Building Safety Defects

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend has decades of experience in government, and he knows that levies and taxes are a matter for the Treasury. However, not only my department, but others as well, have gone through countless numbers of fire risk assessments and external wall surveys. The results are littered with examples of people who did not build to building regulations, who cut corners and who, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, will know if he is here, used value engineering to make a bit more profit. The reality is that we cannot keep looking to the Treasury to keep bailing everybody out—we have to get the polluter to pay.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I appreciate the Minister’s frustration that he is not in a position to launch a magic bullet or even to make an announcement today, so might he instead share some of his own developing thinking? Following on from the very constructive suggestion from his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, why not produce a legislative scheme to immunise the victims and take from those who have been unjustly enriched?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I take that as a helpful interjection. We need to think about how we protect leaseholders, and sometimes statutory protection is a good thing. We know that the Building Safety Bill, that will have finished Committee in the House, provides a vehicle to do precisely that, but I cannot say any more on the subject.