Building Safety Defects

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Greenhalgh

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend has decades of experience in government, and he knows that levies and taxes are a matter for the Treasury. However, not only my department, but others as well, have gone through countless numbers of fire risk assessments and external wall surveys. The results are littered with examples of people who did not build to building regulations, who cut corners and who, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, will know if he is here, used value engineering to make a bit more profit. The reality is that we cannot keep looking to the Treasury to keep bailing everybody out—we have to get the polluter to pay.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I appreciate the Minister’s frustration that he is not in a position to launch a magic bullet or even to make an announcement today, so might he instead share some of his own developing thinking? Following on from the very constructive suggestion from his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, why not produce a legislative scheme to immunise the victims and take from those who have been unjustly enriched?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I take that as a helpful interjection. We need to think about how we protect leaseholders, and sometimes statutory protection is a good thing. We know that the Building Safety Bill, that will have finished Committee in the House, provides a vehicle to do precisely that, but I cannot say any more on the subject.

Leaseholders: Costs

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Greenhalgh

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, faced with repeated variations on this question from my tenacious noble friend Lord Kennedy of Southwark, I have heard the always affable Minister talk about this injustice in terms of complexity, sometimes referring leaseholders to their contracts. I am delighted that the new Secretary of State takes a more bullish approach, suggesting that leaseholders should pay nothing and acknowledging that we collectively—the department, some in local government and others in the private sector—failed people at Grenfell. That is a wonderful acknowledgement of principle. Why did it take four and a half years, and when will we move from principle to practice?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

We will move from principle into practice in a matter of months, but this problem has occurred over decades. Sadly, every decade, there has been a significant fire in a high-rise where there was a loss of life: Garnock Court in 1999, Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 and the tragedy of Grenfell in 2017. Governments knew that cladding was often the cause, as it was in Garnock Court, and the regulations were actually dampened down under a previous Labour Government, who inserted the word “adequately”. It is a mess that took decades; give us months to sort it out.

Public Services

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Greenhalgh

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend. There has been a tremendous success in the competitive tendering of services that has driven down cost and increased value for money for the taxpayer, and also seen an improvement in the delivery of local services. It is not surprising that £64 billion is now paid out by local government to private companies to deliver those services. Although local authorities have the powers to trade and charge, they should think very carefully before they decide to move back to the situation before the introduction of competitive tendering.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Does the Minister think there are any features of some services that make them completely unsuitable for outsourcing? I am thinking of life and death matters such as firefighting or test and trace; extremely vulnerable service users in prisons or secure academies; or natural monopolies such as polluting water companies.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

As the Fire Minister, I certainly recognise the importance of the delivery of the vast majority of our fire and rescue services through people who are currently employed by local government. As a former council leader, I know there is a whole host of statutory areas where you would seek to deliver services through people who are directly employed. But increasingly there are areas where you can drive down costs through competitive tendering. That also gives in-house services the opportunity to compete with the market to see whether they can deliver those services more effectively. Competition does drive down costs and increases the quality of the services provided.