Building Safety Bill

Geraint Davies Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

Four years on from the Grenfell disaster, hundreds of thousands of people are still in unsafe homes and trapped in blocks, unable to move or to sell their properties—in ongoing chronic uncertainty with the added trauma of thinking that they could be consumed by fire. This is not their fault. They are not able to fund the works and they are not able to recover the costs. The answer is clear: only the Government are in a position to assess the work, fund it, fix it and then recover the costs in a systematic way, as appropriate, from insurers and developers, and to fund the residue from taxpayers. Individuals are not in a position to do that.

If the total cost was, say, £15 billion, much of it would be recovered. The cost of that in the first instance would be the interest of around £150 million a year. This year, the Government are saving £14 billion in interest costs on debt because of lower interest rates, so that cost—the £150 million to fund the £15 billion to fund everything—basically represents 1% of the savings they have made this year. It is therefore completely wrong and unnecessary that they should dither and delay. People’s lives have been blighted, their finances have been torpedoed, their mental health is in tatters and it is completely unnecessary.

The Government subsidised second-home purchasers with stamp duty in England to a total of something like £5 billion. That was completely unnecessary, because interest rates actually went down during covid and there was no need to prop up the housing market. So much for levelling up! If the Government are serious about levelling up, they should put their money where their mouth is. They should support first-time buyers, low-income buyers and the low-income homeowners who have been left in this paralysis.

The Government should immediately evaluate this situation, as the Welsh Government are doing in Wales. They should find it, fund it and fix it, and then recover the cost from the developers and insurers. There is no excuse for delay. Justice should be done. People are rightly angry and I would be happy to join them outside Parliament in protest before that becomes illegal in the autumn. Let’s get moving and get people sorted out on this tragic issue.