Building Safety Bill

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I count it a great privilege to speak following the valedictory speech of my right reverend friend the Bishop of Winchester. He has indeed been a powerful advocate, both in your Lordships’ House and in the Church, for our nation’s further and higher education sector. In that capacity, he has also been a great personal supporter and encouragement for me, in my own rather modest efforts at lifelong learning. Along with this, his passion for the global Anglican Communion and his strong links with Africa will be much missed, both in this House and in the House of Bishops of the Church of England. We all wish him a long, happy and fruitful retirement, and indeed pray that he will be safe in his new home.

In turning to the substance of this debate, I declare my interests as set out in the register, as chair of Wythenshawe Community Housing Group and as deputy chair of the Church Commissioners for England, both of whom are substantial residential landlords. Last year the Archbishops’ commission on housing reported, with recommendations for both Church and State. In the debate in this House, my most reverend friend the Archbishop of Canterbury drew attention to the five principles which underlie the findings of that commission: that every household should have a home that is sustainable, safe, stable, sociable and satisfying. As he said in that debate,

“from almshouses to housing associations, (the Church) has for centuries been involved in the provision of decent places to live. We do not do this just to be nice—we are not an NGO with a pointy roof—but because we believe that Christ commands us to love our neighbour.”—[Official Report, 24/3/21; col. GC 38.]

We on these Benches heartily welcome this Bill as a means to progress the principles enshrined in the Coming Home report.

The proposed building safety regulator is particularly welcome. As the chair of a housing association, I am familiar with the work of the regulator in that part of the housing sector, where regulation is seen as not simply about punishing bad practice, but as promoting good practice. I welcome this, not least since theologically I am drawn far more to the advocacy of virtue than the denunciation of sin.

While I accept that the regulator of social housing has a particular role as a consequence of the state funds that support the sector, I struggle to agree that issues of safety are substantially different between different forms of tenure. I hope that as this Bill progresses, we will be able to clarify and, where need be, strengthen the regulator’s role.

Many noble Lords have already drawn our attention to the fire safety scandal in medium- and high-rise buildings. I deliberately do not refer to it as a cladding scandal; while it may have come to our attention through the tragic loss of life at Grenfell Tower, what has been exposed is much wider. It has been my privilege this last couple of years to support the campaigning efforts of the Manchester Cladiators. These are ordinary men and women who purchased properties in good faith, and now find their homes are technically worthless. Not only that, but they face unaffordable costs in terms of remediation works and in paying for interim measures.

I am proud that my housing association has spent a considerable sum to remediate taller buildings, and without requiring leaseholders to pay for the work. But that does not come without a cost. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, has already said, many housing associations are now cutting newbuild plans in order to focus spending on building safety. We need both safe homes and more homes. I urge the Minister, whose understanding and sympathy have helped move matters forward significantly in recent months, to press on his colleagues, perhaps particularly in Her Majesty’s Treasury, that the one-off costs of remediating a crisis that has built up largely unacknowledged and over many years should not be taken from the budgets required for the regular ongoing work of building the new affordable homes that this nation badly needs.

For many of us in your Lordships’ House, this matter will not have been rectified until two things have happened: that all affected properties can be bought, sold and insured at their full, true value, with mortgage providers content to lend against that full value and that this is achieved without the costs being borne by the leaseholders. In that category, I include individuals who have sublet properties that they had to move out of, and now cannot sell. Meeting these two criteria will require the legislation we pass to cover not only buildings of over six storeys or 18 metres in height, but to encompass buildings of four storeys or 11 metres tall, which I believe is the height standard supported by the Fire Brigades Union, whose members attend fires in such properties. I welcome assurances from Her Majesty’s Government that they will seek to bring forward new provisions as the Bill progresses. I and my friends on these Benches will be scrutinising those amendments carefully as well as considering support for other amendments as noble Lords may bring before us.

I will end my remarks by quoting Scripture. On the matter of building safety legislation, Deuteronomy Chapter 22, Verse 8, reads as follows:

“When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, otherwise you might have blood guilt on your house if anyone should fall from it”.


If I may be permitted a pun, they were building on biblical foundations—foundations laid in that book around 3,000 years ago. We must consider not only parapets, but the general safety of our building.

For today, we are seeking to find the right legislation that will protect our fellow citizens in their homes. It is a sacred duty—if we fail, we risk drawing that same blood guilt on this House. I welcome this Bill and look forward to supporting and strengthening it as it progresses through your Lordships’ House.

Homeowners: Cladding-related Costs

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I think that extended beyond two points. In addition to the unprecedented sum of £5.1 billion towards the remediation costs, we recognise the need to strengthen redress mechanisms. That will come forward as part of the building safety Bill. We have also stepped forward to support the installation of many hundreds of alarms to ensure that people do not have to pay for a costly waking watch, with our waking watch relief scheme of some £30 million. We recognise that it is for the building owners to shoulder their statutory responsibilities to keep their buildings safe. We will continue to work with all levels of government to make sure that that happens and that the costs are not passed on to the leaseholders.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester [V]]

My Lords, four years on from Grenfell, one of the heaviest burdens being borne by those trapped living in unsafe buildings—whether due to cladding or otherwise—is simply not knowing when their plight will end. Will the Minister now urge Her Majesty’s Government to present this House with a clear timetable and deadline for resolving all outstanding issues, so that residents will know when they will be able to live in their homes safely and when they will be able to sell them for a proper price?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, we have made further progress on the remediation of all forms of unsafe cladding. Nearly 700 buildings have had their funding approved, and around £400 million has been allocated as part of the building safety fund. We recognise some people’s problems with regard to access to EWS1, but that is why we have the RICS guidance, which has been adopted by about 80% of lenders. I hope that it that will see a more proportionate approach.

Anti-Semitic Attacks

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My noble friend, with his experience as a leader of Bradford, is absolutely right. We need to combine that strict policing, where we do more than engage and the police act to ensure that we take the hate off our streets and online wherever it occurs, with an equally strong and robust approach to social cohesion. In fact, Bradford pioneered the Near Neighbours programme, which brings different communities, such as the Muslim and Jewish communities, closer together. We can learn from that.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester [V]]

Is the Minister aware that the Union of Jewish Students has raised serious concerns that Jewish students and societies are now being targeted with really quite disgusting anti-Semitic abuse due to the conflict in the Middle East? Will he reassure Jewish students that the Government will clamp down on all forms of campus anti-Semitism and encourage all universities not just to adopt but to implement the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, we are aware of this tension. The Community Security Trust has reported a massive spike in anti-Semitic incidents, but equally, Tell MAMA has seen a similar increase in anti-Muslim incidents of 420% in the past week. We are funding the Union of Jewish Students to do precisely that: to tackle these issues. We want to see the full implementation, not just the adoption, of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

Housing Strategy

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester [V]]

My Lords, I thank my most reverend friend the Archbishop of Canterbury for sponsoring this debate. My personal interest and passion in tackling homelessness and creating good homes for the people of our nation go far beyond the interests contained in the official register, to which I draw your Lordships’ attention. Alongside those, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, has indicated, I now chair the board of governors of the Church Commissioners, as deputy to my most reverend friend. I gladly confirm to your Lordships that the board welcomes the report, and indeed I am member of the group set up by the Church charged with overseeing its implementation.

Today we have no Bill to scrutinise, no complex Marshalled List of amendments to work through; what we have is something that runs far deeper, something that should underpin and equip us for such future legislation on the matter of housing as is brought forward to your Lordships’ House to determine. The five values for housing that the Archbishops’ Commission has set before us—sustainable, safe, stable, sociable and satisfying—have been implicit in much of the work I have engaged in over the years. But now we have them encapsulated in a simple and memorable form. Not least, they recognise that a home is far more than walls, roofs, bricks, tiles, glass and mortar. A home is somewhere we can belong.

Some years ago, I was speaking at the official opening of a building that housed several asylum and refugee support services in Birmingham. After those of us numbered among the moderately great and modestly good had all had our say, a young man from one of the charities based in the centre spoke. He said, “For all my time in this country so far, I have been your guest. Today, for the first time, I am the host and you are my guests, and that makes all the difference.” A home is not fully a home until it is a place where we can do what that young man did—offer hospitality and receive guests. That, I believe, is why the concept of home as a sociable place—the fourth of the core values set out in the commission’s report—is so important. I also learned that day in Birmingham that other cultures have much to teach us about the centrality of hospitality to human flourishing.

My most reverend friend referred in his opening speech to his predecessor William Temple. Temple was of course translated to Canterbury from York, having prior to that been Bishop of Manchester. So three of us speaking in Grand Committee today hold offices Temple once held and seek to inhabit that inheritance. Worn out by war and restricted by rationing, the Britain of the 1940s could all too easily have become a divided nation, but Temple and those with whom he worked had a greater vision of a society where all were provided with basics, such as healthcare and education, so that they might have space to flourish.

The mass social housing efforts of the post-war years demolished the slums of our cities, including the house where I was born, in order to replace them with something better. Not everything that was built proved a lasting success—things are rarely that straightforward —but huge progress was made in creating homes that could be lived in with dignity.

In a Britain reeling from 12 months of pandemic, a nation still seeking to redefine itself outside the European Union, we need to recover the boldness of Temple and his generation. We need to make decisions about housing not based on short-term political expediency—whatever might garner a few more votes in a marginal council ward or parliamentary constituency—but on a vision of the good society we wish to bequeath to our grandchildren. Recommendations set out in the commission’s report offer us a road map, if I may use that fashionable term, towards a nation housed for living in the 21st century.

I cannot let this opportunity pass without some reference to one piece of legislation currently before Parliament. It is my privilege to support the Manchester Cladiators group. Its members are leaseholders in high and medium-rise buildings who have been caught up in the aftermath of the dreadful tragedy of Grenfell Tower. The ramifications of that disaster reached much wider than merely to residents of high-rise blocks beset by poor cladding. The deaths at Grenfell have, like the deaths of George Floyd and Sarah Everard, made our society aware of more widespread failings, albeit in this case in our physical rather than our social fabric.

Many buildings formerly considered safe, and homes in them bought on that basis, are now deemed sufficiently at risk as to be unmortgageable. Residents who may need to move for work or family reasons are trapped; some are facing service charges and bills of orders of magnitude higher than in previous years in order to pay for waking watches, insurance or building refurbishment. In many cases the freeholder is little more than a shell mechanism through which leaseholders pay their service charges to the developer who constructed the block. This is a problem too big for anyone other than government to solve, and too urgent for it to be allowed to fester a moment longer. Will the Minister speak with his Treasury colleagues and use his good offices to gain their commitment to attending the next meeting that he and his ministry are due to have with the End Our Cladding Scandal campaign?

Noble Lords will remember, I hope, the famous words written by Lewis Carroll—like me, both a mathematician and an Anglican clergyman:

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’”


In housing terms, an “affordable rent” is now defined by Her Majesty’s Government as being one at or below 80% of the market rent for the local area. But if I were looking in the window of an estate agent and saw one house on sale for a million pounds and one next to it for £800,000, that would hardly convince a mortgage lender that I could afford, on a bishop’s stipend, to buy the cheaper one. As several speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, have reminded us, affordability has to mean what the purchaser can afford. Redefining the word, Humpty Dumpty-like, to mean something entirely other may assert mastery over the language but only at the cost of confusing and damaging serious discourse on Britain’s housing crisis. Please may we have our word back, and some truly affordable homes?

Shortly before lockdown became a word, I was standing one morning in a room high up in the centre of Manchester, speaking with Sir Richard Leese, the leader of the council. Looking out through the windows, we began to count the number of cranes visible. Each one was a symbol of the economic regeneration that had revitalised the city that we both serve, and many of them were building blocks of high-quality apartments.

The number of people living close to the city centre has rocketed so much in recent years that I have had to reverse the practice of my predecessors and buy new city-centre vicarages to house the clergy of the city churches closer to their new parishioners. I welcome the growth in city-centre living, locating people close to where they work, cutting down commuting costs, while helping to support shops and leisure facilities.

Sadly, however, we have also seen something of a trend first spotted in London: blocks are built and apartments are sold, but no one ever moves in. Instead of homes, we are constructing bank vaults in the sky: edifices intended purely to hold value, never people. They have more in common with gold bricks than the bricks that build our homes. While so many of our fellow citizens remain homeless or poorly housed, they are a scandal.

I accept that appropriating them directly to rent out affordably would probably prove too complex to achieve in law, but a stiffer tax regime, radically reducing the incentive to hold much-needed properties empty for long periods, would not only bring more homes into occupation but raise funds from the others—money that could then be redeployed to address our housing crisis. I urge the Minister in this debate to let us know what plans the Government have or will consider, including the taxation of such properties, so that they no longer lie empty in our cities, while, mere yards away, our fellow citizens lie down to sleep in shop doorways each night.

To conclude, today is a day for words, but, like those in the Archbishops’ commission’s report, they must result in action. I thank my most reverend friend for giving us this opportunity to debate these matters, and I pray that his efforts may be richly rewarded.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach. Lord Griffiths? The noble Lord cannot unmute, so we will move on to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, and hope we can go back to the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, later.

Covid-19: “Everybody In” Scheme

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for highlighting the importance of the wraparound care required to get people into settled accommodation. I would point to the budget of £433 million over three years to enable people to move from temporary accommodation into more settled accommodation. We are talking about having supported around 33,000 people, with nearly 10,000 in emergency accommodation. Those are substantial numbers and there is no doubt that this programme has saved lives.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester [V]]

I thank the Minister for his replies to date and for his personal commitment to tackling homelessness in this country. He has already referred to the fact that many homeless people are at high risk of respiratory disease, including coronavirus. Will he encourage Her Majesty’s Government to prioritise the vaccination of all homeless people as a cohort, including those who do not fall neatly into one of the existing priority groups?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, the most important thing is to define terms. Certainly “rough sleepers” are very much considered to be a priority category. The right reverend Prelate makes a case for whether we should consider the broader category of those with a statutory duty to be housed, who may be in accommodation but not settled accommodation. I will take this forward and see how we can make sure that the vaccination goes to the most needed groups, which I am sure is the point behind the question.