabody, which manages 55,000 properties, has around 75 schemes of multiple cores…

A concrete producer has been fined £1m after the death of a 24-year-old man at one of its sites. Stewart Ramsey suffered fatal head injuries while working for Creagh Concrete Products at its base in Hoveringham near Nottingham on 15 March 2017. The accident happened when Ramsey and his colleagues…

Cheshire East Borough Council is one of three claimants seeking £40m of damages from contractors involved in the construction of a burnt-down retirement village. Around 150 elderly people saw their homes destroyed in a fire that razed Beechmere Retirement Village, Crewe, in 2019. The fire at the timber-framed complex resulted…

Michael Gove has accused a building owner – and one of the country’s biggest pension funds – of failing in its duties to fix “life-critical” fire risks on 10 properties, it has been reported. According to the Times, the housing and communities secretary wrote to the chief executive of the…

Kajima Construction faces a multimillion-pound court battle over alleged fire-safety defects on a hospital PFI project, after failing in an attempt to get parts of the claim against it thrown out. In 2018, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust was forced to abandon its Kajima-built Hadfield Wing at Sheffield’s Northern General…

Work has resumed at Domis Construction’s 40-storey Viadux tower in Manchester after a major scare yesterday (4 April) that saw a worker hospitalised. Emergency services rushed to the Deansgate project shortly before 9am in response to an incident that was widely reported to have been an explosion. One worker was…

Housing secretary Michael Gove has warned US-based cladding supplier Arconic that it can expect “commercial consequences” if it does not commit to contributing to the costs of remediating unsafe buildings. The firm manufactured and sold the flammable cladding that was used on Grenfell Tower. But Gove has said on Twitter…

Kingspan must outline how it expects to resolve the fire-safety defects on buildings where it worked, the housing secretary has said. The insulation firm has until Easter to set up a meeting with officials at the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) to discuss its remediation plan, or…