Building Safety Defects

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I have always loved a magic bullet, but the reality is that the scale of the cladding and building sector crisis in Wales is a fraction of that in England. That is just a fact: I could give the right reverend Prelate the statistics if he is interested, but we are not going to solve it that way. We need to have a greater sense of proportion. We have made this a bigger scandal than it needs to be because too many buildings have been declared unsafe that are perfectly safe. Frankly, there is an industry profiteering on the back of this, and we need to do something about that. There needs to be a call for innovation to encourage mitigation, more often than not, rather than full-scale costly remediation; we need to make sure that there is an adequate, sensible, proportionate approach to this crisis.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, we have been very silent on these Benches so far, so I hope that I might intervene at this stage on behalf of my noble friend Lady Pinnock, who cannot be here. The Government intended that Grenfell-style cladding on social housing would be removed by the end of 2019—yet another broken promise. It is reported that the earliest that this will be achieved is 2024. Can the Minister confirm that report? What action are the Government taking to speed up the process and support those affected?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I know that there is a “broken promises” line, but the reality is that 95% of ACM buildings have been remediated. Actually, we have accelerated at pace while I have been Building Safety Minister, despite the global pandemic. The reality is that for many of these buildings—about 20, and a lot of them happen to be in the London Borough of Southwark—it was literally discovered only months ago that they had ACM cladding. I am not blaming the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, but we are doing our best. This is tough, and we should not be trying to score points. We are absolutely committed to remediate these buildings, especially those with aluminium composite material, the most deadly form of cladding. Very shortly, we will have that removed from all buildings in this country.