Leaseholders: Costs

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

We will move from principle into practice in a matter of months, but this problem has occurred over decades. Sadly, every decade, there has been a significant fire in a high-rise where there was a loss of life: Garnock Court in 1999, Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 and the tragedy of Grenfell in 2017. Governments knew that cladding was often the cause, as it was in Garnock Court, and the regulations were actually dampened down under a previous Labour Government, who inserted the word “adequately”. It is a mess that took decades; give us months to sort it out.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Notwithstanding the Minister’s earlier comments, housing associations and councils too face a challenging situation. Both the LGA and the National Housing Federation have evidenced the double whammy of the financial burden to remedy the fire safety issues for the tenants and, consequently, less money to invest in their existing stock—in particular, to build new social and affordable homes. In the recent rethinking, please will the Minister agree to look specifically at the situation faced by housing associations and councils and consider widening the criteria for support for any money that is available? This is their tenants’ rent money, after all, and they too should not have to pay for 20 years of industry failure.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Of course we want to protect leaseholders and ensure that social landlords can build new homes of high quality but, far too often, they as developers were in charge of building homes of poor quality, and they need to fix those homes. The figures are that, as of 31 October, £97.3 million has been approved from the building safety fund, and there is the £200 million to remove cladding of aluminium composite material. We are doing what we can to protect leaseholders, but we recognise the challenges faced by registered providers.