Residential Leaseholders and Interim Fire Safety Costs Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities
Kate Osamor
Main Page: Kate Osamor (Independent - Edmonton)Department Debates - View all Kate Osamor's debates with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities
Residential Leaseholders and Interim Fire Safety Costs
Kate Osamor Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Kate Osamor (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op) [V]
I am always pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, and I look forward to doing so again today.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing this important debate. My constituents in Edmonton who live in Prowse Court, Golden Lion Court and Brickland Court watched the Chancellor’s speech last week and were left feeling very disappointed. There was not one mention of cladding or fire safety in the Budget.
Leaseholders such as my constituent Jason and his wife moved into their flat in 2007 with their daughter. In January this year, a fire safety assessment concluded that the cladding on Jason’s building needed to be removed. Jason and his fellow tenants have no idea about how long they are going to be waiting for the removal of the cladding or who will meet the costs of that work. All they are certain of is that the interim safety measures must be put in place, including increased fire risk assessments and additional heat detectors. The freeholder of Jason’s building has already begun passing down the costs of these measures, in the form of increased insurance and service charge costs. That has left Jason in debt, unable to move and stuck in an unsafe building that is costing him more and more money. Jason goes to sleep every night knowing that his family is not safe and that there is no end in sight to his worry. To put it simply, Jason’s family are trapped.
I have raised identical cases with the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government to ask that the Government fully fund interim fire safety costs. In their reply, the Government seemed focused only on ensuring that remediation work is completed first. It is incredibly unjust to penalise those who did not cause this cladding scandal to have to wait for remediation work to be completed first, while allowing the property developer to walk away, bearing no interim costs and seemingly no long-term costs.
I hope that the Minister will carefully consider what has been said in this debate and will ensure that in the future the Government will not only meet their obligations and fully fund interim fire safety costs, so that not one leaseholder is left out of pocket, but will fully acknowledge that the cladding scandal needs to be treated as the national emergency that it truly is.