Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornhill and Lord Empey

Committee stage
Wednesday 1st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. She mentioned a list of people who had a degree of responsibility. One of them, of course, is building control. My experience of building control in local authorities is that they can be extremely pernickety and difficult, and can enforce very high standards. All of us, in our different cities, will have seen examples of absolutely grotesque omissions and failures. But is it not the case that a local authority has a statutory liability, through building control, and that that, in and of itself, could and should be a source of remedy for a person who finds themselves in this position? On top of that, is there not an incentive for a developer, having built a structure and sold on the units, to wind up and move on to a different company to build the next one? We end up with people slipping out of the net entirely.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

The noble Lord has hit on a point; in some estates, you build one building that might just meet the requirements, and then more and more are built, and it expands the problem. I agree with a lot of what he said. I was trying to point out that we tend to say it is all on the developers, but I think this is a systemic failure of a series of accountable people. That is what I am trying to say.

Ultimately, I am saying that, sadly for democracy, this is yet another state failure—like WASPI, blood contamination and Windrush, to name but a few. The harsh reality is that the impact of this is felt every day by some people, and is growing: when a leaseholder decides that they want to reinsure or somebody decides that they want to sell, suddenly they are faced with, “Wow, I didn’t realise that there was all of this”. Therefore, the number of people affected is actually growing.

I will end on what my noble friend Lady Pinnock always says: leaseholders have done nothing wrong and everything right. Excellent campaigning from groups such as End Our Cladding Scandal and the non-qualifying leaseholders group has helped us achieve the progress we have made on remediation support. We owe it to them to keep pressing the Government on making sure that all leaseholders are protected from the costs of a situation they did absolutely nothing to cause.