Residential Buildings: Safety Remediation

Debate between Florence Eshalomi and Jeremy Corbyn

Tuesday 15th September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Florence Eshalomi]

My hon. Friend will know that I will definitely continue to lobby Treasury colleagues very hard, and any help from colleagues around the House will be helpful. In the meantime, the current system includes a new initiative looking at digital building control programmes. I can confirm that over £45 million has been invested in growing the workforce to help to address the key issue of capacity, streamline the process and support development. More is coming, but a lot more needs to come through the pipeline.

A number of Members, including the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, mentioned the key issue of building insurance and the continuing financial strain felt by so many innocent leaseholders. They see their insurance premiums going through the roof, in some cases paying more than for their mortgages. In the remediation acceleration plan, the Government have committed to working with the insurance industry to explore options to address the insurance challenges faced by residents living in buildings that are undergoing remediation.

To strengthen the evidence base, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government launched the remediation programme insurance survey, a UK-wide survey of buildings in Government remediation programmes. The findings, first published in July 2026, provide the most comprehensive dataset collected to date on insurance costs, premiums and claims and remediation status across more than 2,000 buildings undergoing remediation. The evidence is informing ongoing engagement with insurers and wider work to understand how insurance costs can better reflect improvements in building safety as remediation progresses. The Financial Conduct Authority is undertaking a short and focused review of the multi-occupancy building insurance market, and the findings will strengthen the evidence base on the next steps.

The Government are also undertaking action to improve transparency and fairness in residential building insurance. We are proceeding with secondary legislation to prevent insurance commissions, which can be opaque and excessive, from being passed on by freeholders and managing agents as freeholders’ expenses, and to replace such arrangements with fair and transparent permitted insurance payments with a fee structure. Alongside that, we will introduce through secondary legislation a new transparency requirement for building insurance, including in respect of the disclosure of the relationships and financial arrangements among landlords, managing agents, brokers and insurers.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am pleased to hear what the Minister just said about looking at the fairness of the whole market for insurance, but the immediate issue is that many of our constituents have for several years paid exorbitant and very excessive insurance costs. This is not their responsibility or fault—they did not install the dangerous cladding or fail to inspect properly. They deserve compensation from the insurance industry for what they have been through, and if that is not forthcoming, the Government should have a default position of backing it up. Our constituents have suffered grievously through this problem.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I thank the right hon. Member for raising that point. He highlighted examples of various developments in his constituency, including Drayton Park and Highbury Gardens, underlining the fact that innocent leaseholders have continued to pay exorbitant fees for many years. It is really important that we get to grips with this, especially for new buildings. I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning will be discussing the matter in respect of the national planning policy framework and some other areas, and I will continue to discuss it as well. On the specific issue of backdating, it is important for us to look at clear insurance procurement—the pricing, the cover, the prescribed timeframes for providing information and the mechanism for challenging any future delays.

Together, the measures the Government have outlined are intended to improve transparency, strengthen accountability and help to ensure that residents have a clearer understanding of insurance costs. There is a lot of jargon and hidden figures. We need to make sure that the costs are clear and that when residents challenge them, they get the right information back so that they can assess what they are being asked to pay for.

Renters’ Rights Bill

Debate between Florence Eshalomi and Jeremy Corbyn

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Florence Eshalomi]

I start by paying tribute to Members from across the House who have tabled an amendment at this stage, and to the Minister, who has engaged constructively with Members between Second Reading and Report.

As we debate this Bill today, it is important to remember why it is so badly needed: the dire situation that many tenants across all our constituencies are facing through no fault of their own. We have to ask ourselves how we got to a position where tenants have the threat of eviction held over their head for no good reason. How did we get to a position where tenants can be given only a couple of months to raise thousands of pounds for rent in advance, on top of moving costs and the deposit? How did we get to a position where the average rent went up by 9.1% last year? For far too long tenants have been the innocent victims of an unjust power balance in the rental market. As a result, many of them have been unable to keep a roof over their heads and, sadly, have fallen into homelessness. This cannot continue any longer. We need a fairer deal for renters.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Has the hon. Member noticed, as I have, an increase in the number of threatened evictions at the present time, as well as no-fault evictions, excessive rent rises and harassment by landlords of private sector tenants? Does she believe that there is any immediate and urgent protection that we can give those tenants?

Joint Enterprise (Significant Contribution) Bill

Debate between Florence Eshalomi and Jeremy Corbyn

2nd reading
Friday 2nd February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Looking at the make-up of the imprisoned youth population as well as the adult estate, we find a wholly disproportionate number of people who are on the autism spectrum or other spectrums, because of the complications of their lives. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) correctly pointed out, a wholly disproportionate number of young black people are taken into custody and get prison sentences as a result of the law of joint enterprise.

I think everyone accepts that there is a problem here, and the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside offers a way to take this issue forward so that we can reform the law to ensure that each person who receives a sentence is convicted because there is evidence against them as an individual, not because of an association that they happen to have with somebody who has committed a crime. If someone lives in an inner-city area, they are likely to spend a lot of time with a lot of people, some of whom commit crimes and some of whom are criminals. It does not mean that everybody else is a criminal. We almost get into a mood of collective attack on young people because of their association with people who have done bad things, so this Bill is an important step forward.

I understand what the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) was saying, and he made a very interesting and important contribution. There has to be some clarification of the law. I understand that the Minister will express some reservations about this Bill. However, I hope the Government will encourage the Bill to progress today, so that they can go into discussion with my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside on the way we can take this issue forward. This is a parliamentary opportunity to right a wrong—that is what we are here for, and it is what Friday debates are all about. It is also about coming to listen to the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), and I am grateful to him for his 30-minute speech—sometimes they are longer.

It has been a very effective debate, and I hope the Minister will understand that those of us who support this Bill do so out of a genuine concern to ensure there is a proper and effective system of justice in which people can have confidence. In an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central, I made the point that it is too easy to get prosecutions by using the joint enterprise law. It should never be easy to get a prosecution; it should be effective to get a prosecution against somebody who has committed a crime.

[Florence Eshalomi]

A few weeks ago, I spoke in a debate on knife crime. Getting prosecutions before the courts is an issue that we have all raised in this House and that our constituents have gone through with us. It beggars belief that victims who are grieving and have lost close family members are trying to get their cases before the courts, yet we are seeing people being convicted just because of where they are, the music they have listened to, who their boyfriends were or who they knew. This is totally unacceptable.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend makes a very powerful point. Like her, I represent a constituency where, sadly, we do experience knife crime and death by knife crime. I always visit the families that are victims of knife crime to try to share their pain at what is a horrific experience.

I ask the Minister to recognise the importance of the issue and the burden of the argument that has been put forward by those of us who strongly support this Bill. I hope he will be prepared to have discussions with my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside and the promoters of the Bill to see whether it is necessary to table any amendments in Committee. I do not want to hear warm words that, at some indeterminate point in the indefinite future, there will be a proposal coming forward to deal with what we all acknowledge to be a wrong. We have been down too many cul-de-sacs before, and this is an opportunity. Let us take the opportunity to right a wrong in our criminal justice system.