Building Safety

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Not today. But we are well aware of the practice, which goes beyond just whether they are domiciled, of using special purpose vehicles. We are looking at how we deal that issue, where the developer is known, creates an entity over there, away from the rest of the business, does the development in isolation using the funding, and then wraps it up at the end of the development. We are looking at all these issues, through law and tax. Whatever levers the Secretary of State has, he is looking to deploy them to make sure that the polluter, in the broadest sense, will pay.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the Minister on his untiring work here. The Statement made in another place yesterday is certainly extremely welcome. As a practising chartered surveyor and valuer, I am particularly determined to ensure that the regime where the purveyors of shoddy buildings have not been properly held to account must stop, but I understand the immense complexity, raised by other noble Lords, to do with insurance and other matters downstream from the immediate problem.

My first and last concern is the point made, in particular, by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock: namely, that innocent people have devoted their life savings and invested their homemaking, their very being and their work/life balances in properties which have been found to be not constructed to safe standards. This is an appalling social and mercantile evil—let us make no bones about it.

I request that the Minister confirm that this cannot and must not be turned into a tax solution. The reasons for that will be self-evident. It would be both unfair and an unbelievably blunt instrument. It will almost certainly require hypothecation, and would merely serve to collectivise what should be an individually assessed liability; the Minister mentioned that it will be property by property.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, I fear that there will not be a great queue at the Minister’s door with open cheque books, and I suspect it will be necessary to move to plan B, because it is not just the cladding but an awful lot of other defects—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Will the noble Earl ask his question, please? There are other people waiting.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

Does the Minister agree that the only remaining viable route that is coherent across the piece is, in effect, the polluter pays amendment, the draft of which had the scrutiny of top legal minds, such as Daniel Greenberg QC? Furthermore, does he agree that this is the only means whereby the perverse habits of what is known in the trade as value engineering will become something of the past, and in future that the inculcation of consistently good construction methods will be the lasting legacy of Grenfell?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

The noble Earl is right that this is a crisis of epic proportions that has affected hundreds of thousands of leaseholders and has been caused over many decades. I have probably visibly aged while holding this brief, because some of the stories from leaseholders are simply harrowing. That is one reason why I am delighted that the House collectively feels that we are making a big step in the right direction.

I also agree that we should challenge some of the practices that have led to this, such as value engineering, which is essentially a way of cutting corners and trying to inflate profits, often by compromising the integrity of the building. These practices simply must stop. Making the polluter pay and doing so at the individual building level is the way to ensure that the quality of the buildings in future will be far better than what we have seen in the past 30 years in this country.