Building Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of St Albans and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Monday 28th February 2022 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 50A in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Young of Cookham. Let me say how much I support the sentiments and intentions of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who has done us a real service.

I, too, do not want to die over the details of this amendment. I hope that this will stimulate a really vigorous debate so that we can all work together on how we get these sorts of commitments in the Bill. I and others on my Benches want to work with the Government and others to achieve this. If someone else can turn up with much better solutions, that is great.

Throughout the cladding and fire safety crisis, we have heard many stories of landlords imposing outrageous and sometimes astronomical building safety charges on leaseholders and tenants. Often this has been done by managing agents acting on behalf of the freeholder. Leaseholders and tenants have reported a complete lack of accountability and transparency throughout this process and have been unable to challenge or even scrutinise the charges imposed on them.

Of course, this is only one aspect of the fire safety crisis, but one that has been somewhat overlooked when the primary focus has rightly been on ensuring a fair remediation settlement. However, the fire safety crisis has exposed the utterly powerless position that many leaseholders find themselves in, sometimes subject to the whims of freeholders with very few avenues of recourse, unless they raise considerable amounts of money and try to challenge things in the courts, which is very often way beyond the financial ability of many leaseholders, even if they wish to do it.

Amendment 50A would strengthen the right of leaseholders and tenants to consult with, and scrutinise decisions made by, the landlord on matters relating to building safety and would require the landlord to set up a recognised tenants’ association for the purpose of consultation.

The leasehold system in tall buildings has been placed under serious stress in the post-Grenfell years. Future home owners may have looked at the existing crisis and been turned off the prospect of owning a leasehold property. Others, facing far fewer choices, have simply—fatefully—walked into purchasing a leaseholder property unaware of the realities of the leasehold system, only to be later consumed with regret and extortionate charges. We need to make the leasehold system fairer and more attractive, not just for those who are thinking about buying a leasehold now, but for those existing leaseholders who feel powerless in the face of their managing agent and freeholder.

Ideally, leaseholder associations would also be able to scrutinise and consult on insurance commissions, along with other service charges not related to building safety. The amendment would begin to reorientate the relationship between the freeholder and leaseholder, which, as it currently stands, is skewed too far in favour of the freeholder. This is not an anti-freeholder amendment. Many freeholders will manage their property in a responsible manner. There are, however, just too many instances—and quite high-profile ones—of freeholders acting in an appalling manner. For example, the Yianis Group, the freeholder of the West India Quay development, spent over £74,000 in a legal action to block the residents from forming a recognised residents’ association. This was after leaseholders issued proceedings against the freeholder over expensive energy bills—something not covered by this amendment, of course, but worth mentioning—in which they were vindicated after the court revealed that they had been overcharged by 26% on their utility bills.

This is the same freeholder which, when challenged by the residents at a different development at Canary Riverside, lost a ruling brought forward by the residents and was forced to replace the managing agent. The court ruled that the freeholder failed to maintain the estate and did not adequately prove expenses and service charges. As the Times reported, it even charged a 100% mark-up on repairs to leaky windows to a repair company. At the time of reporting, the freeholder then attempted to chip away at the court-imposed manager’s power, costing the leaseholders £1 million in legal fees over 22 proceedings. The freeholder’s intentions here speak for themselves.

Stronger provisions than those listed in Amendment 50A would be welcome, as these powers would relate only to building safety matters. However, the amendment would go some way to breaking the power of any unscrupulous freeholders who view their leaseholders as cash cows. The amendment is not for those honest, conscientious freeholders who retain good relations with their leaseholders and managing agents, but for those such as the Yianis Group, in respect of whom one leaseholder said they were made to feel at the mercy of their landlord.

I hope the Minister will look seriously at measures to strengthen leaseholder representation when dealing with freeholders. The scope of the Bill limits what we can do at the moment, but a verbal assurance that the Government are committed to reforming this imbalance of power would be most welcome.

In the meantime, I hope that the Government will consider these proposals carefully—limited though they may be—as a stopgap to help end some of the egregious abuses that leaseholders and tenants may face from their freeholder. I hope that this will be a contribution. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says in his summing up.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 52A to 52C, 54A, 54B, 55B and 55C, which relate to Clauses 97 to 99. I also support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, and his comments, as well as those of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans. It is in that spirit that I make these observations.

One issue that the building safety and cladding crisis has shone a light on is just how iniquitous residential leasehold tenure really is. The system of leasehold may dress itself up as home ownership. When I bought my flat 25 years ago, which was the first time I had ever bought anything or got a mortgage, I thought of myself, very proudly, as a home owner—it was part of my growing up—but I now think that it was a bit of a mis-sell, as I am nothing of the sort. As Rabina Khan, a Liberal Democrat councillor in Tower Hamlets, puts it—she has been very insightful on all these issues—in effect:

“Leaseholders are tenants when it comes to rights, but owners when it comes to paying any bills. Yet they have no control over the contractor, costs or scope of any works. They must pay up pretty much whatever is demanded by the freeholder landlord and their agent.”


Under Part 4 of the Bill and the clauses that I am referring to, building owners are given sweeping new rights in relation to entry to and surveillance of leaseholders’ homes in the name of safety and fire prevention, even being able to force entry if the leaseholder does not admit entry to their own homes by a set time. Leaseholders who I have spoken to are concerned that these Part 4 provisions could be used to threaten and harass leaseholders, are overly intrusive without affecting fire safety in any real way, and, more broadly, feed into a dangerous atmosphere —which we are familiar with from the Covid period and lockdowns—of dispensing with civil liberties and privacy too easily under the auspices of safety.

My amendments to Clauses 97 to 99 come as package. They seek to tighten up the drafting to ensure proportionate actions that do not leave leaseholders open to either false accusations or blame for safety issues, so that it does not become yet another vehicle for forcing leaseholders to pay ever more money, and they would respect the rights of leaseholders as home owners.

Clause 97 places a duty on every occupant of a high-risk building not to interfere with safety features. The focus here is making it clear that residents have a duty not to affect the safety of the building. My amendment to Clause 97 makes it clear that this duty is breached only where there is material interference. This change would, for example, avoid someone being found in breach of the duty if they accidentally broke the glass in a dry-riser door or accidentally broke a hinge on a fire door because the current drafting would treat them not as accidents but as breaches of duty in the same way as someone deliberately disabling a fire alarm.

Clause 98 allows an accountable person to send a notice, possibly demanding money, if the accountable person knows or, importantly, just suspects that there has been a breach of this new residents’ duty. Again, this section has no materiality threshold, so it can be triggered by any breach that the accountable person feels like enforcing. As it stands, it is far too subjective. It is blatantly open to malicious misuse or just a promiscuous and ever-growing risk-averse blame culture targeting leaseholders as culprits. The amendment I have put forward tightens the clause up to focus on material breaches that the accountable person can evidence—a key point.

Clause 99 is on the power of entry. The current drafting allows the accountable person to demand access for any reason, including mere suspicion of a breach of duty. This demand for access can be given with as little as 48 hours’ notice. If access is not given in that timeframe, the accountable person can then obtain a court order, possibly without a notice to the person affected. This makes what should be a last resort possibly a new normal, and, I argue, a new draconian normal.

The amendment I have proposed to Clause 99 would require that the new building safety regulator issues a code of practice on how exactly this power is to be used after consulting a tenants panel. That is not a perfect solution, but at least the onus would be on the accountable person to comply with the code of practice when making requests for access to people’s homes.

As has already been mentioned by a number of speakers, I am not trying to paint a picture of dastardly freeholders, building owners or managing agents gleefully harassing leaseholders or threatening to kick their doors down, but for me one of the inevitable consequences of a disproportionate zero-risk attitude to building safety with an ever-growing proliferation of demands and duties placed on the accountable person, requiring that they check, check and check again, means that we end up where the Secretary of State, Michael Gove. warns us not to end up. In another context he has warned of the dangerous overzealousness of inspections, unnecessary surveys and precautionary, just-in-case assessments.

All this fuels the notion that not only is every flat a fire hazard but that every owner of a flat is a fire hazard too. As soon as safety measures become a disproportionate fear, they can lead to perverse outcomes. In June 2020, before the Public Bill Committee, L&Q, one of the biggest social landlords, responsible for 95,000 homes, including leaseholders and shared ownership properties, complained about the difficulties of accessing the front doors of leaseholders, implying that leaseholders who refuse to go along with its neverending fire safety upgrades might be putting lives at risk. Its spokesperson said:

“With tenants, we might be able to go to court and get injunctions and get injunctions to gain access to a home, but with leases, that challenge becomes even more difficult.”


That was said as a matter of regret.

This attitude means that these provisions presume that leaseholders cannot be trusted. I think they imply a certain contempt that treats leaseholders as ignorant or stupid or both, as though, if left alone, away from the wise and sensible landlord or his or her appointed overseer, they might set up a barbeque in the living room, rewire their own flats even though they are not electricians, be like children irresponsibly playing with matches or wilfully destroy safety equipment, as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, mentioned.