Building Safety

Felicity Buchan Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for welcoming much of the substance of today’s announcement. I draw her back to my earlier remarks: to the best of my knowledge, the Scottish Government have made no use at all of the funding that they have been provided with through the existing building safety fund. Important questions now need to be answered by her Government in Scotland as to what is actually happening there. What are they doing to support leaseholders? How are they making those buildings safe?

With respect to the financing scheme that we are bringing forward in England, it will be a matter for the Scottish Government—or, indeed, the Welsh or Northern Irish Administrations—to decide whether they wish to create a similar scheme. We have set an upper limit of £50 a month, which provides a great deal of comfort to leaseholders that they will never need to pay more than that per month. That is about the equivalent of the average service charge for a purpose-built block of flats. I appreciate that it is a cost that no one would wish to bear, but it is a reasonable one in balancing the interests of the taxpayer with providing support and protection to the leaseholder. We will bring forward further details on how that scheme works as quickly as we can.

It is important also to say that the arrangement that we will be creating is not a loan to an individual; it is a financing scheme with buildings. The loans do not sit with the individual and will not affect their credit rating. These are loans on a long tenure that will remain with the building, ensuring that the leaseholders themselves can move on with their lives.

[Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for working so closely with me on cladding issues over the past 15 months. I have been calling for a substantial and comprehensive package for cladding remediation, so I warmly welcome this announcement, which, importantly, allows funds to be deployed very quickly and does not require taskforces or legislation. I have called for a package of £5 billion to £10 billion; I quickly tried to tot up all the numbers as the Secretary of State went through the details, and I think this funding could be approaching certainly the middle if not the upper end of that range. Will he confirm that and assure me that money will be deployed as quickly as possible?

[Robert Jenrick]

I praise my hon. Friend, who has been a fantastic Member of Parliament for Kensington since she was elected and has raised with me this and other issues arising out of the Grenfell tragedy almost every week—in fact, we meet every week to discuss these issues.

My hon. Friend is right to say that this is a very substantial intervention. We have already made £1.6 billion available, and we estimate that it will require another £3.5 billion to complete the remediation of unsafe cladding on buildings over 18 metres and to make good on the promise we have made today to leaseholders. In addition to that, we will bring forward the financing scheme, the details of which, as I said, will be published shortly, but it is a very generous scheme and there is a significant cost to the taxpayer in ensuring that the £50 cap gives that added level of protection and reassurance to leaseholders.

The total intervention that we are making today is, as my hon. Friend says, one of many, many billions of pounds. That is a difficult judgment, which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have made with me, but we believe this is a fair and generous settlement to help everybody to move forwards.