Building Safety

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

My Lords, around £3.5 billion in direct, additional grant has been committed. This is a significant amount of money which dwarfs the £1.6 billion previously promised. More than £5 billion has been committed to support the ending of the cladding crisis. The plans go a long way towards ensuring that affordability is not an issue for any leaseholders in medium-rise properties. It also ensures that, where there is no warranty outstanding or insurance available to protect the leaseholder, the taxpayer—through the Government’s additional grant—will step up and provide the funding necessary to ensure that the cladding system is removed.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, asked about progress. Despite Covid, we saw 50% more starts in 2020 than in any other year. Workers were on site and, by the end of the year, 95% of high-rise buildings with the same sort of cladding as at Grenfell had either started or completed remediation. We know exactly where these buildings are. The vast majority of the remaining cladding will have been removed from them by the end of this calendar year.

The main thrust of the questions was around the scope of the fund. It is important to recognise that height is a huge factor when it comes to safety and the risk to life. The higher the building, the more risk there is to the residents. People who live in buildings between 18 and 30 metres high are four times more likely to have a fire involving a fatality or the need for hospital treatment. In buildings above 30 metres, this rises to 35 times more likely. We know that height is a factor. Eighteen metres is the cut-off point for the definition of a high-rise building. This has been part of building regulations for a considerable number of years. The definition that we are using for scope is above six storeys, so The Cube would fall within the remit of a building where an application could be made to the building safety fund to remove its cladding. The threshold is six or more storeys or a height greater than 18 metres.

The long-term safety advice makes it clear that the external cladding system acts as accelerant, helping the fire to spread. This is why the government money is focused on the removal of external cladding systems. Internal compartmentation, firebreaks and fire doors are designed to stop the spread of fire. It is right that taxpayers’ money should focus on the material that accelerates the spread of fire.

The £3.5 billion and the finance scheme will together help hundreds of thousands of leaseholders. For those in medium-rise properties, it will cover a significant part of their costs. For those in high-rise buildings, there will be no cost. To date, 13,000 leaseholders in ACM buildings have been supported by the government grant scheme. Between 70,000 and 90,000 leaseholders in buildings with non-ACM cladding systems will not bear any cost. A further 150,000 leaseholders in buildings between 11 and 18 metres high will also be helped.

It is important, however, that building owners step up to the plate to support remediation where the government grant is not available. We do not expect this cost to fall entirely on leaseholders. With the ACM fund, more than 50% of owners did the right thing and ensured that the cost did not fall on leaseholders. We expect to see that with the non-ACM buildings as well. Here, warranty schemes can often still be drawn on and protect leaseholders.

It is worth looking at the cladding manufacturers. I will take that point away because, as well as the developers, they are culpable for the situation that we find ourselves in—a point that has been made by both the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. That is something that we can look at in due course.

This is a five-point plan looking at significant sums of money to support the removal of the external cladding systems. It is those systems that have accelerated the spread of fire and their removal makes it far more unlikely that Grenfell will ever happen again. We know that the future building safety regime will be focused on ensuring that the new buildings will be of far greater quality and then provide the greater confidence that is required in the housing market to ensure that it begins to function properly in future years.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Barker) (LD)]

We now come to the 20 minutes allocated to Back-Bench questions. Questions and answers must be brief.