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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.