Fire Safety Bill

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

At end insert “but do propose Amendment 4J in lieu—

4J: After Clause 2, insert the following new Clause—
“Prohibition on passing remediation costs on to leaseholders and tenants pending operation of a statutory scheme
(1) The owner of a building may not pass the costs of any remedial work attributable to the provisions of this Act on to leaseholders or tenants of that building.
(2) This section has effect only until a statutory scheme is in operation which ensures that leaseholders and tenants of dwellings do not have to pay for remedial work attributable to the provisions of this Act.
(3) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply to a leaseholder who is also the owner or part owner of the freehold of the building.””

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I give notice of my intention to seek the opinion of the House when the time comes, and declare my interest as a vice-president of the LGA.

When there is a crisis, we look to Her Majesty’s Government for radical and rapid action. Ministers are good at calling stakeholders to gather around the table. Just yesterday, in the other place, Minister Oliver Dowden said he was appalled by a situation. He promised Members that they should

“be no doubt that if they cannot act, we will … We will put everything on the table to prevent this from happening … Put simply, we will review everything the Government do to support”

this. He went on:

“We will do whatever it takes.”—[Official Report, Commons, 19/4/21; col. 676.]


Indeed, this situation is so important that it is said that the Prime Minister has decided to rearrange his busy diary and intervene personally to hold a round table to resolve the problem. The trouble is that the radical action being talked about concerns the European Super League, not the hundreds of thousands of people who, at this very moment, are facing desperate dilemmas.

I deeply regret having to come back; I know that it is a nuisance and that people are fed up. But this is the first time in my ministry that I have been stopped on the street in St Albans three times in a week by people saying, “Thank you for what you are doing”. So, I come back hugely reluctantly. I want to see this Bill get on to the statute book, I really do. I hope that we will do all we can, if necessary sitting late, to make sure that when it comes back, if it has to do so, it will get on to the statute book; I do not want to hold it up. This is a good Bill, which seeks to implement a recommendation from the Grenfell inquiry. It is of the utmost importance that our dwellings are safe and people can sleep at night.

However, the consequences of this legislation have a huge impact on leaseholders. The Government, whom I thank very much, have committed £5 billion. I accept that this is unprecedented and a wonderful thing; I want to affirm what the Government have done. However, as things stand, the promised grant and loan schemes are not even operational. I am grateful to the Minister—we have had two meetings in the last week—and I know that they are working as hard and as fast as they can, but the schemes are not operational, there are no dates and no assurance has been given on, for example, whether it will be possible to apply retrospectively.

The moment that the Bill passes, those who would ordinarily be excluded from paying for replacement cladding under the government scheme could, within months, be handed very large bills. Likewise, these bills will be handed to those who should have replacement cladding costs capped at £50 per month under the government scheme. The result, I fear, will be bankruptcies, enormous mental health strains, and possibly worse. Part—though only part—of the problem is that there have been no assurances to prevent the remediation costs being passed on to leaseholders until the Government’s own scheme is operational. This shows the complexity of what we are facing. I do not pretend that this is easy, or that my proposal will solve everything but, for example, other historical fire safety defects not covered by this scheme still have the potential to bankrupt leaseholders. I remind the House again of the additional financial issues crippling leaseholders: interim fire safety costs and high insurance policy premiums. Just today I received an email about a building where the insurance last year was £11,963 but, in one year, has gone up to £242,400 because the insurers believe that the building is not safe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I am very new to this place but, as I have tried to highlight, I do not believe that the solution in large part involves statute. The noble Lord is asking for a further commitment that is really about putting more government money up front to pay for the significant costs faced by leaseholders. It would not be helpful to amend the amendment by removing that word, because I do not think we could accept the amendment in any way whatever. We have set out that we want to focus on the remediation of unsafe cladding because cladding on the outside of buildings is the major fire accelerant. That is what we will focus on and we are putting forward over £5 billion to do precisely that—a significant, globally unprecedented amount. I do not think amending that one word moves us any further forward.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I am hugely grateful for the extraordinary range of speeches made today. I acknowledge what Her Majesty’s Government have done; I take the point that this is unprecedented and a major contribution towards trying to sort out this very difficult problem. The Minister knows that I have said on many occasions that I am terribly naive about all this. I was hoping Her Majesty’s Government would help solve it because I am just an amateur paddling around in the shallows. I am hugely grateful to people such as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, who is a real expert in this area.

I still believe that my amendment is a practical, helpful and just way forward which is in the spirit of what Her Majesty’s Government want and have committed to. I was hugely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for quoting the Minister in the other place. I am still sufficiently positive—noble Lords will probably say naive—about our political system to believe that this amendment could well commend itself to people in the other place when they see that it is within the spirit of what the Government want to do. I hope that it will be taken back to the other place and considered there, or that the Government will wish to introduce something like it, to help us move this forward. I would like us to get this on to the statute book as quickly as possible but, in the light of what I have heard, with reluctance I feel I have no other choice but to divide the House on this Motion.