Fire Safety: Leaseholder Bankruptcies

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Monday 24th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, obviously we take into account whether developers are good partners. There are many national schemes they will want to access for their businesses. We monitor very closely the number of defective buildings and whether the developers step up and contribute. That will be a factor in their future relationships with government at every single level.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Will the Minister acknowledge that, by kicking this scandal down the road, the political crisis surrounding who pays for fire safety defects has not gone away but intensified, while the financial demands on blameless home owners who are unfortunate enough to be leaseholders are escalating way beyond cladding? Will the Minister specifically investigate the spiralling costs of the enforced requirement for waking watch patrols provided by private security firms, whose efficacy is, to say the least, contested? I note that the average cost to individual leaseholders is an extra—unaffordable—£400 a month even before the huge remediation bill drops through the letterbox.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I was asked to carry out a waking watch review on behalf of the Secretary of State some months ago. The noble Baroness is right that it is a significant cost for leaseholders. This is why we created the £30 million waking watch relief fund, which will help between 300 and 400 buildings put a fire alarm in place and benefit between 17,400 and 26,520 leaseholders, who will no longer have to pay those high interim costs for waking watches.