Leaseholders: Costs

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, further to that very point, the Secretary of State, in front of the HCLG Committee, acknowledged the unfair and undue burden on both leaseholders and social housing tenants to shoulder the remediation costs. How do the Government plan to alleviate what the Secretary of State referred to as the Sophie’s choice of the housing associations between safety and investing in stock and quality?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

All major landlords, including social landlords, will have to do that as a matter of course. We are providing funds that will protect leaseholders where the balance sheet does not enable them to do so, and I have given those figures already. However, we ask for a sense of proportion from registered providers—I have reached out to the noble Baroness’s chief executive—not to inflate the bill just because the taxpayer sums are there, but to keep costs down. We need to ensure that together we remediate, mitigate where that is preferable to remediation, keep tenants safe and use the affordable homes programme to build more homes.