Building Safety Bill

Bob Blackman Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con) [V]]

As a member of the Select Committee on Housing, Communities and Local Government, I had the opportunity to spend many hours scrutinising the draft Bill as we conducted pre-legislative scrutiny. I am delighted that the Government have adopted almost all the recommendations that we made, but there are concerns.

One issue is that some of the language used in the Bill is not exact enough. It is clear that what will matter is the regulations that underpin this extremely complicated and complex Bill, which will need to be ironed out over the next 18 months before it becomes operational. Of course, that gives rise to further problems. There will be no excuse whatsoever for a developer that is currently developing a new high-rise building or, indeed, planning one in future not to abide by the rules and regulations that will be introduced when the Bill becomes law. They will have to do that. However, there is concern about the historical elements of fire safety defects, as well as the remediation of unsafe cladding.

We have to split the issue into a number of areas. There has clearly been much progress on the remediation of unsafe cladding, which is welcome, but fire safety defects have been excluded from almost everything on offer from the Government thus far, and developers are trying to wash their hands of the matter. As right hon. and hon. Members from all parties have said, leaseholders are being presented with huge bills right now. They do not have 18 months to wait to resolve the issues, so we need urgent action. We were promised that the details of the fourth loan scheme would be introduced at the time of the Budget. I assume that we will have to wait for the autumn Budget as opposed to the spring Budget, because so far we have not seen the details of how that will operate. That detail is vital for people so that they can know how to plan.

The reality is that the people in the middle of this—the innocent parties, we have to remember—are the leaseholders. The building owners and the people who developed the buildings in the first place are the ones who put the buildings up. The one excuse to which they can cling is to say that they adhered completely to the rules and regulations that were in place when they put the buildings up perhaps five, 10 or even 20 years ago. If that is the case, the Government have to find a way to fund the remediation, because the Government were responsible for putting in place the regulations. If the regulations have been blatantly ignored, it is clear that the building owners and developers must remediate the buildings and fire safety defects without any charge to leaseholders whatsoever.

The Bill is a good start to the process and I welcome it. I welcome its going into Committee, and we must get it through to safeguard leaseholders.

Building Safety Bill

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He will know, as the House does, that building safety and the challenges that leaseholders face are very complicated. The House will also know that we have committed to help those in shared ownership, for example, by making it easier for them to rent out their properties if that is a means of ensuring that they can pay their mortgages. I assure him that we will look closely and work collegiately and collectively across parties, and with other interested parties, to ensure that such issues are effectively and appropriately debated and addressed.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has done a stoic job in taking the Bill through its various stages. The other place is under incredible pressure in dealing with Government legislation, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) mentioned. It is clearly up to business managers there how much time they allocate to amendments and so forth, but will he commit that when the Bill comes back to us with the Lords amendments, we will get a chance to debate them—and, if necessary, correct them and improve them—rather than just a 60-minute debate where hardly anyone gets an opportunity to debate the issues?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. The business managers in this House, if not the other House, will have heard his points—he has got a pretty loud voice—and will want to ensure that appropriate, adequate debating time is made available to deal with these technical and detailed issues. As I said, I believe that business managers will have heard what has been said by him and by right hon. and hon. Members and will react accordingly.

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[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

We have less than three quarters of an hour left, so I will have to impose an initial time limit of four minutes on Back-Bench speeches.

[Bob Blackman]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chairman of the Select Committee. He and I have spent many happy hours poring over this draft Bill, in the first place, and, going forward, different reports.

Essentially, there are four separate categories on remediation that fit within the Building Safety Bill. The first, as everyone agrees without question, is, for tall buildings of seven storeys and above, removing the cladding and making the building safe. The second is the buildings of six storeys and below for which the Government came up with the forced loan scheme. I am delighted to see the death of that scheme. I could never see how it was going to work, so that is good news. The other two categories are the tall buildings with fire safety defects and the buildings of six storeys and below with fire safety defects. We can all agree that the one set of people who should not have to pay for remedying this are the leaseholders, because they never designed them and they never knew anything about them before they moved in. However, this scandal still goes on. Only last week, a planning application was presented to the planning committee at Tower Hamlets for a building of 52 storeys with only one staircase as a route to escape. The building industry does not show any signs of correcting what has been done, so we have to correct it.

I take my right hon. Friend the Minister’s remarks seriously. I look forward to the amendments that are going to be moved in the other place that I hope we can then debate here. However, these are very complex areas and there are immense questions to be answered. I well remember that when we debated the Bill that became the Fire Safety Act 2021, we were told that protecting leaseholders should not be done then but we should wait for the Building Safety Bill—and here we are, right now. The crunch issue is that leaseholders up and down the country have received enormous bills. Some have made arrangements to pay; some have even paid them. They are told, “Tough—you’ve paid and you won’t be compensated as a result.” If we had moved the amendments to the Fire Safety Act, we would have protected those leaseholders, but we failed to do so.

As I have said to the Secretary of State, I welcome his commitment to resolve this issue, but I trust that when we come to the amendments on remediation, we will do two things. The first is that we will retrospectively put a date on what happens. It will not be acceptable to wait until this Bill becomes law and facilitate the unscrupulous individuals who may bill the leaseholders between now and then, which would be outrageous.

The other issue that is terribly important in this whole process is that at some stage, with regard to all the buildings that we are talking about, someone signed off on their being in accordance with regulations. Insurance covers that particular aspect, so here is an alternative solution. Given that insurance companies insured the people who signed these buildings off, and they were clearly not in accordance with the regulations at the time, let us make claims against the insurance companies that still exist and could be made to pay for this remediation. That would be a much better solution than either the taxpayer paying or robbing the leaseholders. It would at least give us some protection.

I welcome the Government amendments, and I welcome the conversion that has taken place in the Department to what the Select Committee said in the first place. We are making progress. We are almost there. We have only a little a little way to go before every single one of our recommendations has been endorsed. We look forward to that happening, and indeed to having a Bill of which we can all be proud, which protects leaseholders and protects the industry for the future.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

Let me begin by echoing the sentiments expressed earlier. We must be mindful of all those who died tragically in the Grenfell fire, which prompted much of the work that we are debating today.

The majority of the Bill relates only to England or to England and Wales, so I will necessarily keep my remarks on behalf to the Scottish National party short. I am sure that that will be music to many ears in the Chamber.

We can all agree on the necessity and the importance of raising the standards of conduct of developers. House buyers need to have confidence in the safety and quality of their homes, which is why the Scottish Government support the principle of the new homes ombudsman scheme proposed in part 5 of the Bill. Housing is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, who could devise their own provisions for a Scottish system, but the benefits of having a single system to operate on a UK-wide basis are self-evident. However, it is also true to say that the scheme must fully meet the needs of Scotland, so this Bill ought to confer greater powers to Scottish Ministers, similar to those of the Secretary of State. It is essential for part 5 to acknowledge and respect the devolution settlement. The Secretary of State and, I am sure, the Minister will understand that SNP co-operation in relation to the new homes ombudsman scheme in no way diminishes our opposition to the form and intention of the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020.

It is fully expected that meaningful consultation will minimise the risk that the ombudsman scheme is contrary to the wishes and aspirations of the Scottish Government, so that homeowners in Scotland can benefit from it. If that turns out not to be the case, the Scottish Government have the option to withdraw from the scheme without contractual penalties and other repercussions. No one would wish to see that happen, and we need to be assured that the Minister and the Department will work, and continue to work, in a collaborative, consultative and collegiate way with the Scottish Government to deliver the scheme for Scotland.

In that spirit, I say to the Minister that given the confusion and delay over issues of cladding, nearly five years since the tragedy of Grenfell, we need a clear commitment that he will work constructively with the Scottish Government to provide clarity about consequential funding, so that the Scottish Government can plan their response appropriately. Will he tell us how much funding there will be, and when it will be delivered to Scotland?

I understand that the Secretary of State has committed himself to working with the Scottish Government on these matters—and no doubt the Minister has done so as well—but certainty is important. I am sure the Minister will understand that, so I am keen to hear what he has to say about the timing, levels and delivery of the funds that Scotland can expect.

Building Safety Bill

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 20th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Andrew]

We continue to review all these matters. We are looking at and consulting on the whole of the affordable housing and social housing policy area, and we will come back to ensure that we get it right.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

The Chairman of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee—the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts)—and I have been involved in the prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill and the whole process behind it. Is my right hon. Friend the Minister saying that not only can we pass the Bill today with the Government amendments but he will continue to look to revise the law and to embrace more people in the law through secondary legislation?

[Stuart Andrew]

The Building Safety Regulator will continue to make sure that all building safety regulations are adhered to. Mention has been made of social housing tenants, social housing and affordable housing; we will consult on that further down the line so that we can be absolutely sure we have got this right. I hope that reassures my hon. Friend.

On 13 April, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State wrote to Members to update them on the progress in the negotiations with industry. We will now see the vast majority of developers fix all the buildings that they had a role in developing or refurbishing in the past 30 years. My right hon. Friend announced last week that, in addition to the existing building safety fund, the Government will establish a new cladding remediation scheme, funded by industry contributions, to cover all other unsafe residential buildings of 11 to 18 metres that contain private leasehold properties but a developer has not accepted responsibility for fixing them or cannot be identified.

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[Hilary Benn]

I am delighted to echo the Father of the House. The partnership has been brilliant in its analysis of what has and has not been done, what the problems are and what the solution ought to be, and it has also been persistent.

I know the Minister will appreciate my final point, because he has worked very hard on this. Our constituents have waited long enough, with their lives on hold, and the sooner we can made all these bits work, the better. We have to enable them to wake up in the morning and think, “D’you know what? I don’t have to worry about the nightmare I’ve been living in for the last five years and I can get on with the rest of my life.” We owe it to them to bring the day they dream of around as soon as possible.

[Bob Blackman]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in particular as chairman of the all-party group for fire safety and rescue. As I mentioned in an intervention, I have been involved in prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill from its beginning and in the various reports the Select Committee produced in the wake of the Grenfell fire. The eye-watering aspects of building safety across this country really only came to light with that terrible tragedy at Grenfell, nearly five years ago. We have all learned a lot.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing, who is new to the job and to the Bill, on the rapid progress that has been made since he was appointed. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who has dramatically changed the whole approach taken in this Bill. The Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), is no longer in his place, but I think he recognises the dramatic changes that have taken place during the passage of the Bill through the other place.

When preparing for today’s debate, I thought of one or two ironies. The first was that the Second Reading debate was so shortened that we all got three minutes to speak, but today, although we have a reasonable amount of time to debate the issues, the business managers are encouraging us not to go on too long. That seems suitably ironic.

There are several issues to address. I thank the Minister for making it clear that this will not be the end of the process. Secondary legislation will come along on the back of the Bill, and that will be the detail that really matters to the people we represent—the leaseholders, who are the one party in all of this who are completely innocent and should not be penalised in any way, shape or form. It is a contradiction that we are asking leaseholders to make a contribution to fire safety costs and cladding remediation for which they have no responsibility.

I welcome the cap, but I do not see why that cap has been set at a particular figure. Many of the people we are talking about are not wealthy. They may have bought their leases a long time ago, and they are often living on fixed incomes and have no disposable income to put towards the costs, because they are paying the other bills for their properties. They are not able to stump up huge amounts of cash. As has been said, many of those people have been presented with eye-watering bills, such as £250,000 or more, to fix fire safety issues that are definitely not their fault, are clearly the responsibility of the developer in the first place and should have been put right since.

Also in preparation for this debate, I had a look at the Select Committee’s first report on prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill—the Chairman of the Committee may recall it. If the Government had accepted our proposed changes, we probably would not be here today discussing Lords amendments. Almost all the proposals in our report are now in the revised Bill. That is a significant change and demonstrates that when we are dealing with issues of such a technical nature, prelegislative scrutiny is the right way forward. I commend its use to Ministers in the future.

I have a couple of points to make about where we are now, to put them on the record so that we can get through this phase in the secondary legislation. I would like clarity from the Minister on the position of housing associations when pursuing developers who have developed social housing that is clearly not fit for purpose.

[Sir Mike Penning]

Go for the insurers.

[Bob Blackman]

I agree with my right hon. Friend, but let us make it clear that it should not be housing associations paying for the costs of remediation—it should be the developers who did the work in the first place, under instruction. If the developers are no longer in business or have retired, will housing associations have access to the building safety fund? That will be important, because—as Opposition Members have said—the cost will fall on those paying rent in housing association properties, and that is unfair.

Will the Minister make sure that proper protection is given to the affordable homes programme? Otherwise we will not get the new properties developed that we all want to see to enable more social rented accommodation in this country.

One change in the Bill is that from 18 metres in height to 11 metres. In reality, the lower height properties do not have the compartmentalisation that high-rise flats have. As a result, there is a greater inherent fire risk in lower level designs. If a fire breaks out in one of those units, it is likely to spread rapidly across a broader range of properties. That is a serious fire risk and it needs to be remediated. I welcome the move from 18 metres to 11 metres, but it does not design out the original problem. We need to make it clear in the future that designing out such risks has to be paramount.

Another issue is disabled access. One concern is that when disabled people have to leave a property to flee a fire, disabled access is not always available. That has to be taken into consideration. From my reading of the Bill, that does not appear to have been given proper consideration and we need to look at it in the secondary legislation.

Since Grenfell and the publication of the original draft Bill, a raft of new high-density, multi-storey blocks of flats have been erected. Most of them now need fire remediation. I find it bizarre that developers would ignore all the suggestions of what needed to be done, but they have. We had an example earlier this year of a developer putting in a planning application for a 44-storey tower block in east London with only one stairway. It was outrageous, but it was only the intervention of the fire brigade and local residents that prevented that planning application from being approved.

Another issue is the commonhold versus leasehold model. I believe that more people should exercise common- hold, because I want to see more people enfranchised. The Bill appears to suggest that they would be penalised for doing so, but that cannot be right and the Minister needs to correct that.

I shall mention two other issues briefly. What happens to overseas ownership of buildings? Will we pursue those people to the nth degree or will they get away scot-free? My right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) referred to the insurance companies. To me, they have not so far put their minds to the problem.

The Bill is vastly improved compared with when it left this place. I will support it wholeheartedly today on the basis that we will not draw a line under it and that will be the end of it; secondary legislation will be required to amend it further. The evidence that was presented to the Select Committee suggested that we still do not know exactly how many buildings need fire remediation, how many need cladding remediation, and what the cost of that work will be. Until we have that data, we will not be in a position to say what the total cost will be to the Treasury and the Department, and how it will be funded.

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[Stuart Andrew]

How could I possibly refuse?

[Bob Blackman]

I apologise for taking part in a bit of a pincer movement on the Minister. He mentioned the 30-year rule; there will be developers who say, “We built under the regulations that existed over those 30 years.” Are we going to say to those developers, “No. As a result of fire safety issues, you must remediate those buildings in line with the regulations that are now in place, not those that existed 30 years ago”?

[Stuart Andrew]

Yes. I think I am correct in saying that. Yes, I am; I have just double-checked.

Colleagues have mentioned the 11-metre rule, and I reiterate that they should please write to my Department if they are aware of buildings under 11 metres that are facing costly remediation. We are clear that costly remediation should not be undertaken on buildings under 11 metres, and we would be glad to look into specific cases and to question freeholders on why they are insisting on commissioning costly and unnecessary remediation works.

In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), let me say that we are retrospectively extending the limitation period under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act. The duty under the Act applies to those taking on work in connection with the provision of a dwelling, which includes architects and contractors whose actions have contributed towards defects, as well as developers.