Fire Safety Bill

Clive Betts Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con) [V]]

It is a pleasure to be able to speak in this debate. I would also like to send my best wishes to my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire).

It is a great pleasure to see the Minister in his place and responding to this debate. I listened to him very carefully and I detect a hint that there could be a compromise, for which I and my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) have been calling for many months now. We are very keen to work with the Government. We are very keen for the Government to table an amendment in lieu, to accept our amendment today or, if the Minister feels so inclined, even to move our amendment to a vote to test the will of the House, but I imagine that, sadly, we will not have the opportunity to vote on what is called the McPartland-Smith amendment today.

I would like to pick the Minister up on the point he made about this Bill not being the correct place for the amendment. I believe it is, which I will come on to in a moment. I would also like to put on record that I, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen, those who have supported our amendment and the leaseholders themselves are all very clear that we have never asked the Government to pay for the full costs of remediation, or the taxpayer to bail people out. We just want the taxpayer to provide a safety net for leaseholders to ensure the fire safety works are actually undertaken; it has been nearly four years.

We want to be in a position whereby the Government provide the cash flow up front, and then they can levy those who have been responsible within the industry to recoup those funds over the next 10 years. That is our plan and objective. We would love to work with the Minister and the Government to get this resolved in the Lords. I say to the Minister today that their lordships have already agreed to re-table the amendment if it is not accepted. It will be tabled in the Lords on Friday. I am sure we will be back to discuss this later on—in a few months. So I hope that we can work in the in-between time to come to some solution together.

I am very proud to be the Chairman of the Regulatory Reform Committee. The Fire Safety Bill does amend the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. The reason why the Bill is so important is that it creates a financial obligation on leaseholders to pay freeholders for the costs of remedying any fire safety defects on external walls and doors, such as cladding, but not limited to cladding, so it can include fire safety breaks and a whole variety of other issues. I assume that this is an unintended consequence. The Government do not want leaseholders to pay—that is very clear from what the Minister said earlier—but they are not sure how they can resolve the problem and get the works fixed without leaseholders actually paying.

From my point of view, we are very keen to ensure that leaseholders are not responsible. In terms of dealing with that order, we have to amend the Fire Safety Bill, because we cannot wait for the Building Safety Bill. The Fire Safety Bill creates this legal obligation. It creates the position whereby a fire authority, which is a competent authority, can order a freeholder to do the works. They have 21 days to agree to do the works and provide a timescale, or that is a criminal offence. Once they have had this direction from a competent authority, the leaseholders are then required to refund the freeholder for the works that are done. Up and down the country we already have thousands of leaseholders who are on the verge of bankruptcy—some have already gone bankrupt—just waiting and, before they actually get to the costs of remediation, paying £15,000 a week for waking watch in blocks of flats and excessive insurance premiums. The costs are huge.

I urge the Government to accept our amendment, to let us vote on it, or to work with us to ensure that we resolve this issue in the Lords and that leaseholders do not have to pay.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

First, may I send my best wishes to the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire)? When he was Secretary of State, he and I discussed our respective illnesses, and I really feel for him and his family at this very difficult time.

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has discussed the issue of cladding remediation and fire safety works on many occasions. In June, we made it clear that

“residents are in no way to blame”

for defects from cladding

“and it is our view that they should bear none of the cost of remediation.”

We repeated those sentiments in our prelegislative scrutiny of the Building Safety Bill. Again, we said:

“The Government must recommit to the principle that leaseholders should not pay anything towards the cost of remediating historical building safety defects…for which they were not responsible.”

That is very clear.

The question is who should pay: the initial developer—the Government could help to co-ordinate action against them—the taxpayer, of course, or the industry as a whole? Unfortunately, the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland)—I very much agreed with the sentiments of his comments—and by the Labour Front Benchers seek to place responsibility on the freeholder.

For reasons that the Minister gave, those amendments cut across the contractual relationship between freeholder and leaseholder. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), who raised this issue a number of times in the Select Committee when he was a member, showed that freeholders are often quite small companies that, where they were not responsible for the initial development, simply collect ground rent. If faced with the cost of remediation, they would simply walk away. Those amendments will not get the work done. That is the fundamental issue. We want to see it done without leaseholders having to pay for it.

Turning to who should pay, certainly, the Government have put on the table £3.5 billion in addition to the £1.6 billion, but that does not include anything other than cladding remediation. All the other works, which for many leaseholders are as substantial in cost as cladding remediation, are not covered, and of course that funding does not cover buildings below 18 metres.

The Government have come up with a loan scheme for buildings below 18 metres, but that places the loan charge on the freeholder. Surely, we are back to the same problems: if we cannot interfere with the contractual relationship between the freeholder and the leaseholder—according to the Minister, with respect to the amendments before us from the Opposition and the hon. Member for Stevenage, we cannot—then surely that is a problem for the Government’s loan scheme too, and if freeholders are going to walk away from a direct charge on properties, as the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton said, they will walk away from a loan too. That is a real problem that the Government have to address.

I welcome that the Government are going to introduce a levy and a financial contribution from the industry, but we appear to be in a position where they cannot tell us whether the money raised from the levy will be in addition to the £3.5 billion or whether it will be taken from the £3.5 billion—in other words, that the Treasury will get some of that money back. That, to my view, would be wrong. The Minister is going to come to the Select Committee on 8 March; hopefully, we will be a bit wiser after that visit.

Finally, we have talked a lot about leaseholders, but what about social housing tenants? The National Housing Federation says that there is £10 billion of remedial work to be done in the social housing sector, and more for council housing properties, yet the only automatic right that social housing landlords have to any funding is for help with the removal of ACM cladding; everything else they are likely to have to pay for. Tenants are going to have to pay through rent increases, cuts to future maintenance or cuts to the house building programme, none of which is acceptable. So we have a perverse situation where the social housing landlord, as a freeholder, could be ensuring that tenants have to pay for the remediation of properties next door that have been subject to the right to buy. That cannot be right.

All these matters need resolving. We hope that the Minister does so on his visit to the Select Committee.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We now move to a three-minute limit. I call Royston Smith.

Fire Safety Bill

Clive Betts Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 29th April 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

First, may I allude to the work, which has just been mentioned, by my honourable friend and colleague, Jim Fitzpatrick? When he was a Member of this House, he did an awful lot of work in this area, and he deserves to be respected and remembered for that.

This is the first of two Bills to improve building safety, particularly in relation to fire. This Bill will be followed by the building safety Bill, which we understand will come in draft form. If that is the case, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, which I chair, will look forward to undertaking pre-legislative scrutiny on it. We will certainly treat it with the urgency it deserves. The Committee has taken evidence in recent months from Dame Judith Hackitt on her report on fire safety, expert witnesses and Ministers. We recommended at an early stage that all combustible cladding should be removed from high rise residential buildings and we called for Government funding to enable that to happen. I am pleased that many of the Committee’s recommendations have been accepted, but it is unacceptable that at this stage there are still over 300 high rise residential buildings that have combustible cladding on them.

The Select Committee has just started a new inquiry into combustible cladding. We have had 1,300 responses to a survey. In those responses, we have been told by the respondents that 70% of them are living in buildings that still have combustible cladding on them. We have been told that in many of those buildings, fire breaks and fire doors are missing or inadequate. We have been told that many of the buildings have combustible insulation as well as combustible cladding. Nearly three years after Grenfell, it is not good enough that those buildings are still in that state.

It is welcome, however, that the Bill clarifies the responsibility of building owners with regard to those issues and defects. It gives powers to the fire service to enforce the regulations that are in place. One of the challenges highlighted by Dame Judith Hackitt is the need for responsible and accountable persons at all stages of a building’s life. A responsible and accountable person needs to be identified at the construction stage and then, when the building is built, for its maintenance and management. As the previous speaker, the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning), said, the question is: who is the responsible owner in each case? Is it the leaseholder? The real problem for leaseholders is that they are not normally the building owner. Is it the freeholder, who may not have legal responsibility, or is it the management agent? Do any of these bodies actually have the necessary skills to take on this role and, indeed, would a management agent want to do that job if they had to take on those liabilities? There are real challenges that are not addressed in this legislation.

On the role of the fire service, it is welcome that it will be given powers to enforce the regulations and make sure that buildings are safe, and that owners do their job. We heard in our Select Committee inquiry that the job of the fire service, in all matters, could be greatly enhanced and helped if every single property has a log book, which has the materials used in the construction of the building, the building’s layout and the responsibilities for the management of that building, including evacuation procedures. It would help the fire service to carry out enforcement and, of course, it would make it much easier for the fire service to deal with a fire when one breaks out in such a building.

Dame Judith highlighted the need for residents of these high-rise residential buildings to be fully involved in, informed of and consulted on matters to do with the safety of those buildings. The Select Committee completely agreed with her, and it is welcome that in the Bill, there is the possibility to go on and ensure that evacuation procedures in buildings are fully understood by the people who live in them.

Finally, to echo the comments that have been made, all this legislation we are discussing today and future legislation should have the simple objective of making sure that a Grenfell disaster never happens again.