Building Safety

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I am very conscious of the need for speed. I quite agree. If we look at the behaviour of some of the cladding firms, the behaviour of people who work for Kingspan and Arconic, and the evidence presented to the Grenfell inquiry, we see that it is truly dreadful. The individuals concerned must take responsibility. She represents a constituency in which there are many, many people who are effectively trapped because of the failure of the property market to effectively address all these problems. In the interests of her constituents and so many more, and in particular in the interests of the Grenfell community and its fight for justice, I am very conscious of the need to move as fast as we possibly can.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. I am sure he will welcome an invitation from the Select Committee to come and discuss these matters further in detail. Just two important issues. First, will he clarify that leaseholders will not have to pay the cost of remediation, including non-cladding work, because that is not exactly what his statement says? Secondly, will he clarify that, apart from the removal of aluminium composite material cladding, the Government will give social housing providers no help whatsoever? If developers do not pay for the measures that he announced today or taxes are not raised, and there are cuts to his budget as a result, will that come off social housing provision as well? What assessment has he done of the total impact on the future building of social housing?

[Michael Gove]

These are three very important points. First, we will make sure that we provide leaseholders with statutory protection—that is what we aim to do and we will work with colleagues across the House to ensure that that statutory protection extends to all the work required to make buildings safe. Secondly, to ensure that there is not an adverse impact on social housing or on the work that Homes England is leading to bring together and remediate brownfield land for new private-sector development, we will do absolutely everything possible so that, ultimately, those with big balance sheets and big bucks discharge their responsibility. He and I will know that the seven major housing developers do much good work but that in the last three years they made profits of £16 billion. Understandably, people are prompted to ask that those significant sums be devoted to ensuring that the building safety crisis is met, alongside the building supply pipeline of the future.

New Homes: Developers, Housebuilders and Management Companies

Clive Betts Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Let us begin the first parliamentary sitting of the new year by wishing everyone a happy new year. As is now tradition before all our sittings, I remind all hon. Members that they are expected to wear face coverings when they are not speaking in the debate. I am also asked to remind everyone to get a lateral flow test—provided, of course, that you can get one—at least twice a week, before coming on to the parliamentary estate. These can be done at the testing centre here as well. Welcome, everyone.

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of developers, housebuilders and management companies in new homes.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. Happy new year to you and to everybody else who is here this morning. This is a 90-minute debate, and I have said to quite a number of people that I could easily speak for at least 90 minutes on this topic—it will be a relief to everyone that I am not going to do that. The reason is that it is a source of huge frustration in my constituency. Owning a new home and the development of new homes should be a source of great joy, but too often it is a source of great distress. There are a few reasons for that that I want to talk about, but before I go into those, I want to say at the outset that, contrary to some of the media stereotypes about areas such as mine, most people in my constituency are not opposed to new homes. If they are homeowners themselves, they entirely understand why other people want to own a home. They often have children and grandchildren whom they are trying to help get on the housing ladder. They know that we need housing for key workers. They know that sometimes people just want to move into one of these new homes from where they already live in the constituency. But people have real frustration with the way in which these things are developing and the problems they are causing in the local area.

The first issue is simply the quality of a lot of the homes that go up, because it is often poor. Sometimes it is very good, but too often it is poor, and constituents’ homes have major defects that take years to try to deal with. I have constituents who have spent two, three or four years—sometimes more—trying to get these defects repaired. This is not like buying a cheap version of something on eBay, half-expecting that there might be something wrong with it. This is the biggest purchase that any of us will make, and we do not expect to then have years of trying to sort out the problems with it. Unfortunately, when constituents try to do that, they feel completely outmatched by the builder that built their home. Sometimes the builder will blame the contractor; sometimes they will say that there is nothing wrong: “We signed it off according to building regulations.” But I have been in some of these places and we can see these huge issues. It is completely unacceptable that people are experiencing them.

The second issue is about the impact of these homes on the environment. That has two major aspects to it. One is what it does to the local environment around the area. Naturally, people can see greenfield sites disappearing. One constituent wrote to me and said that the biodiversity commitments that a particular house builder had made had not been kept whatsoever. There is an impact on air quality and water quality, but the other aspect is how the homes themselves are built. I am continually asked by constituents, “Why are we building so many homes that we know we will have to retrofit in a few years’ time?”, and there is no easy answer to that. I am continually asked, “Why can’t every new home have solar panels? Why can’t every new home have a heat pump?” I understand why: there are various reasons why we might not put the same thing in every kind of house.

I completely welcome the Government’s commitment to having electric charging points in every new home. I really welcome the future homes standard, which will make new homes from 2025 net zero ready, with a 75% reduction in their emissions. But the point still stands that thousands of homes are going up right now and we know that because of our ambitious net zero goals, we will have to retrofit a lot of them. The reason is that it is cheaper for the house builders to build them that way today.

The third issue is affordability. I have said a few times in this place that no one who rents has ever said to me, “There are too many new homes going up.” They say only that those homes are not affordable. They say that they have saved for years and years, and it does not matter how much they save; they do not get close to being able to afford one. The average house price in my constituency is £335,000. The average house price in my constituency is £335,000. To London ears that might sound fine, but it is 9.2 times median income, and that is out of reach for most people. An affordability threshold of 80% of that is still not affordable. Again, we run into bad practices. We all know that developers commit to a certain number of affordable homes, but time after time that number is driven down on the grounds that the development would not be viable if that commitment were maintained, so broken promises are a constant theme.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Johnston]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I expect the Minister will address that point when he speaks later. Most people think that they own their home, but they can often end up feeling like tenants. I experienced that myself until recently. I used to get a bill for £300 on Christmas day every year. The bill, dated 25 December, was £300 for absolutely nothing, but constituents of mine are in a much worse situation.

The fifth aspect I want to talk about is the overall broken system in which the process operates. I do not blame the Government entirely. Councils have some responsibilities: One is if they do not enforce the planning conditions when developers go above the assessed numbers that they are supposed to build. Another is if they allow the same application to be made over and over again, when they could refuse it after two tries. They do not take a bigger-picture view. There are villages in my constituency, such as Sutton Courtenay, that feel hugely overdeveloped because individual applications are all being approved and nobody is looking at what is happening to the whole area and why it might not be a good idea to keep approving those applications.

Ultimately, these companies have to be held accountable for their behaviour. They apply for sites that they know the local plan does not allow them to apply for, as is happening in Grove, in my constituency. They continually try to build on flood plains. They continually fail to adhere to their section 106 agreements and community infrastructure levy agreements—sometimes not building infrastructure at all, and sometimes building pointless things, such as a pathway that goes only halfway across an estate or a bike path that leads to nowhere, just so they can say that they have done it. All those things are going on with new developments in my constituency. I do not blame Government for it all, but it is the Government’s job to ensure that the system does not operate in that way.

If I had to sum up the problems in my constituency, it would be, “Too many homes, too little infrastructure.” The two district councils that my constituency covers are, relative to their size, in the top 10 areas for house building in the country, yet they are in the bottom third for infrastructure spending. That is a huge bugbear. To put that in numerical context, an estimate of the population change between 2017 and 2027 found that the largest town and surrounding area in my constituency, Didcot, will increase from 36,000 to 51,000. The second largest area, Wantage and Grove, will increase from 17,000 to 27,000—that is in a 10-year period. Faringdon is getting thousands more people, and Wallingford is getting thousands more.

The infrastructure is not following that. It is harder to get a GP appointment, the roads in the constituency get more and more congested and it is harder to get a school place. One village has a 220-child school, and 300 houses have been built right next to it; just last year, the catchment area became less than 470 metres. People who have lived there for a long time and who expected their children to go to that school now cannot get in. When my constituents hear that planning reform may mean new houses and that they will not be able to oppose them, or that the Oxford-Cambridge arc may mean more houses, or that the council leaders’ Oxfordshire 2050 plan may lead to more houses, they are not concerned out of nimbyism; they are concerned because of their experience, over many years, of so many houses being built and so many promises being broken.

To conclude, I will talk about a few things that I think should happen. There are lots of things, and there are plenty of experts in this room who I know will talk about other aspects. First, we need a much tougher regime for the quality of new buildings. I know that the new homes ombudsman will deal with some of these issues, but it is completely unacceptable to pay that much money and have that many problems. We need very tight quality conditions, and the threshold needs to be raised. If it is not met within a certain timeframe, there should be penalties; issues must not go on for years.

Secondly, we need “use it or lose it” planning permissions. I know that there are debates about how best to do this, and I am frequently written to about the 1 million permissions that have not been built on. I know that there is a debate about land banking and whether it happens; hon. Members would be hard pressed to persuade me that it does not, at least from the developers’ point of view. We in this place are familiar with the phrase “dig a trench.” The emphasis has been on starting the building: companies dig a trench to suggest that they have started building, and the houses then take years to appear. We need these homes to be completed within a certain period. If they are not, taxes might be levied or fines paid, but I think that the permission should be lost entirely.

Thirdly, I want to talk about environmental standards. If it takes several years for these houses to be built, they should be built to the latest environmental standards, not to those that existed when the developers got permission. That is what is happening at the moment: companies are building houses to an environmental standard of several years ago, when they should be building to a standard of the future. That needs to change.

We have got to make developers and house builders commit to their affordability criteria. Our big house builders are doing completely fine for profits for their own viability, so they cannot keep saying that developments would not be viable if they committed to what they originally promised.

When it comes to management companies, we need a much stricter regime, because the current one is very murky. Companies are getting away with appalling practices, bullying residents into things and fleecing them, year after year, for things that are not being provided. We need a tougher regime under which companies cannot keep hiking charges without an extraordinary set of circumstances. The charges often go up because of things the company itself has done and got wrong, and it passes the cost on to residents who had no say in the first place. Much more transparency is needed, and penalties for such bad behaviour.

I understand that house builders want a level playing field, because an individual company does not want to commit to expensive things if its rivals are not doing so. That is where there is a role for Government in raising standards, so that all house builders have to do the same. I want more of a level playing field for smaller companies, such as Greencore Construction in my constituency. Many such companies are more environmentally friendly and more efficient, and produce higher-quality homes, but they are often outbid by the financial muscle of the big boys. Perhaps we need to reserve a greater proportion of development sites for such companies or give them greater access to capital. I am all in favour of smaller organisations rather than larger ones—I ran small charities, not larger ones. I think we can get a better product from smaller house builders, and we need to help more such companies into the market.

My final point is that infrastructure needs to go in first. It is not right to pile more and more houses and people into an area, but to do nothing to support local services and infrastructure. I have been campaigning for Grove station to be reopened, for improvements on our roads and for better medical facilities. GP surgeries are bursting at the seams because thousands more people have been added to the area—Members have heard the numbers. GP surgeries and school places have not been added along with the people. Infrastructure must go in first. Unfortunately, over decades my constituents have been told too many times that the infrastructure will come with the houses, but it never has, and now they do not believe it. That has to come first. As part of that, we might better capture the land value increase that comes with planning permission. At the moment, the increase all goes to the owner. Some of it ought to go to the local community who will live with the new houses, not to the landowner who has sold the land.

The balance of power is wrong. Management companies, house builders and developers have too much power, and local residents have too little. The Government cannot be blamed for every single thing that a private company does, but they can help to restore the balance, so that local communities do not see new houses as a curse on the area they used to love.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

There are eight colleagues wishing to speak in the debate, and I want to start the winding-up speeches just before 10.40 am. That gives us just under an hour, which is six or seven minutes per person. I will not put a formal guideline on speeches, but I ask that people comply with that time limit.

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[Theresa Villiers]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. There are certainly aspects of the Northern Ireland planning system that we could usefully learn from, but it has its drawbacks as well. However, I feel strongly that developer contributions should be ring-fenced for the local communities that are directly affected by the new homes. Too often—certainly in England—such contributions end up being distributed to a broader area and those who bear the burden of the new development do not necessarily get the benefit of the developer contributions.

We should use home building as a core part of efforts to regenerate cities and communities in the north and midlands. Many of those areas have seen population declines over the past 50 years, but new housing and infrastructure could help to reverse that trend.

We also need to address land banking. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage proposed, we could introduce a “use it or lose it” rule for land-banked permissions. An agreed start-by date could be imposed and permission could be withdrawn if that deadline was not met, and “start-by” should mean significant initial works and not digging a few holes or a trench. We could also impose end-by dates, after which council tax is payable on every home that is planned, regardless of whether it has been built or not. There is also a case for introducing a rule to limit the number of applications that can be made in relation to the same site, which would bring to an end the exasperating practice of developers coming back again and again, with multiple applications being turned down, which effectively turns the planning process into a war of attrition with planners and local residents.

There is a strong case for a character test in planning, so that if people have a poor track record in development or there are other reasons to doubt their ability to deliver, they can be blocked at the planning stage. I believe that sites that have been illegally prepared for building—for example, where tree felling has taken place illegally—should be made ineligible for future planning applications, and I would certainly like to see the penalties increase for illegal tree felling by developers.

Lastly, we could provide tax incentives for elderly homeowners to downsize, for example by reducing stamp duty.

As the Secretary of State contemplates which reforms to take forward and which to reject, I hope that he will listen carefully to the concerns that have been expressed in this debate. We must not let our rush for new homes compromise our environmental commitments or destroy our green and pleasant land, and we must not repeat the mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s, when poor quality high-rise housing blighted the lives of millions of people.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I must emphasise that speeches should last for no more than six minutes, please. Otherwise, other Members will not get as much time in which to speak.

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[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

A very happy new year to you, Mr Betts. As we have limited time, I will make three points. First, I have served as an MP for over 20 years, and the whole issue of housing development and the associated infrastructure remains the most controversial issue in my constituency. One of the things I have learned from that is that in order to be accepted by local people, development must be done with people, rather than to people, but the major house builders rarely seem to understand that.

The legislative framework within which the house building industry has to operate is obviously fundamental, but we are still awaiting the publication of the Government’s much-delayed planning Bill. That has led to the iniquitous situation whereby the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities continues to harry local authorities to finalise their local plans, despite holding back legislation that, once enacted, might mean that local councils have to revise or even substantially rewrite the plans that many of them have just spent literally years working on. It is becoming a bit like “Waiting for Godot”. To put it another way, the Department should remove the plank from its own eye. I humbly ask the Minister: when can we expect the publication of the planning Bill, and when is Second Reading likely to be?

Secondly, the UK housing market is now effectively an example of near market failure. It is completely dominated by half a dozen or so major house builders, some of whom have grown over the years by absorbing competitors. That restricts choice, and, even more importantly, artificially restricts housing supply. That is done deliberately to keep prices up. Liam Halligan, economics editor of the Sunday Telegraph and now a popular TV presenter, explored the problem in great detail in his very good 2019 book, “Home Truths: The UK's chronic housing shortage”, in which he exposes the adverse effects of the dominance of the volume house builders on the housing market.

For instance, as Liam Halligan points out, since the Office of Fair Trading’s investigation into the housing sector in 2008, the market share of the volume house builders has more than doubled, from 31% to 59%—not far off two thirds of the entire market. Covid is likely to have made that serious market anomaly worse by increasing the pressure on smaller builders, many of whom have limited financial reserves.

As Liam Halligan argues,

“An oligopolistic house building sector, deliberately restricting the supply of new homes to keep profits high, is anathema to free markets.”

But it is even worse than that. The paradigm that the Government appear to be working in is one where house building is held back by nimby local authorities, despite the best efforts of house builders to build new homes. In fact, the reverse is true. As the Local Government Association pointed out in February 2020, there are over 1 million extant planning permissions for new properties, but these have not been built out. In October 2020, the Campaign to Protect Rural England produced a report highlighting that over half a million of these plots alone are on brownfield sites. A former chief executive of Persimmon Homes stood down after getting his £75 million bonus—a bonus so profane that it embarrassed not just his company but the rest of the industry. Perhaps he was untroubled by these facts. Nevertheless, some of the practices we have heard about from colleagues this morning still go on. Where, one has to ask, are Ministers—and, indeed, the Competition and Markets Authority—in all of this?

I come to my third point. Let me give a practical example of how truly arrogant some of these companies have become. Bloor Homes, one of the largest privately owned developers in Britain, was so desperate to secure planning permission for a highly controversial site off Ashingdon Road in my constituency that it resorted to trying to interfere with the composition of the development control committee of Rochford District Council, which was due to consider the application last June. Bloor having lost—the committee turned it down—Bloor’s political consultant sent a series of highly intemperate, even offensive, texts late at night to the leader of the council. It is the sheer arrogance of these tactics, which I have not previously encountered in over 30 years of public life as a councillor and then as an MP, that I find deeply shocking. This is the sad reality of house building in Britain today. We have limited time, Mr Betts, so I will not read all the communications into the record. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to do on Second Reading of the planning Bill, so that Ministers, parliamentary colleagues, the media and others in the house building industry can learn how Bloor Homes really behaves.

In summary, the UK house building sector is deeply troubled, bordering on dysfunctional. Many ordinary families are struggling to buy a home, while some of the major house builders ruthlessly exploit their agony to maintain their already generous profit margins. They blame everyone but themselves: Government, MPs, local authorities or concerned local residents—anyone but the greedy companies that are at the heart of the problem. If Ministers really want to boost housing supply, let us have a full inquiry by the Competition and Markets Authority on over-concentration in the UK house building industry, and let us have it now.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

As I want to call the Front-Bench speakers at 10.38 am, the last two speakers will have five minutes each.

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[Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. May I wish all Members a happy new year and thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston) for securing this important debate? The debate is important because it allows us to discuss the role that house builders play not just before houses are built, but when ensuring that homes are fit for purpose once they are finished.

Buying a home is probably the most important and expensive purchase that any of us will make. With that in mind, I wish to raise the case of a specific development within my constituency, the High Banks development in Silsden, which sadly has witnessed mismanagement by its construction company, Harron Homes. It is perfect timing that I am following the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), who spent most of her speech talking about Harron Homes, as I intend to do the same. The High Banks development was constructed and finished back in 2020, and it consists of about 50 properties. I have been contacted by the residents about this. Indeed, the local councillor, Rebecca Whittaker, who represents the Craven ward, has been contacted by about 30 of the 50 residents.

The manner in which the High Banks development has been finished and the snagging issues are, quite frankly, shocking. I have visited the site many times. As soon as I arrived, it became quite clear why residents have contacted me and Councillor Whitaker. The road is in a shocking state. The sewerage system is still not connected to the mains, and a tanker comes in on a weekly basis to empty the development’s tanks. Many house owners have contacted me about cracks in their walls appearing, plumbing systems in their houses not being connected or finished, floorboards creaking, gardens not being properly landscaped or finished, and boundary fences not being finished. This situation is not satisfactory at all. One constituent told me that they had waited so long for many of these issues to be sorted that they carried out the work themselves, only for the developer to say, “You finished it; we’re not coming in to sort it out.” That is not good enough.

I know that High Banks is not the only Harron Homes development to face these issues. The hon. Member for Halifax already raised her case, and I know that there are similar cases in Dewsbury and Colne Valley. Communication is a big concern with this particular developer. On the back of constituents raising these concerns with me, I tried to have a meeting with the managing director. I requested the meeting in the summer of last year, and we were able to secure a meeting with him on site only in October.

Harron Homes promised to keep up communications with many of its residents. Indeed, on the back of a meeting with Tony Lee, the managing director, and Andy Hall, the construction director, I was promised six-weekly updates. I have not received any update since the meeting with them in October, and the residents have received only one communication. Again, that is not good enough. As a result, I continue to receive correspondence from constituents in High Banks saying that Harron Homes has done absolutely nothing—since I met them or, indeed, since 2020, when it finished the development—to improve the site.

The company has not kept its promises to those who bought their homes. Where do we go from here? I call on Harron Homes again to respect its contractual relationship with its purchasers and not to blame issues on its subcontractors. The responsibility lies solely with the developer, Harron Homes. The snagging issues have to be resolved within a respectful timeframe, without the pandemic being used as an excuse, as I have heard from Harron Homes before.

There also has to be an auditing process in place. When a developer hands over a completed house to a purchaser, it surely has a responsibility to go back to the purchaser and say, “Has the home been completed to the standard that you expected?” That surely has to happen after six months and then potentially after a year. Harron Homes has done none of that.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage, I would like to see a much tougher regime for the quality of house building, with a fixed-term timeframe for completion and with possible penalties if homes are not completed.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I thank hon. Members for keeping to time limits; it is appreciated. We move to the Front Benchers. There will be 10 minutes for the two Front Benchers and then a short time for the mover of the motion to wind up.

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Betts. I wish all hon. Members and staff present a happy new year, and add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Wantage (David Johnston) on securing this important debate, and on his comprehensive and extremely well-judged introductory remarks.

As expected, given the subject, this has been a wide-ranging debate, with a series of thoughtful contributions informed by the experiences of hon. Members on both sides with new build developments in their respective constituencies. I highlight, in particular, the contributions made by my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western), who spoke of the importance of local authorities in housing and planning and the imbalance of power between councils and developers, and the constraints that the former therefore face when it comes to meeting the needs of their populations.

My hon. Friends the Members for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) and for Halifax (Holly Lynch) spoke powerfully about cases of unscrupulous developers in their own constituencies, as did the hon. Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) in relation to Harron Homes, and the lack of accountability, at least in the current system, for redress for the serious defects that people face.

In the time available, I would like to expand on three issues that have featured in the debate this morning and that the hon. Member for Wantage touched on in his introductory remarks. First, what is the quality of new homes being built? Secondly, as well as building new homes, do we have a system that supports the creation of sustainable communities where individuals and families can not just live but thrive? Thirdly, are buyers of new build homes getting a fair deal?

I turn first to quality. It manifestly remains the case, despite the problem being both of long standing and widely understood, that a significant proportion of those buying recent new builds in England find, having moved into their new home, that their property has serious defects. As has been made clear today by cases from across the country, to which I could add a great many from my own constituency, we are talking here not about minor snagging issues but about major defects, whether that be in relation to the fabric of the building, unfinished fittings, or faults with utilities.

The fundamental reason why standards remain too low is simple: the housing market is broken and the planning system is in crisis. As the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) argued, the housing market does not have sufficient diversity of supply, and it is not one in which—aside from a minority of homes at the very top end of the market—quality of product is rewarded by price. A decade of planning deregulation has exacerbated that situation, and the relaxation of permitted development is the most egregious example of decisions taken by this Conservative Government that will increase the amount of substandard housing being delivered across the country, with all the negative impacts on health and life chances that flow from that. For all the rhetoric about beauty and the various initiatives announced in the wake of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, the present system still overwhelmingly produces, as extensive analysis by the Place Alliance has shown, “mediocre” or “poor” outcomes when it comes to build quality and design.

We of course must robustly challenge developers and house builders to improve their performance, and call out those choosing not to build better-quality housing or using the planning appeals process to force through schemes with the lowest design quality, but there is much more that the Government could do to drive up standards. The establishment of the new homes ombudsman is of course welcome, although the Minister will know the concerns that Opposition Members have about the scheme’s membership. Likewise, we welcome the publication of the new homes quality code. However, given its nature and the fact that it relies on compliance with national standards that currently, I argue, fall far short, we have little confidence that it will lead to the needed step change in developer behaviour. The fact is that until the Government act to ensure that we have a planning system fit for purpose and make greater progress on diversifying the housing industry and delivering a marked increase in output, including in terms of genuinely affordable homes, the numbers seeking redress for serious defects are unlikely to fall significantly.

I turn next to the question of how we ensure that the construction of new homes creates sustainable and thriving communities. As things stand, far too many new build developments are not being delivered with the necessary key amenities and social and physical infrastructure to provide for such communities, and we have heard a great many examples this morning. That is because the present housing and planning framework is simply not conducive to effective place making. Of course, that is not a new phenomenon—indeed, it was remarked upon as far back as the 2007 Callcutt review. But the problem has become more acute in recent years, as a direct result of this Government’s commitment to deregulating the planning system, with the relaxation of permitted development rights in particular preventing councils—the skills, morale and capacity of whose planning departments are at an all-time low after a decade of budget cuts—from co-ordinating development or planning vital infrastructure and services.

The situation is having a direct impact on the provision of environmentally sustainable development—for example, in terms of the relationship between relatively inaccessible development sites and rates of sustainable transport use, or buildings that are constructed on sites without due regard to climate resilience. Again, the fundamental problem is a development model that is geared primarily towards the wants of developers, as opposed to one whose primary purpose is securing what is in the public interest.

When it comes to enabling effective place making, the Government must, as a minimum, rescind the damaging relaxation of permitted development rights and return those powers to local government. Ministers should then turn their attention to what more the Government must do to encourage the creation of thriving communities that support the health and wellbeing of their residents, not least by implementing comprehensive national housing standards so that developers—particularly the volume housebuilders—have no choice but to deliver in core place making.

Lastly, turning to whether those people buying new homes are getting a fair deal, the answer in far too many cases is clearly no, particularly for leaseholders. That is most obvious in the topical issue of ground rents for new leasehold homes. The House will know that the Opposition welcome the Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Bill but remain of the view that onerous ground rents must be tackled for existing long residential leases, not just new homes, and we urge the Government once again to reconsider their position on the matter.

With regard to existing long residential leases, we welcome the commitment given by Taylor Wimpey to the Competition and Markets Authority to remove onerous ground rent terms from its existing contracts. The imposition of those terms was wholly unjustified, and it is obviously right that the relevant clauses will be removed. Other developers and freehold investors must also do the right thing and abandon escalation clauses in their leasehold contracts. When he responds, I would welcome the Minister making it clear, for the record, that that is what the Government now expect them to do.

However, the issue of ground rents is not the only way in which those buying new leasehold homes are getting a bad deal. There are a range of issues, from soaring service charges to the unregulated nature of managing agents, that all point to the need not only for measures to address specific problems, but for wider leasehold reform and reform of the current framework for resident control of estate management—issues that I have no doubt Ministers and I will return to on many future occasions.

On protecting the owners of new homes from abuse and poor service at the hands of disreputable management companies, I ask the Minister to tell the House whether the Government intend to implement the recommendations of the regulation of property agents working group, chaired by the noble Lord Best. What progress has been made on that, given that the final report was published back in July 2019?

To conclude, this has been a valuable debate and a welcome opportunity to hear the concerns of hon. Members from across the House regarding new homes. However, it is taking place after almost 12 years of Conservative-led Government, with numerous changes to housing and planning legislation in that time. Yet when it comes to new homes, the outcomes for people and communities, on the whole, have not only not improved but noticeably deteriorated in a number of key areas.

It is self-evident that more must be done to drive up quality and design standards across the industry, to enable and support more effective place making, and to ensure that those buying new homes get a fair deal. I look forward to hearing from the Minister, not least in relation to the planning legislation that we are told the Government remain committed to introducing and on what the Government will do differently to ensure that real progress is made on these objectives.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I call the Minister. If he could allow a brief period at the end for the mover of the motion to wind up, that would be appreciated.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Developer contributions, provided by developers to local authorities in order to undertake important infrastructure works, can often be slow to arrive, if they arrive at all, and they are often not what was expected in the first place. We want to put more power in the hands of local authorities and local communities, and not developers. That is one of the reasons why our infrastructure levy, which is under development, will provide greater transparency and greater certainty for communities about the important infrastructure that they will get.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I think there is a desire across the House for a planning system that gets homes built but also recognises the democratic rights of local residents. Looking at the Minister’s planning reforms, may I suggest that he drops his zonal proposals, which are really quite bureaucratic and time consuming, and looks instead to simplify the local plan system, allows for more residents to contribute and be involved in it, and brings in his digital proposals, which have been generally accepted? Once a local plan is in place and an individual application comes in, should there not be a presumption that that application will be accepted where it is in agreement with the local plan, subject to any remaining concerns from residents being taken into account and listened to as part of the consideration of the application?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, who makes some important and powerful points. He is right that we need to have more people engaged in the planning system. He will know that presently, about 1% of the local community engages in local plan making; that is, as near as damn it, local planners and their blood relations. That rises to as much as 2% or 3% of the local community engaging in individual local planning applications. We want to make sure that we have an engaging process and that we use digitisation to help us with that, and we will consider his proposals as we move forward with our important planning reforms.

Budget Resolutions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I have huge respect and affection for the right hon. Member, but I remember when we sat in Cabinet together and he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. I remember when he spoke to the Liberal Democrat conference, when such a thing occurred —when there were enough Liberal Democrats to get together to fill a conference hall. I remember him telling that Liberal Democrat conference hall that it was time—please forgive my language, ladies and gentlemen—to get fracking. Now that he is no longer in government and is in opposition, he seems, curiously enough, to have reversed his position, an unprecedented thing for a Liberal Democrat to do.[Laughter.] Saying one thing to one constituency and another thing to another? Remarkable!

I should say that my own views on fracking in Surrey—and indeed elsewhere—are on the record, and the right hon. Member can be reassured that my opposition to fracking in Surrey, particularly in a case that came up in my constituency, is on the record; but because my views are on the record of the past, I should say no more about the future.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

May I return the Secretary of State to the 3% increase in spending power for local councils? Has he seen the analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies? It states that the 3% includes the £5.4 billion that the Government have used from the levy, but as the way in which councils must spend it is specified, it amounts to only a 1.8% increase in money that they can choose, and the 1.8% is there only if they put their council tax up by 3% a year.

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Additional funding is, quite rightly, being devoted to improving adult social care, and it is also the case that the overall rise in core spending power for local government is at 3%. If we look back, we see that that is a significant increase, and it is also part of the broader increase of 4.7% overall in the spending that we are providing. Local government is not just being given more money for discretionary spending and for adult social care; we are also seeing additional spending from the Department for Education on special educational needs, we are seeing additional spending for transport, particularly in our city regions, and we are seeing the levelling-up fund as well. It is important to look in the round at the amount of money available to local government and spent in local areas.

[Mr Betts]

The IFS is right, is it not?

[Michael Gove]

The IFS is often—but not always—right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

First, I associate myself with the comments of the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) about the need for more money for social housing and cladding and the importance of dealing with the issues of rough sleeping. We have dealt cross-party with those matters on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee.

Generally, I am supportive of the whole idea of levelling up, but I must say to the Secretary of State that I could be a lot more enthusiastic if I knew what it meant, how it would be achieved and how success would be measured. The recent report by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee said that, for all the current documents, levelling up was

“a wide ranging and disjointed programme of random policies…it is difficult to see how they all tie together under one over-arching strategy.”

I think that is a fair comment on what exists now.

Presumably, it is the job of the Secretary of State, with his new responsibilities, to produce that overarching strategy and to tie together all these disparate funding streams. I presume we will see all that in the White Paper, which is hopefully coming shortly, and no doubt we can explore that further with him when he comes to the HCLG Committee next week.

However, as well as having an overarching national strategy, councils need the ability to plan and have a local strategy. That means doing away with all the disparate pots of money they have to bid for. The Local Government Association last calculated that there are 117 different pots of money that councils have to bid for. I am not making a party political point here; if we go to Conservative leaders of councils, they will be just as strident in their criticisms as Labour council leaders on this. Will the Secretary of State please look at that as a major issue?

[Michael Gove]

indicated assent.

[Mr Betts]

I see the Secretary of State nodding, so hopefully we might be able to get some change there.

The Secretary of State is right to emphasise the importance of transport. Yes, the South Yorkshire region got £600 million, but its bid to the levelling up fund for transport expenditure got turned down completely. When councils look at their local plans, there is a levelling up fund, a bus service improvement plan, a city region sustainable transport settlement plan and a zero emission bus regional areas fund to bid for. That is four different pots of money that councils must bid for to fund local transport services and that they must try to tie together, in the hope they may get some of them. That is really no way to enable our city region Mayors to plan the transport for their areas—no way at all.

That, of course, is against the background that in the Sheffield city region, expenditure on buses is £5 per head of population. It is £70 per head of population in London. That really needs to be addressed in levelling up.

I welcome the successful levelling-up fund bid from Sheffield for the regeneration—or the beginning of the regeneration—in Attercliffe in my constituency. I also welcome the £1.8 billion for brownfield sites, which is really important. Peter Freeman, the chair of Homes England, came to look at Attercliffe and the sites there, and I say to the Secretary of State that some changes to the way Homes England distributes its money are needed. First, we need to do away with the 80:20 rule, whereby Homes England is obliged to spend 80% of its money in the south-east—that simply cannot be right. We must look again at the Green Book evaluations of spending on housing sites, which are totally biased towards uplift in land values. There is bound to be a bigger uplift in land values on a greenfield site in the south than on a brownfield site in the north, and that needs addressing. We also need to look at the no additionality rule; where a derelict site with 100 old homes is cleared and 100 new ones are put in, thus really regenerating the area, Homes England funding cannot be got towards that. Those three issues do need addressing.

Finally, we had a discussion about the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of local government spending and what that meant. I say to the Secretary of State that in the past 10 years local government has been the major subject of austerity cuts—it has had bigger cuts than anywhere else. Those cuts have fallen disproportionately on the poorest areas; it has not been levelling up, but a major exercise in levelling down. The very areas that he says he now wants to help have had the biggest cuts to their funding in the past 10 years. This Budget will probably stop the cuts getting worse, but it is not seriously going to reverse them. There is a Government policy on levelling up, an aspiration and even a Department and a Secretary of State with “levelling up” in the title. I look forward to him actually showing us what levelling up means, and producing the policies and a coherent strategy that actually deliver it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Whately]

I am delighted to pick up on the hon. Member’s comments. I am surprised that he did not welcome the level of funding—the highest ever block grant—that Scotland is receiving as part of the Budget and spending review. We are making much-needed reforms to the alcohol duty system, which has been recognised by many commentators over the years as dysfunctional and in the interests of neither public health, nor our economy. We are now moving to a fairer system that taxes more alcoholic drinks at a higher level. This is also fair to whisky. The hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) called for whisky and wine to have the same duty rate by unit of alcohol. That is exactly what we are proposing in the reforms that will be introduced in 2023, because we recognise the importance of many parts of the sector—whether it is beer, cider, English and Welsh sparkling wine, or whisky—to the UK economy.

We are ensuring that regions that have historically received less investment are no longer overlooked. For example, some £500 million of the £1.7 billion of the first round of the levelling up fund will indeed go to the north of England, but there are examples of levelling up fund investment all around the country.

[Mr Betts]

Will the Minister give way?

[Helen Whately]

I will make a bit more progress.

I heard some Opposition Members say that rich people are not paying in enough. Well, I ask them to look at the Government’s distribution analysis and the analysis of the Resolution Foundation. These analyses say that the Government’s policies boost incomes for those on the lowest incomes, while those with the broadest shoulders—the better off—are the ones who will be paying the most. I also ask Opposition Members to acknowledge, as so many Government Members did, how both the increase to the national living wage by 6.6% and the changes to the universal credit taper rate will help millions of households on the lowest incomes. For example, a single parent of two children who works full-time will be £1,200 better off next year thanks to these changes.

[Helen Whately]

I stand by what I said: the Government’s distribution analysis and the Resolution Foundation analysis say that this Budget and spending review boost the incomes of those on the lowest incomes, and that those who are better off are paying in the most. The crucial point about the changes to the taper rate for universal credit is that it is about ensuring that people keep more of what they earn, and get the benefits and rewards of their hard work. The effect that it has is a tax cut for those on the lowest incomes.

There were times when I wondered whether Opposition Members were scrutinising the same Budget as Government Members. At many points, it felt as though they had missed the point. It was clear that the Opposition have no alternative plan. It was not clear whether they felt that we were spending too much or too little; what they would cut; what they would change; or where they would raise funds from. We on the Conservative Benches know that we are making the hard, responsible decisions, and setting ourselves up for the future.

I come to a serious point I want to make. Colleagues rightly pointed out that public spending is relatively high, and I share colleagues’ concerns about the size of the state at the moment. In fact, the Chancellor himself spoke about this last week. We on the Conservative Benches know that government should have limits. We want people to keep more of the rewards of their efforts, and we have said that, by the end of this Parliament, we want taxes to be going up, rather than down.

[Mr Betts]

The Minister referred to a plan. Will she explain where I can find a copy of the Government’s plan for levelling up?

[Helen Whately]

I would like to quickly correct the record. My apologies: I wanted to say that, by the end of this Parliament, we on the Conservative Benches want taxes to be going down. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] I thank my hon. Friends for their support.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Across the country, many people would welcome new housing development enthusiastically if they had the assurance of knowing that there was sufficient investment in infrastructure to ensure that public services and other utilities were there for them so that additional pressure was not applied unequally. His argument is correct, and it has been incorporated into our thinking about the future of planning reform.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State to his new role and look forward to seeing him at the Select Committee next week. I do not know whether he has had the chance to read yet the Select Committee’s review of the planning reforms. May I suggest that local plans need to be at the heart of a plan-led system, indicating where development is likely to happen? To do that, local plans need to be simpler, easier to understand and get more people involved in the process so that there is real community buy-in to them. Finally, even when local plans are in place, there still needs to be an opportunity for local people to be able to comment on, object to, and, where necessary, influence the outcomes of individual planning applications.

[Michael Gove]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is a very distinguished Select Committee Chair. At the danger of establishing a treacly consensus right from the very beginning, may I say that I entirely agreed with the first part of his question? As for the second part, I certainly welcome that direction of travel.

Affordable Housing in the South-West

Clive Betts Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Before we start the debate, I have to advise Members, in line with recommendations from the Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission, that they are encouraged to wear masks when they are not speaking and to give proper space to each other when seated or leaving the Chamber; that Members’ notes should be passed to Hansard by email; and that officials should communicate with Ministers electronically. That is the advice that I have to give, so I have given it.

Before I invite David Warburton to move the motion, are any other Members intending to speak in the debate? No? Obviously, Members can intervene, if their intervention is taken, but they can speak only with the mover’s permission.

Building Safety Bill

Clive Betts Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I will make some progress, if I may, but I will return to the hon. Lady.

While strengthening fire safety requirements in all premises regulated by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and improving competence and oversight generally, the Bill rightly focuses the new more stringent requirements on those buildings and those issues that pose the greatest risk. It provides a framework to ensure that, during design and construction, defined duty holders have clear responsibilities and that compliance with building regulations occurs. They will have to clear a series of hard stops through the new gateway system for in-scope buildings. In occupation, every building in scope will have an identified accountable person with clear responsibility for safety matters. Importantly, it will be a criminal offence not to carry out these duties effectively, punishable by an unlimited fine and up to two years in prison.

If we are truly to build a world-class regime, then residents must be at its heart. That is why, as well as championing social housing residents through the social housing charter that I created last year, we are giving residents a stronger voice in the system through the Bill, making it easier for them to seek redress and to have their voices heard. The Bill will require an accountable person for a high-rise residential building to engage with their residents and establish a formal complaints process for residents to raise concerns.

These measures are strong, but fair, and they will be overseen by the new building safety regulator within the Health and Safety Executive. The regulator will be equipped with robust powers to crack down on substandard practices, and as I said earlier, it will ensure that proportionality is embedded within its operations.

Dame Judith’s review pointed to an industry that needed significant culture and regulatory change to be fit for purpose, and I am sure I am not the only Member who has been shocked by the recent testimony at the Grenfell inquiry. This has exposed a corrosive culture of corner cutting and at times a cavalier attitude to building safety. We await the findings of the inquiry, and indeed whether criminal proceedings will follow.

The Bill creates powers to strengthen regulatory oversight for firms that manufacture and sell construction products, overseen by the new national regulator for construction products. Crucially, the Bill will have powers to remove unsafe construction products from the market swiftly and to take action against those who break the rules.

Our new regime will help those living in high-rise residential buildings to raise these issues, but we need to expand legal safeguards for everybody, regardless of the type of property they live in. We are strengthening redress for people buying a new build home, through provisions for the new homes ombudsman, which will provide dispute resolution and resolve complaints involving buyers and developers. As Members of Parliament, we all know of examples of shoddy workmanship by developers and of cases where complaints about things ranging from snagging to much more serious issues have not been properly addressed. There will now be a forum where these issues can be settled and consumers provided with the outcome they deserve when making the biggest investment in their lives.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for the kind words he said about the Select Committee’s scrutiny of the legislation. On the new homes ombudsman, many of us have been shocked by what we have seen from developers of new housing and the cavalier attitude they have towards their developments. Will he confirm that the new homes ombudsman will have the powers to deal with the appalling practice of non-disclosure agreements which some people have been asked to sign in order to get builders who have not built their homes properly to put that right? Will he consider going a step further and requiring the builders of new homes which have faults to put right all similar faults in other homes, just as a car manufacturer would have to do?

[Robert Jenrick]

Those are two important points. I would like to see the new homes ombudsman be able to take the kind of action that the hon. Gentleman describes. I will have to revert to him on whether the powers exactly allow that. If they do not, that is the kind of issue we should progress during the passage of the Bill. I give way to the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) and apologise for keeping her waiting.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—

[Mr Betts]

rose—

[Robert Jenrick]

I shall come to the hon. Gentleman, but in answer to the question posed by the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), my domain as Secretary of State on these matters is within England, but of course the lenders will apply practices at their discretion throughout the whole United Kingdom, so I think his question is probably better directed to the lenders who, following this announcement, will no doubt set out in the coming days how they intend to amend their lending practices in different parts of the United Kingdom. I do not think it is for me to explain the lending practices that they choose to adopt, other than in respect of the quotations that the lenders have given, which I believe will be published later today.

I shall take an intervention from the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and then, if I may, I will conclude my remarks.

[Mr Betts]

This is a very significant statement, and it is difficult to read it quickly and grasp it, but it says that EWS1 forms

“should not be needed for buildings less than 18m. This position is a significant step and one supported by the National Fire Chiefs Council and the Institute of Fire Engineers.”

That is a significant step, so will the Secretary of State explain, if the form is not necessary for those buildings, whether he is saying that, in effect, apart from cladding removal, significant remediation works are not necessary on buildings below 18 metres? Is that what the Government are saying? Because that is a major step in this debate and the House needs a lot more explanation.

[Robert Jenrick]

The expert advice that I commissioned has concluded that there is no systemic risk to life from purpose-built flats in this country and in particular—this was the question that I asked of the experts—from those flats that are low and medium-rise, meaning those of 11 to 18 metres. The experts’ advice, following on from that, is that they do not see a need for lenders to ask for EWS1 forms in the ordinary course of business. They also recommend that fire risk assessments are conducted in the usual compliance cycle, rather than on demand, in order to satisfy a market transaction such as purchasing or remortgaging a property. They do not conclude—as one would not expect them to do—that all buildings below 18 metres are safe. One can never say that, and there will be buildings that need remediation below that level, but because there is no systemic risk and the number of buildings is likely to be very small, it is not appropriate, in their opinion, which the Government have accepted, that lenders and other parties in the market should act as if there was a widespread and systemic issue. That is a subtle but important change of tone and one that I hope will lead—the initial support of the lenders suggests that this will happen—to a significantly different housing market.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Powell]

I am fully aware what an EWS1 form is, thank you. Its scope and its effect came about from the advice note that the Government issued in January 2020. If it is a matter for the lenders, what recourse do leaseholders have? There is nothing in the Secretary of State’s statement about recourse and accountability and where the buck stops. That is my central argument here. In the vacuum of leadership, everybody from insurers to mortgage lenders, risk assessors and others are too concerned about their liability, leaving thousands of buildings with endless fire safety requirements, some of which are potentially life threatening, but others are an unnecessary symptom of this crisis in confidence. Who is it that says which is which? Where does that sit? With whom does that lie? The Government cannot leave this to industry and the private sector to sort out. The market cannot sort this, because it is completely broken—the Secretary of State said today that the market was completely broken as if this was news to him. Yet he says that he will not intervene in that broken market. The power is with him to intervene if he wanted to. That is why we have been calling for a building works agency. I am talking about a crack team of engineers and experts appointed by the Government, going block by block, assessing the real fire risk and what remediation works are absolutely necessary; commissioning and funding those works from the building safety fund; and then, crucially, certifying the building as safe and sellable. This rigorous approach would also keep costs down, and the agency can then go after those responsible for costs. It has been done before in Australia and it can be done again here—if the Secretary of State was prepared to step up, lead and intervene rather than leave it to the broken market he describes.

[Mr Betts]

I keep reading this statement and I am not sure I am any clearer than I was at the beginning. The Secretary of State said that EWS1 forms are not needed on properties below 18 metres because there is no systemic risk across those sorts of buildings. What I am not clear about is whether the lack of systemic risk applies to cladding that is of limited combustibility. Is he now saying that there is no need to remove combustible cladding from buildings below 18 metres, or that there is a need? If there is, is not an EWS1 form needed as part of that process? If it is not, we still do not know who is going to pay for the work.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Of course, there are also many buildings over 18 metres that do not have cladding and are still facing the issues of fire remediation works, some of which may not be necessary. I am not clear whose job it is to decide whether they are necessary, and therefore whether a building can be mortgageable and insurable once again and people can move on with their lives. I am still not sure of that and I still do not feel that the Government are really providing the leadership and intervention that is necessary.

There is huge strength of feeling on these issues, as we can see from the number of Members wanting to speak in this debate. The toll of this crisis is immeasurable. Innocent homeowners want us to work together, and I will work with anyone to protect them from these costs. I am not interested in party political point-scoring, as it happens, but the Government have to step up on these issues.

Returning to the Hackitt test, her ultimate test of this new framework is the rebuilding of public confidence in the system. She says that the people who matter most in all this are the residents of these buildings. The honest truth is that, through the omission of cast-iron protections for today’s leaseholders, this test will not be met. It is not enough to simply will the ends; the means need real determination and focus too. We will work with all sides to protect leaseholders and meet the Hackitt test.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

Welcome to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is good to see you there.

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee did pre-legislative scrutiny on the Bill—it is a technical Bill, which we went through line by line and made recommendations—and I think that shows how the House should operate. I thank the Government, and the Minister for Building Safety and Communities in particular, for taking it seriously, responding to all our points in great detail and talking to us about it.

The Committee still have some concerns and wrote again to the Minister the other day about what we think is missing. One thing, of course, is building control. Developers should not be able to appoint their own building control inspectors, because that is a conflict of interest.

On risk, it is not height alone that makes buildings risky. A one-storey care home is potentially risky, and that must be taken into account in the role of the building safety regulator.

The Government are to come forward with proposals on the qualifications and training of everyone working on high-rise buildings. That is really important, because currently an electrician rewiring a flat in a high-rise development does not have to be qualified. Their employer must be part of a competent person scheme, but the individual does not have to be qualified anywhere in the building industry. Those matters need addressing now in the Bill.

[Seema Malhotra]

I thank my hon. Friend for all the work he does on his Committee. He made an important point about the independence of building control. Does he agree that it causes a considerable lack of confidence when people who have bought properties find they have no recourse and that there is a real question about the role of local authorities in building control?

[Mr Betts]

There are major issues about the independence of building control not just on the highest-rise buildings but right throughout the building industry. The Select Committee report drew attention to that.

On product testing, we await the Government’s proposals. Hackitt identified that the product testing regime is broken and needs fixing, and the Committee stands by its view that if a product that has gone to testing and failed a test comes commercially to the market, that information should be made available publicly. That is important information. The Government rejected that recommendation, but I hope they might consider it further.

It is very difficult to make comprehensive sense of the statement published today. I hope that the Secretary of State will accept an invitation to come to the Select Committee after the summer recess and discuss the matter with us in more detail. Whatever the statement says, it still leaves out buildings over 18 metres that have defects that are not just about cladding. Even when cladding defects have been put right, people are facing bills of £50,000 that they cannot afford. Where is the help for those leaseholders? It is not anywhere in the Bill.

I turn to buildings between 11 and 18 metres. I do not understand how the Secretary of State can say that systemic defects were not found in those buildings. Where does cladding fit into that? Will the removal of combustible cladding from buildings between 11 and 18 metres no longer be required? If it is still required, who will pay for it? The Government floated the idea of a loan scheme, but there is no reference to that in the Bill. Has the loan scheme been ditched? We need clarification on these important issues because leaseholders need certainty that they are not going to have to face these bills.

There are important issues in the Bill. It is generally to be welcomed. There are still issues that we want the Government to go further on, but the explanation in this statement of who is going to pay for some of the costs that the building safety fund does not cover is still an essential matter that the Government need to think again about.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Sir Mike Penning.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I am sure that Conservative councillors the length and breadth of the country were over the moon to receive the hon. Gentleman’s letter. I can see the scene now over the summer recess, when the gate rattles or there is a knock at the door and he rushes to check what the post has brought in, but like a jilted lover or a pen pal who assumes his letters got lost in the mail, he finds nothing there except just another letter from Croydon Council telling him that the bills are going up as a result of the terrible mistakes and mismanagement that his friends and cronies are making over at Croydon. He has taken an avowedly anti-house building approach. This is a far cry from the Labour party of Attlee and Bevan, who said that this was a social service and a moral mission. This Government are going to keep on building houses, but we will build them sensitively. We will build beautiful homes, we will protect the environment and we will help young people and those on lower incomes to enjoy all the security and prosperity that comes with owning a home of their own.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

I hope that the Secretary of State has seen the Select Committee’s report into the planning reforms. We were supportive of a number of aspects, including the need to strengthen local plans and how they are drawn up. Could I ask him two things in relation to our recommendations? We need to recognise the serious change in moving to a zonal system and the importance of getting the details right, and I wonder if he might consider the recommendation to move, at the next stage, to a draft Bill, so that we could give it serious pre-legislative scrutiny as to what it would mean in practice. Secondly, will he have another look at the distribution of housing under his latest proposals? Under the proposals, large areas of the north outside the major cities will see their housing numbers fall, which seems to be in contradiction to the Government’s levelling-up agenda.

[Robert Jenrick]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman and the members of the Select Committee for their interesting report, which we have considered carefully as part of the broader work that we have done to listen to the views of colleagues here in Parliament on both sides of the House and in the country before preparing our response to the White Paper in the autumn. I will of course bear in mind his suggestion about pre-legislative scrutiny, which may be a good way forward. On his second point, I must respectfully disagree, because I think levelling up involves ensuring that our big cities of the midlands and the north build more homes. That is the way we will ensure a brownfield-first approach. That is also the way we will ensure inspired regeneration and get aspirational middle-class families back into some of those great cities, and ensure that councils have the revenues they need to invest and to prosper; and of course it is the way to protect the countryside from unnecessary development.

Building Safety

Clive Betts Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for finding time for this important debate. I realise that the whole of the nation will be watching their television sets this afternoon, totally interested in the proceedings in the House on this important issue—but, seriously, four years on from Grenfell, the one thing that we should be able to agree on is that we should do everything necessary to ensure that a tragedy like Grenfell never happens again.

We have had the Hackitt review and the draft building safety Bill on which the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee did pre-leg scrutiny, both of which are welcome steps forward. I will ask many questions this afternoon. I probably will not be able to put all of them on the record, but the Committee will write to the Minister afterwards and set out a list of questions in the public domain, if that is helpful. First, when will the building safety Bill in its final form be published? Can we have a timetable for that? Four years after Grenfell, thousands of families are still living in unsafe homes and facing bills they cannot afford. In many cases, their lives are put on hold because they cannot sell the homes they live in and move on. That puts enormous pressure on the mental health and wellbeing of those families.

The Committee has produced three reports about building safety and cladding issues, and I have with me the most recent one, “Cladding Remediation—Follow-up”, which we published in April. Because it is an estimates day, I will concentrate on resources and Government funding—or sometimes the lack of Government funding. Do the Government yet know how many homes are unsafe and what the estimates are to put them right? There is a second, general point that we have repeated over and over again in our reports. We ought to be absolutely clear that we establish

“the principle that leaseholders should not pay anything towards the cost of remediating historical building safety defects”

for which they are not responsible. One of the questions we will probably ask—the second question—is: will the Minister confirm that that is still the Government’s policy? It has changed from time to time.

In recognising that significant funding has been made available by Government, let me go through the funds. On the £600 million funding to remove aluminium composite material cladding—the cladding that was on Grenfell—progress has been a little disappointing. Could the Minister explain, probably with an answer in writing at some point, when the removal of all ACM cladding will be finished and why there are still 33 buildings with ACM cladding where remediation work has not started?

The Select Committee was also at the forefront of pushing for funding to remove other forms of dangerous cladding. The first £1 billion building safety fund was clearly not adequate: it was on a first come, first served basis, which was not appropriate. It is therefore welcome that the fund is now £5 billion, but why are only buildings over 18 metres covered? What risk assessment has been done to determine that? Has an estimate been done of whether the extra £3.5 billion will be sufficient? Why is the £3.5 billion not so far covered in the estimates? Has the funding profile for that money and the years that it will be spent over now been agreed? If so, can we know what it is? Why have 2,000 registrations for the fund not progressed? Are the Government satisfied that those buildings are safe even though their claims on the fund, having been registered, have not moved any further forward?

Have we any further information on how the loan scheme for buildings between 11 and 18 metres will work? Ministers have been unable to explain any of it in previous discussions. They have said that neither leaseholders nor freeholders will be responsible for the debt for the loan, so who will be responsible? Have Ministers any idea what the total cost of the loan scheme will be? How many buildings will it cover? Do they accept that for some buildings it will mean a debt of several thousand pounds, running over many years, before the final costs are paid off?

Does the Minister accept that buildings under 11 metres, which are not covered by the building safety fund or the loan scheme, could still be at risk? How many such buildings are there? What risk assessment has been done on them?

Why has social housing been excluded from all the funds apart from the original ACM fund? Does the Minister accept the National Housing Federation’s figure that it could cost £10 billion for housing associations to put right building safety defects in their homes? If that is to be done without any Government support, do the Government accept that that money will come out of commitments that would otherwise have been made to build new homes or refurbish existing homes? What assessment have the Government done of the impact of not allowing social housing to claim against the building safety fund?

One of the biggest issues is that, apart from cladding removal, the building safety fund does not cover building safety defects. We know that there are faulty balconies, faulty fire doors, missing fire breaks and faulty insulation. Why have those issues been omitted from the fund? What risk assessment has been done of that? Do the Government accept that some leaseholders are facing bills of £50,000 to put right defects in their home other than cladding? Does the Minister accept that buildings that have claimed and received money from the building safety fund to put right cladding problems are being left with other defects that make their homes unsafe? In some cases, we are spending enormous sums of public money and the end result will still be homes that are not safe, because other defects remain that the leaseholders simply cannot afford to put right. Is that an acceptable situation?

Does the Minister accept the Select Committee’s proposal that we should now have a comprehensive building safety fund that covers all safety defects, not just cladding; all buildings, not just those above 18 metres or above 11 metres; and all tenures, including leasehold and social housing?

We believe that where individual developers, architects or contractors can be held accountable for defects in a particular building, they should be held accountable properly in law and made to pay. However, we know that those legal battles can go on for years and years, so essentially Government have to step in first to fund this work, putting the money into a comprehensive building safety fund, although we believe that industry in general should also pay. That includes the development industry, as well as suppliers of products, because often faulty products have been a cause of these problems.

We welcome the principle of a tax and a levy on the industry, which the Government have announced. That is a good step forward. To confirm, will the tax and levy produce money in addition to the £5 billion, or are they part of that, reducing the Government’s cost? Do we know when the money from the levy and the tax will start to arrive? Presumably the tax will need legislation, and perhaps the levy will as well. Is it true that a levy, if introduced, will be applied only when planning permission is granted? If so, it could be years down the road before a building on which the developers are due to pay the levy is actually built and the levy is handed over; we could be years away from getting any money. Will the Government confirm the likely timetable?

This issue will not go away until all homes are safe in this country. It is an issue that we will come back to as a Select Committee and, I suspect, that we will come back to over and over again in this House. This is a major challenge, and so far, bit by bit, the Government are moving steadily towards addressing it. All I would say to the Minister today is that, although progress has been made, there is still an awfully long way to go. I hope we will get a positive response from him to the recommendations in the Select Committee report. We will write to him further to list all the questions we would like answers to following the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Betts]

Perhaps we could hope for the same result for the Select Committee vis-à-vis the Government when we come to their response to the building safety Bill.

We have had a wide-ranging debate, and this is clearly a very important issue. We should also think back to Dame Judith Hackitt’s report, in which she identified a legacy of building regulatory failures in this country, but also identified a fundamental problem of culture in the construction industry. That culture is about cutting costs, a race to the bottom and conflicts of interests, and that is fundamentally at the heart of many of these problems, which eventually will probably take longer to address.

When we debated the Fire Safety Bill, the Government said that it was the wrong Bill to be used for amendments to bring building safety matters to a conclusion. They said that the right Bill was the building safety Bill. I am pleased that the Minister has now said that the Bill is imminent. I hope that means it will be before the recess and is quicker than “soon” or “shortly”, which Ministers often say.

The first duty of a Government is to keep their citizens safe. The only way to keep people safe in their homes is to remove all safety defects, and I say to the Government that the only way to remove all safety defects is to adopt the comprehensive building safety fund, as recommended by the Select Committee.

Question deferred until tomorrow at Seven o’clock (Standing Order No. 54).

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Let us go to the Chair of the Select Committee on Housing, Communities and Local Government.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

I am sure the Minister has had a busy weekend reading the Select Committee report on the planning system. In it, he will have seen that the Committee was supportive of the Government’s proposals to improve and enhance the local plan system, particularly through getting more public involvement by making the plans digital. That is to be welcomed. However, many people in our evidence-taking were concerned that once a local plan has been agreed, local people will lose their right to have any meaningful say in individual planning applications. That was a real concern that was expressed to us, so when the Government respond to the report and to its wider consultation, will they look again at how they can ensure that local people have a meaningful voice on individual applications, particularly those in the renewal areas, which are often very contentious?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Select Committee for his report. We will consider it carefully, as we always do, and I am pleased that he has, with some caveats, been so very supportive of our proposals. He asks about the way in which we can better democratise our planning system. The fact is that 3% of all planning applications are engaged with by the local community, yet 90% of planning applications go through, so only a small number of people are engaging with the planning process and the overwhelming number of plans go through anyway. I do not think that that is particularly engaged or democratic, and we are seeking to bring forward the democratic element of plan making so that local people can have a real and meaningful place and decision-making role in what happens in their communities.