Building Safety

Kelly Tolhurst Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I will look at the specific case of the building of just under 11 metres that the hon. Lady mentions. More broadly, I would absolutely love to be able to provide people with reassurance that from tomorrow the cloud will be lifted, but as a number of Members have pointed out, there is a complex set of interrelated problems. I believe that we have a means of dealing with them all, and I also appreciate that we need to move at speed. I will come back to the House before Easter with an update on the measures we have taken. I will work with colleagues across the House in order to ensure that we have the right statutory underpinning. Again, I want to confirm that we require everything to go right in order to be able to help everyone who is currently facing difficulties. We will do everything we can. I hope the hon. Lady will appreciate that I would not want at this stage to provide an absolute guarantee for people whose specific circumstances I am not yet familiar with.

[Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement, which I very much welcome, and I am incredibly grateful to his Ministers for the time they have spent listening to my concerns and those of residents of The Wharf in my constituency. They have suffered from a lack of transparency and clarity on the work required and whether it needs to be done. As we speak, the management company, Y&Y, is applying to the tier 1 tribunal for costs. What assurances can my right hon. Friend give my constituents, who are very concerned about any outcome that would leave them with bills of between £10,000 and £20,000, payable within the next six months?

[Michael Gove]

Absolutely the intention of today’s statement is to try to address the concerns raised so powerfully by my hon. Friend on behalf of constituents who face those imminent bills. I am really grateful to her for drawing attention to the immensely hard work being done by Ministers in the Department. The Minister for Housing, Lord Greenhalgh and the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes), who has responsibility for rough sleeping, have all been working incredibly hard to engage with colleagues across the House and with others in order to try to move this forward. It has been a collective effort and I am very grateful to my colleagues for that.