Building Safety Bill (Second sitting)

Brendan Clarke-Smith Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Practical solutions.

[Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw) (Con)]

Q Good afternoon, gentlemen. Which parts of the Bill do you feel will be the key areas of interest for the legal profession? Following on from that, which do you think will take the most time to understand and prepare for?

Giles Peaker: It will partly depend on who you act for.

Justin Bates: It will depend on who you act for and what you do. For both of us, our primary focus is on residential property law—leasehold, freehold, tenants and so on—so I am really interested in from about clause 120 onwards, the service charge and the building safety charges. Those are all my Christmases come at once, in terms of the amount of litigation you are creating for me, which is probably not what you intended. I want to come back to who you act for. If you act for a developer, one of the things that will worry you is the extension of limitation periods under the Defective Premises Act 1972. At the moment, it is six years from building control sign-off and, in practice, very few people know enough about the problem within that timeframe. 15 years is obviously better than six. If you have developer clients, you will advise them to do as much building as possible through SPVs and then wind them up, once finished, because your exposure after the Bill will be much more significant. That is even more true for refurbs, because you are extending the Defective Premises Act to include refurbishments, not just new builds. That is an aspect that will very much interest the legal profession.

I think there is a lot here that will end up in litigation, and there is not a lot you can be done about that because this is a pretty significant change to the structure of how buildings are regulated, and to the structure of the landlord-tenant relationship. You cannot lawyer-proof this, but you might not need to be quite as generous to lawyers as you are being. In a moment, we will come on to where you could be more exacting with your wording, to be clearer about what you want.

[The Chair]

Giles, do you want to add anything to that?

Giles Peaker: I think that is right. In some ways, the Bill is actually inviting more litigation through the extension of limitation. To be honest, that is probably the one thing that will not happen, for reasons we will probably get on to—or it might happen, but to a very small degree. I have no doubt that there will be considerable tribunal activity over the new requirements in clause 124, from a leaseholder perspective. The advice to developers might be quite expensive, but it will be very short and sweet: “Limit your liability in any way you can”. SPVs will be the way they do that.