Building Safety Bill

Debate between Hilary Benn and Matthew Pennycook

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[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.