Building Safety Bill (Fifteenth sitting)
Debate between Daisy Cooper and Ruth Cadbury(3 years ago)
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Daisy Cooper
I am grateful to the Minister for responding. I would highlight two points. The first is that the Minister suggested that new clause 10 was not necessary because of clause 139, but I respectfully highlight the fact that clause 139 relates to an independent review of the building regulatory regime and the regulation for construction products, so this is a process. Clause 139 relates to future regulation; it does not apply to the remediation of historical fire safety defects.
Secondly, although the Minister was at pains to highlight that he appreciates the urgency, I would highlight that clause 139, on the future review, requires only that the Secretary of State appoints a reviewer within five years of the Act passing. We have tens of thousands of innocent leaseholders who cannot wait another five years for their houses to be made safe so that they can get on with their lives. I said before that the purpose behind the new clause was to highlight the emergency and the urgency with which we would like the Government to act. Many of us feel as though the Government are not acting with the necessary urgency, but I hope the Minister hears that point. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
Clause, by leave, withdrawn.
New Clause 11
Assessment of mental health impact for leaseholders in dwellings with building safety risks
“(1) The Secretary of State must carry out a review of the impact of building safety issues on leasehold tenants’ mental health.
(2) The review as set out in subsection (1) must be laid before each House of Parliament within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, and must consider the effect on leasehold tenants’ mental health arising from but not limited to—
(a) residing or being a leasehold tenant in a building which has had or currently has building safety issues;
(b) any financial pressures on leaseholders as a result of charges due to building safety work, conducted based on advice given by his department since 14 June 2017;
(c) supply of mortgage finance.
(3) The review shall include recommendations on any mental health support to be provided to leasehold tenants’ as a result of findings under subsection (2).”.—(Ruth Cadbury.)
This new clause would ensure the Government publish an assessment considering the impact of the building safety risks on leaseholders, and whether further specific mental health support is required.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Ruth Cadbury
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Dowd. The new clause seeks an assessment of the mental health impact for leaseholders in dwellings with building safety risks.
It may be normal in areas such as health, social care and justice to consider in legislation the mental health impact on victims, but it is unusual in matters of the built environment. I hope in my comments to address the impact that the crisis is having on the mental health of millions of people across the country. Any MP who has looked into their postbag will know the turmoil and trauma that the crisis has caused to leaseholders. As the hon. Member for St Albans said earlier, they are innocent parties—the only innocent parties—and they have had the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.
The new clause makes three aspects clear. First, there is the trauma caused to people by living in a building that is unsafe and that they fear could go up in flames. Then there is the trauma of the financial bills that so many leaseholders face, which can run into tens of thousands for many. Finally, there is the trauma caused by being trapped and unable to sell or remortgage a home. That is a toxic trio that we know is impacting people’s mental health. Survey after survey has confirmed the huge impact.
In a survey for Which?, a leaseholder called Georgie said:
“I don’t know of any leaseholder whose mental health isn’t affected in some way due to this horrendous situation.”
That chimes with the findings in the landmark report by the Cladding Action Group, which found that nine out of 10 of those surveyed said their mental health had
“deteriorated as a direct result of the situation”.
Some 94% said they were anxious and worried, 83% said they were angry—rightly, I might say—and 59% felt abandoned, which is a point I will come back to later. People also said they had had to take time off work. Health conditions had been made worse. Many were seeking or planning to seek medical help for stress. Some 67% said their mental health had got worse since they were last interviewed. Those numbers should serve as a chilling reminder of the impact, toll and misery of this crisis—a crisis that this Government have effectively caused.
It is hard to convey just what the fear of living in an unsafe building must feel like—how it must feel for people to go to sleep at night not knowing if they are safe in their bed. A constituent who wrote to me after the fire at Grenfell told me that they went past and saw the fire raging from their bus. The images of that night are seared on that constituent’s brain, as it is in the minds of so many other people, even if we just saw it on the TV.
Grenfell was, of course, not the only residential fire with serious consequences. The Cube fire in Bolton and Richmond House in south-west London are just two in recent years. Locally, there are many more examples. Luckily, Sperry House in Brentford was caught in time before the fire raged across the full building—before life was lost. Thanks to the fire services, it was caught in time.
Daisy Cooper
A number of colleagues have asked what the practical effect of this clause might be. It seems to me that, as the hon. Lady has just said, there is a lack of understanding and information about the impact this situation has on those leaseholders who are caught up in it. We could imagine that, under subsection (3) of the new clause where it says,
“The review shall include recommendations”,
some of those recommendations could, for example, include mental health first aid training in the blocks of flats that are affected, particularly during times when those buildings will be wrapped in plastic. They could include providing information sheets about the impact on people’s lives that those who are affected could take to their GPs, their councillors or others, so a number of practical things could be recommended as a result of a review that could be conducted under this new clause.
Ruth Cadbury
The hon. Lady makes a useful suggestion. I feel conflicted when somebody tells me excitedly that they are moving, or that they have just bought, because what do I say? Do I say how pleased I am for them, or do I ask, “Have you thought about this? Did you know about this? Was your solicitor employed by the developer?” and so on. These issues will lead to the mental health problems of the future among people who now are very happy and excited.
I will not press this new clause to a vote, but I am concerned about the rising tide of mental health problems, particularly among leaseholders, but generally among all residents in these blocks. I do wonder how many suicides there have to be before the Government take this on as yet another aspect of the emergency. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
Clause, by leave, withdrawn.
New Clause 12
Assessment of the impact of building safety issues on access to insurance
“(1) Within one year of the day on which this Act is passed the Secretary of State must carry out a review of the impact of building safety issues, including the provisions of this Act, on access to insurance.
(2) The review as set out in subsection (1) shall include assessment of the United Kingdom insurance market.
(3) The review must consider the impact of building safety issues, confidence in the building safety industry and the impact of advice given by his Department on building safety given since 14 July 2017 on—
(a) the availability and cost of insurance for residential blocks;
(b) the availability and cost of professional indemnity insurance for workers in the building safety industry;
(c) requirements placed on buildings in order to access building insurance; and
(d) the wider insurance market.
(4) The review must make recommendation as to any further action needed by Government or the industry to improve access to affordable residential and professional insurance across the United Kingdom.”—(Mike Amesbury.)
This new clause would ensure the Government publish an assessment of the impact of the building safety risks on the UK insurance market for residential buildings and professional indemnity insurance for those working in building safety.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Building Safety Bill (Eleventh sitting)
Debate between Daisy Cooper and Ruth Cadbury(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Dowd. I echo the comments made across the Committee about our departed colleagues Mr Brokenshire and Sir David Amess.
I rise to support amendment 12, which stands in my name and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale and the hon. Member for St Albans. I reinforce the point that risk to building safety should be defined by actual risk—as assessed by the many experts we have in this country and the systems that we use but should probably improve—and not by some arbitrary cut-off.
I will describe two examples. On building risk, my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale mentioned the risk of occupation, which should be covered but from which so many users and so many types of residential building are excluded—a point that I have covered in previous Committee sittings.
In my constituency, we have six 22-storey tower blocks called the Brentford Towers, which are council blocks with a mixture of tenants and leaseholders and were built more than 40 years ago. Not so long ago, a man died in a fire in his flat in one of those blocks. The fire did not spread. There was smoke damage in the communal hallway, which was shared by three other flats, and a lot of the smoke went out of his windows or through the smoke escape hatch on the stairwell.
The fire did not spread upwards, downwards or into the other flats on the man’s floor, because the building was designed with fire safety in mind and had not subsequently been messed around with. The fire doors were all shut and the smoke vent was open. That is what was supposed to happen: it was a tragic death, but sadly the man might have died in any kind of home-based fire. No one else was injured, no other flat was damaged and the cost to the community was minimal.
The other example is a block of flats that I have mentioned before, Richmond House in Worcester Park in south London. It had four storeys, I believe, with just over 30 flats. Once the fire took hold, it took 11 minutes for that building to burn down completely. By the grace of God, as my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale said, no one died, although some people had smoke injuries.
Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. On a number of occasions during the passage of the Fire Safety Act 2021 and this Bill, we have heard from the Government that the number of fires has gone down, but does the hon. Member agree that it is important that we remember the evidence we have heard from a number of organisations that fires are now spreading a lot faster and that there is therefore a much greater danger when fires do break out?
Ruth Cadbury
The hon. Member is absolutely right: we need to look at the evidence from actual fires. Many of us have had examples in our own constituency; the one that I mentioned was not in mine, but there was a fire in a block of flats in my constituency as a result of flammable cladding that had not yet been removed. Luckily, the fire brigade got there in time, before serious damage, injury or death occurred.
I conclude by referring to so much high-quality, professional expertise that has submitted evidence to the Committee and said that the risks should be based on actual risk and not on an arbitrary cut-off by height or number of storeys.
Building Safety Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Daisy Cooper and Ruth Cadbury(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Daisy Cooper
Q
Martin Boyd: Unfortunately, my view is that the residents’ voice section of the Bill and the HSE’s current work is the weakest element of the whole process. The Government have not dealt with the issue of the residents’ voice particularly well for a very long time. There is no system at all in either the social or the private sector for the proper representation of everyone’s interests.
As we said, the landlord is obviously sitting in conflict. Under the Bill, I get to sit in conflict with my leaseholders because I have become the accountable person. Under me, I have a responsible person—one of Nigel’s managing agents—who will employ the building safety manager. With my landlord’s hat on, I am liable if things go wrong, but I have no responsibility for any of the costs. All the residents have full responsibility for the costs, but no control. It is only because I am a landlord and a leaseholder that we get that common interest. In both the social and private sector, we have had landlords who have undermined effective resident engagement for decades.
Early in the Bill’s passage, we set out a proposal for a formalised system to create a residents’ group on every site, and the view at the time was that that sat outside the Bill’s purview, but there is no point in setting up a system for cosy little decisions to be made that filter down to the residents, where you hand them a nice little infographic saying, “Please don’t store petrol in your flat.” That is what has been done. The social sector best practice group has produced an infographic, and one of the diagrams says, “Don’t keep petrol in your flats.” Well, if that is our view of the intelligence of people who live in flats, we have a very, very long way to go.
We need to take a very different approach to resident engagement, and what I have said to officials is that, rather than take a top-down approach—assuming that we call the landlord the top of the system—it should start at the bottom with people who actually live in the buildings. Give them the facility to organise themselves and represent their common interests.
Dr Glen: As a managing agent, I would much rather deal with a representative committee of residents than each resident individually, because obviously time is involved in that. It would be nice to think that those residents will represent everybody—that would be nirvana—although it will not always be the case.
This is a really difficult issue. It is always a surprise that people do not realise that managing agents often do not know who the resident is. Somebody will hide the fact that they are sub-letting, for a variety of reasons. They might not want the taxman to know that they are receiving rental income. They might not want to pay a sub-letting fee, or they might not bother to get around to it.
It is difficult to engage with residents when you do not know who they are, but capturing their voice means we have to do that. We also have to filter it. I will give you an unfortunate example that I read about on LinkedIn over the weekend. A firm that specialises in out-of-hours said that they had had a complaint from a gentleman. It was about an issue that did not need instant attention, because that would cost four times as much and he could wait until Monday. The firm received 155 phone calls from that person over two days, most of which were abusive.
Something I put in my paper was that we need somehow to figure out how to filter this. The example I gave was someone saying, “It’s a bit dark in this corridor.” Is that a complaint? Is it just ruefully saying, “My eyes are getting old,” or do I, as a managing agent, have to log that, report it to the regulator, track it and bring in somebody to install new lighting at the cost of £2,000 that weekend? I do not know.
This is a difficult area to get into, but the more we, as managing agents, can get a collective response, the less admin you are doing trying to deal with absolutely everybody.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
Q
Martin Boyd: The answer on whether it is fully clear—I think we would fully agree on this—is that when you get into complex sites with mixed private, social sector and commercial, you are going to have a number of accountable people, a number of responsible people and, potentially, a number of building safety managers. The potential for conflict there is enormous.
The issue I have with the Bill is this: I can accept that you want to make me accountable if I get something wrong, but the Bill, if we use the analogy of cars, is trying to make me responsible for the fact that Mercedes produced a diesel engine that broke the rules. I did not design the building. I did not build the building. I am responsible, and fully accept I should be responsible, if we do something wrong with the management, but we, effectively, are non-exec directors. At any large site, that is how it will be.
Residents do not run their own building unless it is very small; they will contract and employ a professional managing agent. In turn, there is no such thing as a building safety manager at the moment. I do not see why they are needed at all in the occupation phase, because what a professional property manager does is contract a relevant expert when they are needed. If the air conditioning system, the lift system, various plant and machinery or the fire alarms need to be updated, they will go out to a relevant expert.
The idea that we are somehow going to put that expertise in one individual and that they will make the decisions is just going to cause conflict. The property manager will be trying to budget for how they plan to look after the building for the next five years, and the building safety manager will have a different set of priorities. As far as I understand it, the building safety manager wins—so what happens if the building safety manager spends all the money and there is nothing left for the property manager to spend? The answer is that they will just have to put up their bills, so we will have one set of building safety charge bills getting bigger and bigger, and another set of normal service charges getting bigger. It will cause problems.
Dr Glen: A big worry for me about the impact of having an accountable person, particularly where there are lay boards, is, to put it succinctly: who in their right mind would agree to be a director with that level of accountability? What are we going to do in those circumstances?
We have talked about potentially bringing in professional directors—that is one possible route, if the lease allows it, and that would be a cost, again. That is going to be an issue, I believe, for anybody in their right mind taking on that level of responsibility. What this might mean is that there are no leaseholder-led boards—they might appoint a professional who then appoints and instructs the managing agent accordingly, but you might see residents’ management companies and right-to-manage companies disappearing.
Martin Boyd: I think there is a risk, because if you want to make me responsible for Mercedes, you need to put me in charge of Mercedes. I am not going to do that, so I am stuck. People who sit on the boards of RMCs usually consider the matter quite carefully. You are taking on a serious responsibility, helping to look after the lives of other people. But you are doing it as a non-exec.
I make it clear to the rest of my board on regular occasions: “You do not interfere in operational matters.” We employ professional managing agents to do that. I think that the legislation needs to be structured to allow that non-exec position to continue because if you want to say, “I am suddenly going to make you criminally liable for matters you don’t control,” Nigel is right: who is going to be stupid enough to take that role? More importantly, a representative of the Association of British Insurers will be speaking to you in a while and I think you are going to struggle to find anyone who will insure that role or those of the building safety manager and the responsible person.
Daisy Cooper
Q
James Dalton: The significantly increased cost of fire is obviously passed on to all premium payers through increased premiums. For leaseholders in the post-Grenfell world, there have been very significant increases in the cost of insurance for some of the buildings that have been identified as most at risk.
I and the insurance industry particularly empathise with all leaseholders who have been affected, and we have worked hard to ensure that where buildings have not been able to access insurance, we have tried to facilitate insurance. The sad reality is that, in the absence of a quicker remediation programme, those leaseholders will continue to face increased insurance premiums.
Ruth Cadbury
Q
James Dalton: I would say that it is not just residential; it is in a number of buildings. If you think about the significant increase in online shopping, for example, which has driven the development of very large non-compartmentalised warehouses: those are very significant fire risks because they lack the structures internally. It is a problem that the insurance industry is cognisant of both here in the UK and internationally.
Building Safety Bill (Third sitting)
Debate between Daisy Cooper and Ruth Cadbury(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Ruth Cadbury
Q
Andrew Bulmer: I will lead with that one, Chair. I think that question was directed at me. I will come back to what needs to be in the Bill. The commentary behind this is that there is a clear and understandable push through the Law Commission and through the work being done by Government to vest the freehold or commonhold interest or the management of the development in the hands of the residents themselves, who thereby have democratic control over their development, and we find the logic of that compelling. The challenge is that it means those residents will be in charge of their own affairs. We can see in the example of Miami—the building that collapsed there—that the residents association was challenged in terms of its competence to manage the building safely. That does not mean that we abandon the adventure. I think we progress with it, but we progress with our eyes open and that means we have to support those directors.
I would like to see a support mechanism for directors who wish to actively manage their own affairs, so they can feel supported and get guidance where they need it. There would also need to be support for those directors in terms of quality assurance of their suppliers. For building safety managers, for example, it is important there is some form of a register of quality assurance. We would like to see the managing agents they will depend on being regulated as per Lord Best’s RoPA report.
In the Bill, there would need to be the option for directors to decide if they choose—purely optional—to appoint an external director to take on the role of the AP or principal accountable person. The danger is that lay directors will look at the risks involved, and they will all step back and not take up directorships. That is already happening and is already a significant problem.
Every property manager will tell you that it is difficult to get directors to come forward these days as the responsibilities become clear. When the responsibilities of the Building Safety Bill are made clear to those directors, we expect it will be difficult to get people to take up those responsibilities voluntarily, unpaid and without the necessary expertise or competence to fulfil them. The ability to appoint an external director would be likely to mean overriding the articles of association of the development and implying covenants into the leases to enable the external director to be paid for. It would require protections for leaseholders from a director who went rogue. These provisions would need to be in the Bill to enable leaseholders to outsource their responsibilities to a professional if they chose to do so.
Daisy Cooper
Q
Councillor McCoy: Yes, London Councils and the Local Government Association have worked with MHCLG all through the process since the Grenfell Tower tragedy to help shape the legislation. Obviously, a lot of the time we are responding to things, but we are trying to feed in and push. I would flag up at this point that London Councils would like to see a wholesale review of the building regulation framework.
At the moment, the Bill addresses and improves the existing regulation. We have been pushing quite hard for a wholesale review across all the legislation, which is a bit more in line with the Dame Judith Hackitt report. However, we have been working closely throughout to assist and get the best out of this, and, yes, we have been working with the Health and Safety Executive. We are quite pleased with our progress so far and the way it has been coming across to the HSE.
We would like to see a requirement that the HSE works with the local authority’s building control regulator, local councils and the fire authority in the first instance—that they call on their expertise—because that helps us as London Councils to build our capacity and resources. That is important, as are the resources to go with it, and I do not think we have had any firm commitments to those resources. We keep making the case that we are going to need to bring those resources forward. I would just emphasise that making this Bill deliverable and achieving its aims of improving building safety cannot be done without the staff and skills required, and we cannot upskill without the funding to do that. To make it practically deliverable, it needs to be fully funded.
Ruth Cadbury
Q
Andrew Bulmer: The wider comment on the PI insurance market is that it is in serious difficulty, and has been for some time. Any professional who is giving advice on building safety, especially fire safety matters, is having their premiums either severely increased, cover withdrawn entirely, or significant restrictions placed upon them, so accessing any professional on a fire safety matter at the moment is problematic. You used the phrase “duty holder”: if that were to refer to an RMC, for example, I cannot comment on PI insurance for RMCs. I think that is something that requires further investigation.
Building Safety Bill (Second sitting)
Debate between Daisy Cooper and Ruth Cadbury(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Ruth Cadbury
Q
Justin Bates: Oh, yes.