Residential Leaseholders and Interim Fire Safety Costs

Justin Madders Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing the debate and on the eloquent way in which she introduced the subject. She went through the eye-watering costs, and she powerfully made the point that the costs are there week in, week out, until the defects are removed.

I state for the record my co-chairing of the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold and commonhold reform, and I am a patron of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, which brings its expertise to the APPG and has helped to secure many of our experts, who between them have put together what I consider to be credible and fair proposals to try to deal with many of the issues that have been raised today. As things stand, what the Government are proposing is not credible or fair, and it will not deal with the plethora of building safety issues that leaseholders have been lumbered with.

When the Secretary of State made his announcement in the main Chamber, we were told that the Government’s plans would give certainty to leaseholders, but anyone who heard the Minister’s evidence before the Select Committee on Monday will have been left with the impression that certainty is one of the things that is clearly missing at the moment. We still do not know who will be the legally responsible body for the remediation, and it looks like there is still a huge risk that leaseholders will find themselves saddled with a debt that they have not consented to and should not be responsible for.

The reality is that we have moved from statements that Ministers have made in the past about the strong expectation on freeholders to put matters right, to the shameful position that we are now in, which is frankly a bit of muddle. However, it is looking more and more likely that freeholders will have their assets invested in and brought up to scratch at no cost and at no risk to themselves. I cannot put any other interpretation on Lord Greenhalgh’s statement on Monday to the Select Committee. He said:

“We are not asking any of the building owners to make any contribution to the remediation costs.”

I cannot take that to mean anything other than innocent leaseholders will end up picking up the bill. If that is where we end up, it surely means that the thousands of pounds that leaseholders are paying out to help keep themselves safe will be theirs alone to meet.

Despite two updates to the waking watch guidance and recommendations that interim alarms are installed, we have sites that have needed both a waking watch and interim alarms for years, costing the leaseholders a huge amount of money, which it seems they will never get back. After 44 months, there has been no impact assessment of the costs and benefits of such interim measures. Despite the Government producing data that they say would allow leaseholders to challenge the reasonableness of the costs, there is no evidence that leaseholders have been able to do so in the tribunal.

It is also worth pointing out that, in addition to the extra costs, leaseholders have found that their insurance premiums—even in buildings with no history of fire safety issues—have skyrocketed by an average of 400%, which is financially devastating. The money has to be paid by leaseholders every week, and they currently have no prospect of recovering it. These are people who, through no fault of their own, have been left in an impossible position. They deserve our support, and they deserve a solution. At the moment, they are having to pay three times: once for the property, once for the defects that we are talking about at the moment, and also for interim measures in the meantime. When the Minister responds, I want him to tell us where else people pay three times to get the same thing.