Building Safety

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I welcome my hon. Friend to the House and will no doubt work closely with her on these issues in the years ahead. I think it was right to take the decision that height alone was too crude a measure and that we needed to consider this carefully and involve a whole range of factors, including the likely use of the building and the likely nature of the residents of that building, whether it be a hotel, student accommodation or something else. That is exactly what we are doing, and we will use the best possible expert advice to draw up a new regime.

We saw in the Bolton fire, where the building was 17.6 or 17.8 metres high—just a matter of centimetres away from the 18-metre threshold—that height alone was simply too crude a measure and that building safety needs to be proportionate to the building. Height is likely to continue to be a very material factor—perhaps the most material one—but a range of other factors now need to be considered.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

The issue of retrofitting sprinklers in social housing blocks seems to be less determined by risk assessment than by cost and the legal right to access those properties. We have seen Wandsworth Council lose its case in the first-tier tribunal. My council has suspended work on retrofitting because of a lack of clarity about rights of access. Can the Secretary of State tell us exactly what the policy is and whether he accepts that, in almost all social blocks, there are multi-tenures—there are private leaseholders—and there needs to be clarity about how retrofitting will be funded and what rights of access councils will have to private leasehold properties?

[Robert Jenrick]

I will take up the issue the hon. Lady raises with respect to rights of access so that I can give her the best possible advice there. With respect to cost, the position today, as it has been throughout, is that this remediation work is the responsibility of building owners. As I have already said now on a number of occasions, I am aware of the fact that clearly there are some leaseholders who will struggle to raise the necessary funds. We have precedents for this: we see, for example, homeowners who purchased their property through right to buy and who may then be presented with significant costs, perhaps by a council or a housing association. Measures have been put in place to help them through that process so that that is not a bar to doing the essential works that now need to be done. That is exactly the conversation I will now be having with the Treasury to see whether we can put in place some sensible proposals to help people in that situation.