Building Safety Bill

Hilary Benn Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I would be happy to speak to the organisation the hon. Member refers to or ensure that my officials do so if they have not done so already. Of course, we take the risk of electrical fires very seriously, and the Government have taken a number of steps, particularly in the private rental sector, to ensure higher standards than there are today.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman, and then I must make some progress.

[Hilary Benn]

I am extremely grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. He made the point a moment ago that the risk of a fatal fire is very low. Can he therefore explain why thousands and thousands of leaseholders are paying for expensive waking watches, having been told by their local fire services that, unless there is a waking watch, the building will be closed down and all of them will have to leave? There is a clear contradiction between those two positions.

[Robert Jenrick]

I think the right hon Gentleman makes an important point, and that is one element of the market failure we are seeing today. Waking watches are being used excessively. They can be rip-offs and, in many cases, they can be replaced by modern fire alarms. That is why I created the waking watch relief fund last year, which is assisting with the issue, but has not closed it down entirely. The National Fire Chiefs Council has now produced further guidance, which essentially says that waking watches should be used only in the most exceptional of circumstances, and where they are used, they should be used only for short periods. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is taking forward that work with fire and rescue services, and I would like to see most waking watches, barring the most exceptional of circumstances, brought to a close as quickly as possible.

The Bill will deliver improvements across the entire built environment. It will strengthen oversight and protections for residents in high-rise buildings. It will give those residents a greater say and will toughen sanctions against those who threaten safety. Its focus on risk will help owners to manage their buildings better, while giving the home building industry the clear, proportionate framework it needs to deliver more high-quality homes.

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[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

Last Saturday, I attended a demonstration at Leeds Dock in which my constituents—leaseholders affected by the scandal—talked about the anxiety, the stress and the potentially crippling financial costs they face if they are asked to pay to fix their homes. They really feel that nothing has changed. Now, had they been able to see Ted Baillieu from Victoria state speak last week, as referred to by the Father of the House, the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), they would have been blown away by his direct, no-nonsense approach. Those three words—“find, fix, fund”, and then go after the people who are responsible —should be the guiding light of the Government’s approach. My question to Ministers is: when will we see in the UK the kind of comprehensive approach that we are seeing in Victoria in Australia?

I appreciate—we all do—the money that the Government are putting in, but there are so many other faults in buildings apart from unsafe cladding that replacing the cladding will not make them safe. To take one example, the Richmond House fire was just under two years ago. It was below 18 metres, yet we are told that it was the absence of proper cavity barriers and fire breaks that allowed the fire to spread. I say to Members: watch the video. It is absolutely terrifying.

Luckily no one was killed, yet it is precisely fire defects of that sort, which we know are being discovered on countless buildings, that are not covered by the Government’s funding offer, because the Government are funding the removal of dangerous cladding. Ministers know—we have told them time and again—that lease- holders do not have the money to pay to fix those defects. If the defects are not fixed, those buildings will remain classed as unsafe. Presumably if they are a serious risk, they will continue to have waking watch and insurance bills, which will drain the accounts of innocent leaseholders.

My second point is: where is the plan to manage the most dangerous buildings first? At the moment, the order in which they are fixed depends on the speed with which managing agents and freeholders either pay for it themselves or apply to the building safety fund. We do not actually know the full extent of the problem; there is no comprehensive list. Offering 15 years instead of six is fine, but useless, because not a single leaseholder I have spoken to will be able to put the money up and take the risk of suing someone when they might lose after seven years and face another bill. They have enough to worry about at the moment.

I look forward to working with others on a cross-party basis to support amendments to the Bill, so that finally my leaseholders can look at the Bill when it is finished and say, “Right. We have a plan to deal with this”. Then all our constituents can get on with their lives, because that is what they want and what they deserve.

Building Safety Bill

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Of course, the time made available for debate in the other place is for the other place to determine, but I am sure that the business managers in both Houses have heard his points. I certainly want to ensure that there is adequate time to debate properly what are somewhat technical and detailed matters so that, working across party and with members of the Select Committee on Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, we can properly get the Bill right.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

Further to the answer given to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), will the Minister explain why the statutory protection that the Government are considering will apparently not extend to leaseholders not living in their flats? I know of at least one constituent of mine who was forced to leave his flat and rent it out as that was the only way he could raise the money to pay for the waking watches and insurance bills. Given that he is just as much a victim as those still living in their flats, why should protection against unreasonable costs not be extended to people such as him?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He will know, as the House does, that building safety and the challenges that leaseholders face are very complicated. The House will also know that we have committed to help those in shared ownership, for example, by making it easier for them to rent out their properties if that is a means of ensuring that they can pay their mortgages. I assure him that we will look closely and work collegiately and collectively across parties, and with other interested parties, to ensure that such issues are effectively and appropriately debated and addressed.

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[Matthew Pennycook]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I hope that, as Members consider the Bill and amendments, they have the chance to reflect and to remember why it is going through.

One does not pre-empt the Grenfell Tower inquiry’s conclusions in stating that the horror of that dreadful June night was the product not only of pernicious industry practice, but of state failure—the failure of successive Governments in presiding over a deficient regulatory regime, and the failure to act on repeated warnings about the potential lethal consequences of that fact. The Hackitt review detailed a deeply flawed system of regulation and argued for a radical overhaul of it. To the extent that the Bill delivers on the recommendations of Dame Judith’s report, we remain supportive of it and want to see a version of it on the statute book as soon as possible, given that four and a half years have elapsed since the Grenfell tragedy; however, the House knows we have serious concerns about what is missing from the Bill, and particularly its failure as drafted to provide robust legal protection for leaseholders facing ruinous costs—a point already made by several hon. Members on both sides of the House—for remediating historic cladding and non-cladding defects. In the absence of such protection, the Opposition are clear that the Bill will fail to meet what Dame Judith described as

“The ultimate test of this new framework”,

namely,

“the rebuilding of public confidence in the system.”

As we have heard, part 5 deals with remediation and redress, as well as assorted provisions relating to safety and standards. In Committee, my hon. Friends raised concerns about the limitations of clause 126, which seeks to ensure that landlords take “reasonable steps” to pursue other potential means of recovering the costs before passing them on to leaseholders. We of course believe it is right that landlords be forced to exhaust all means of funding remediation works other than passing on costs to leaseholders, whether that be seeking redress from the original developer in cases where the two are not the same, exploring a claim against a warranty, or applying for grant funding; however, we remain of the view that this provision gives leaseholders extremely limited protection in practice and we want that to be supplemented with additional provisions for maximum legal protection against the costs of remediating all historical defects—an objective that I know is widely shared across the House, as evidenced by the numerous amendments on the amendment paper today relating in one way or another to leaseholder protection. I will speak on that issue in more detail later in my remarks.

Clause 128 relates to limitation periods and makes changes to the operation of the Defective Premises Act. We supported the proposed expansion of the Act but remain of the view that there are considerable practical obstacles to leaseholders’ successfully securing redress via that mechanism—a point made by the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer)—not least given the prevalent use of special purpose vehicles precisely to avoid liabilities of this kind. We believe that the Government are in general overplaying the significance of litigation as a solution of the building safety crisis.

[Hilary Benn]

While of course we all welcome the extension, in practical terms, our constituents who have, staring at them from the table, bills for sums of money that they cannot afford, will not be in a position to start a legal action that may take several years, at enormous cost and risk and with no guarantee that it will reach a satisfactory conclusion, as my hon. Friend is so ably pointing out. It is not an answer to the problems that so many of our constituents are facing now.

[Matthew Pennycook]

My right hon. Friend, as so often, is absolutely right that it is an uphill struggle for leaseholders to get together to begin legal action of this kind. He also raises the highly pertinent point that there is nothing in the Bill that prevents freeholders today from passing on costs to those blameless victims of the crisis.

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[Sir Mike Penning]

The Father of the House is absolutely right. When we put to the insurers this idea that they should compensate those people whose lives and loved ones had been affected by the asbestos, did they like it? No, they hated it. They fought tooth and nail not to do it, but we did it, and we did the right thing. When we come to part 5, Mr Deputy Speaker, I hope to catch your eye again.

May I just touch on a point that many colleagues have raised today? If people, in fear of threatening letters from lawyers and bailiffs, paid the remedial costs on their lease in good faith, how can it be right for us in this House to say that they did the wrong thing, while the people who held off paying those costs did the right thing? That sticks in my throat. It cannot be right that we penalise people who feel that they did the right thing. I said this to the Secretary of State during his statement. I am not saying that he dismissed it; he probably just thinks it is very difficult. Yes, it is very difficult, but that is what this place is for—when things become difficult, we resolve the problem. We have an opportunity with the insurers.

As we have heard from Members across the House, these bills are dropping on people’s doorsteps now, and it is happening in my constituency. They are innocent people who have done nothing wrong other than wanting to get on the housing ladder. Today we have an opportunity to address this. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) that we do not need to move these amendments now. We will wait to see what happens when the Bill goes to the Lords, but by golly we will move them if it comes back.

[Hilary Benn]

The one thing that has united the House today has been support for the principle embodied in new clause 13. There is a huge burden of expectation now on the shoulders of the Minister and the Secretary of State because of the commitment that was given in the recent statement, and we are all anxious to see how the Government intend to fulfil it.

The right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning), whom it is a great pleasure to follow, asked earlier what happens if the funds are not forthcoming from those who are still in existence who were responsible. The answer is that there is a mechanism already in place, which is the levy that the Government previously announced. I have no objection to adding insurers to those who are levied, because it is a collective failure on the part of the industry. That is the point. Even if we put on one side debates about cladding, for every one of the buildings that have been discovered to have missing fire breaks, I can guarantee that the plans specified that the fire breaks should be installed, but they were not. As a result, we have a generation of shoddy, unsafe buildings and it is our constituents who are feeling the pain.

Secondly, once we have sorted out who is paying, we really have to find a way of getting the work done. I must say to the Minister that having observed, as we all have, the back-and-forth between managing agents, freeholders, developers and the building safety fund, we can see that that is not a very efficient way to solve the problem. That is why the buildings works agency approach that my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) spoke about earlier is such a good idea. It is a good idea for two reasons. First, we would have a body whose job was to find, fix, fund and then recoup through the levy that we have discussed, which would be quicker. Secondly, it would avoid the stand-offs that are taking place. I have seen one case where the expert advisers to the building owners have said that the zinc cladding on wooden battens is not safe, but the building safety fund has said that it is.

Another reason that the Government should adopt our proposal for a buildings works agency is that it would be the perfect vehicle to review the safety assessment of all of the buildings, which the Secretary of State spoke about last week, and in the end be the referee—the judge and the jury—that says what is safe, what works and what work needs to be done.

Building Safety Bill

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 20th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Andrew]

My door is always open, so if the hon. Gentleman wants to raise specific cases with me I would be more than happy to take them up and make sure that we get relevant answers for him.

Freeholders and landlords should not be commissioning costly remediation in buildings below 11 metres except in exceptional circumstances, which is where there is no more proportionate option available. They certainly should not be pointing to old EWS assessments to justify those costs. Given the small number of buildings involved, a blanket legislative intervention bringing hundreds of thousands more buildings into scope to deal with an issue affecting just a handful of buildings would be entirely disproportionate. The Government amendments therefore reinstate the definition of “relevant building” as one that is at least 11 metres, or five storeys in height, and contains at least two dwellings.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I am extremely grateful to the Minister for giving way. In respect of the point that he has just made, have the Government made an estimate of the number of residential buildings below 11 metres where there may be a case for extensive remediation works? I am just trying to follow the logic of the Government’s position. They say that there is not really a problem with buildings below 11 metres, which is why they do want to include them, but if there is not a problem, surely the Government would not be having to do much in respect of those buildings, because there are very few of them—so the Minister says.

[Stuart Andrew]

The issue is the proportionate measures that can be made in those buildings to ensure that they are safe. We want to make sure that we get this right, and we will be continuing to look at all of these. If the building safety regulator assesses that further work needs to be done, or that the Government need to look at what needs to be done, we will absolutely make sure that we do that, and I make that commitment to the House.

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[Sir Mike Penning]

What an awful long way we have come with this Bill. On the previous Bill, the Fire Safety Bill, we were told categorically that that was not the right vehicle for the sorts of remedial help people needed in all our constituencies and that this was the Bill. To be fair to the Minister and his civil servants, there has been huge movement—huge movement—compared with where we were when there was considerable unrest on the Conservative side of the House as well as around the House. One of the reasons this Bill has been changed so much is that there was general unrest across the Floor of the House as to what the Bill was actually saying and doing. Can I pay tribute to my colleagues on this side of the House? With a majority of this size, the Government could have ignored us, but they could not because there was too much unrest on this side of the House and the campaigning went on. I want to pay tribute to my colleagues on that point.

Is the Bill perfect? No, it is not going to be perfect. But do we need this Bill on the statute book in this Session? Yes, we do. That is why I will personally be supporting all the measures, and not voting for any of the amendments to send it back to the other place. I think a lot of the work can be done through secondary legislation. The Minister has indicated that. More work could be done, particularly in my opinion—I have said this on Report and Third Reading, and the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), has touched on it, as have all of my colleagues here—with the insurance companies. The Father of the House cited how all the professional bodies that were responsible for building these properties—all of them—were insured, yet the insurance companies have got off scot-free.

I know that those in the Department will say—I have said this before, but let me just repeat it—that it would be very difficult to get the insurance companies to retrospectively pay for this work. That is what they said about mesothelioma, where companies had gone bust and people were dying and suffering from that horrible asbestos disease, but the Government actually brought the legislation forward so that we took a levy from the insurance companies to cover those missing employers, and we could do it with the missing companies. We could do it if we wanted to really do it, and I hope—I am going to go on and on to everyone in this House—that this can be done. Look at the way the Department for Work and Pensions did that Bill. I know a lot about it because I took it through the House, so I am slightly biased. It can be done.

I want to pause for a second, and I declare an interest as a former firefighter. I have nothing but admiration for our firefighters and emergency services who went into Grenfell, when others were quite understandably coming in the other direction. They saw things they never dreamed they would see in their careers. We do not want to see that again, but fires do recur, and our emergency services do a fantastic job. I hope that they are getting the psychiatric support for what some of those sights will have created in their lives. That will affect their lives going forward, and I have asked this question before of several Ministers.

However, the key to this Bill today is that we get it on the statute book. We can do more work through secondary legislation. I think it is absolutely imperative for our constituents that we get it on the book today, so that the other House listens to us and we get this on the statute book before the Queen’s Speech.

[Hilary Benn]

Like many Members have already done, I begin by acknowledging the progress that the Government have made. I think the House would like to thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for Housing for effecting the transformation from the laissez-fair approach that the Government took previously to a really hands-on approach now—I also pay tribute to the civil servants for the work they have obviously done advising Ministers—and for asking themselves, “What are all the levers we can pull and the legislation we can enact to force people to live up to their responsibility?” I also thank Members on both sides of the House—it has been a team effort—but echo the point made by the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) that, given the Government majority, dissent on the Conservative Back Benches has been really important in getting us to this point. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Members for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith).

The reason above all others that we have got to this point, however, is the leaseholders’ refusal to give up. They looked at the situation they found themselves in through no fault of their own and basically said, “We’re not having it, because it’s not fair.” The House now acknowledges that and recognises it, so we should, above all, applaud their determination and persistence and that of all the cladding groups, including the Leeds Cladding Scandal group in my constituency, where, like many speakers today, I have constituents who are affected. It shows what can be done if people do not give up, which is a really important life lesson.

Having said that, our constituents have lived with years of uncertainty and it is not quite over yet—a point to which I shall return. Reference was made to a video of one of the fires. We all saw what happened at Grenfell, but there was also the fire at The Cube student accommodation in Bolton, and we saw how quickly it went up. I think the official report said, in effect, “The building did not perform according to expectations”. If that is not understatement, I do not know what is. The truth is that we are dealing with a load of buildings that were badly built and unsafe, and people got away with it for far too long. Let us try to put ourselves in the position of those who live in those buildings. Never mind the fear of a bill arriving which they have no hope of paying; there are the waking watch costs, the insurance, the uncertainty, the inability to get on with their life or to sell, and going to bed every night thinking, “Well, if there were a fire, would I get out if the building went up in 11 minutes?” It is a scandalous position that people have been put in through no fault of their own.

I have a few brief points to make. The first is that I stick to the principle that I and many other Members have advocated from the start, which is that leaseholders, because they are not responsible, should not have to pay anything. My hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), who spoke so clearly a little earlier, was absolutely right when he said that they should not have to pay. A cap is better than an uncapped bill, but why should they have to pay anything at all?

Secondly, we have discussed the position of buildings under 11 metres this afternoon, and I think the local case for including them is extremely strong. Replying to interventions, the Minister for Housing said that he is prepared to look at them on a case-by-case basis, but it seems to me that he could do that even if the Government chose to include them in the scheme.

Thirdly, I seek clarification on a point my hon. Friend raised about what happens if leaseholders have already paid up to the £10,000 cap but there are further costs. What if there is a continuing need for a waking watch? If the bill is not paid, the fire service may say to leaseholders, “You’re going to have to leave the building. We’re shutting it down because you don’t have a waking watch still in place.” What happens in those circumstances? It would be scandalous if leaseholders who have already paid the £10,000, or £15,000 in London, were to suffer that for want of someone to pay the bill.

Fourth is a point that has not been raised in the debate so far, but some constituents have contacted me about it. The Government have decided to limit the number of leaseholders who are not resident—buy-to-let landlords—who can benefit from the scheme. Morally, I do not see how anyone can argue that they are more responsible for the failings of others than residential leaseholders. Also, if a building has a lot of buy-to-let properties and the buy-to-let landlord leaseholders cannot come up with their share of the money to fix the building, that has an impact on the residential leaseholders living in the building, and the net result could be that the building does not get fixed and they continue to bear costs that they cannot bear. I say “cannot bear” because ultimately that is the reason the Government have had to move. It was a fantasy to think that leaseholders would come up with sums of money they simply do not have—ridiculous. It was never ever going to happen.

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[Sir Peter Bottomley]

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, which I should have included in the list of those to be thanked. I think that representatives of the partnership and the National Leaseholders Campaign have had time to get from the rally to the Gallery, so I repeat the thanks to them. I include with them Lord Greenhalgh, who has engaged with all the voluntary groups. I can think of no better aim for a campaigning charity than saving residential leaseholders from a situation from which they could not otherwise escape.

[Hilary Benn]

I am delighted to echo the Father of the House. The partnership has been brilliant in its analysis of what has and has not been done, what the problems are and what the solution ought to be, and it has also been persistent.

I know the Minister will appreciate my final point, because he has worked very hard on this. Our constituents have waited long enough, with their lives on hold, and the sooner we can made all these bits work, the better. We have to enable them to wake up in the morning and think, “D’you know what? I don’t have to worry about the nightmare I’ve been living in for the last five years and I can get on with the rest of my life.” We owe it to them to bring the day they dream of around as soon as possible.

[Bob Blackman]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in particular as chairman of the all-party group for fire safety and rescue. As I mentioned in an intervention, I have been involved in prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill from its beginning and in the various reports the Select Committee produced in the wake of the Grenfell fire. The eye-watering aspects of building safety across this country really only came to light with that terrible tragedy at Grenfell, nearly five years ago. We have all learned a lot.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing, who is new to the job and to the Bill, on the rapid progress that has been made since he was appointed. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who has dramatically changed the whole approach taken in this Bill. The Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), is no longer in his place, but I think he recognises the dramatic changes that have taken place during the passage of the Bill through the other place.

When preparing for today’s debate, I thought of one or two ironies. The first was that the Second Reading debate was so shortened that we all got three minutes to speak, but today, although we have a reasonable amount of time to debate the issues, the business managers are encouraging us not to go on too long. That seems suitably ironic.

There are several issues to address. I thank the Minister for making it clear that this will not be the end of the process. Secondary legislation will come along on the back of the Bill, and that will be the detail that really matters to the people we represent—the leaseholders, who are the one party in all of this who are completely innocent and should not be penalised in any way, shape or form. It is a contradiction that we are asking leaseholders to make a contribution to fire safety costs and cladding remediation for which they have no responsibility.

I welcome the cap, but I do not see why that cap has been set at a particular figure. Many of the people we are talking about are not wealthy. They may have bought their leases a long time ago, and they are often living on fixed incomes and have no disposable income to put towards the costs, because they are paying the other bills for their properties. They are not able to stump up huge amounts of cash. As has been said, many of those people have been presented with eye-watering bills, such as £250,000 or more, to fix fire safety issues that are definitely not their fault, are clearly the responsibility of the developer in the first place and should have been put right since.

Also in preparation for this debate, I had a look at the Select Committee’s first report on prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill—the Chairman of the Committee may recall it. If the Government had accepted our proposed changes, we probably would not be here today discussing Lords amendments. Almost all the proposals in our report are now in the revised Bill. That is a significant change and demonstrates that when we are dealing with issues of such a technical nature, prelegislative scrutiny is the right way forward. I commend its use to Ministers in the future.

I have a couple of points to make about where we are now, to put them on the record so that we can get through this phase in the secondary legislation. I would like clarity from the Minister on the position of housing associations when pursuing developers who have developed social housing that is clearly not fit for purpose.