Building Safety Bill

Kim Johnson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab) [V]]

I appreciate the opportunity to speak in this important debate.

Time and again, we have heard Members across the House relay the nightmares that hundreds of thousands of our constituents are facing—trapped in a building safety crisis that was not of their making, forced to pay astronomical bills, and suffering significant mental health problems and the ever-present fear of living in an unsafe home. In Liverpool, 10% of buildings are still covered in dangerous cladding and there are 30,000 leaseholders in Liverpool, Riverside who are facing bills for things other than cladding to make their homes safe. On top of that, they are facing increasing insurance premiums of up to 500% and are being forced to foot the bill for a situation that they did not create. This will have a particularly serious impact on the social housing sector, with councils and local authorities forced to divert scarce resources in order to address fire safety failures.

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service has lost more than a third of its funding in the past decade and the same proportion of its firefighters. A decade of Tory austerity and deregulation has created this building safety crisis. Let us call it what it is: a criminal dereliction of responsibility by those in power, who are more concerned with putting money in the pockets of their developer donors than with protecting the people they serve—putting profit before people.

One pensioner living in my constituency told me that he has been sent a bill of nearly £20,000 and has no savings and no way of paying. Two doctors who have worked tirelessly to protect and care for our community throughout the pandemic tell me that the crisis has trapped them in a flat that they cannot sell, unable to start the life that they had planned elsewhere and fearing being faced with a mountain of further debt and/or bankruptcy.

I have asked this before, and I will continue to ask until justice is served and the safety and future of my constituents and the people living in this crisis across the country is secured: can the Minister look me in the eye and tell me how he sleeps at night, knowing that his Government’s deregulation programme has left hundreds of thousands at risk in their homes? I ask him what it will take for this Government to act to fix historic failures, and alleviate the unbearable financial pressures caused by their deregulation and the greed of developers.

It is the Government’s responsibility to assess and identify the buildings that are unsafe, and to make the necessary changes with the utmost urgency. This Bill is not only a missed opportunity, but an absolute betrayal of every single one of the residents who are now at risk in their own homes. The statement issued by the Secretary of State this afternoon does nothing to allay any of the fears of leaseholders; it is entirely inadequate, and it lets those leaseholders down.