Fire Safety Bill

Lord Newby Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Lords Chamber

I know that there is a lot to tackle, but I want to say to the Government, “You aren’t alone”. This is not a blame game or a party-political issue; it is a case maybe of unintended market failure, and it requires the sort of collective state-backed intervention that we have seen from this Government with issues such as furlough. It needs a bailout or safety net, and the Government are more than capable of doing that. The Government have allies here to come up with creative solutions; here and in the other place, they have heard some fantastic ideas and ways of solving this. If you talk to the rank and file leaseholder groups, they are full of innovative policies that can solve this. But to access those ideas, the Government have to talk to people and to listen. I hope that the Minister listens today and accepts this amendment. I know that the Government mean well, but they are not doing well.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interest as a leaseholder in a block of flats that faces major fire and remediation works.

When we last debated this Bill, I teased the Minister by suggesting that he was behaving like Sir Humphrey in the TV series “Yes, Minister”, by coming up with a series of bureaucratic reasons for not taking any action. After the debate, I was a bit worried that I might have been a bit unfair to him, so I reread his speech just to make sure. I fear that, if anything, I had underestimated the extent to which the Government were hiding behind stock bureaucratic arguments for not doing what they know is required to clear up the scandal. He has repeated some of those arguments today.

Last time around, the Minister, as he has today, accepted that something more was needed. Last time he said that it was

“unacceptable for leaseholders to have to worry about the cost of fixing historic building safety defects.”

He also acknowledged that the Government believed that

“building owners and industry should make buildings safe without passing on costs to leaseholders.”

So far, so good. But when it came to actually dealing with removing that worry, in his response to the amendments from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and my noble friend Lady Pinnock, at great length and somewhat repetitiously he explained why the Government had no plans to fix the problem.

The reasons were as follows. First, the Minister said,

“it would be impractical and confusing to include remediation measures in the Bill.”

Well, it would not be confusing if they were clear. Secondly, he said that it was too soon to include comprehensive measures in the Bill. He said that it was

“important to ensure that the practical implications of any legislation are properly worked through, rather than being rushed”.

Well, we would not want the Government to rush to solve the problems of people who are being forced into bankruptcy today, would we?

Thirdly, the Minister said that the amendment was “too narrow” and did not

“take into account remedial works that arise outside the fire risk assessment process”.

He said that the amendment would go beyond “focusing on service charges”.

Fourthly, the Minister said that the amendment was not detailed enough

“and would require extensive drafting of primary legislation”.

It is not that this Government or any other Government fail to know how to draft extensively—look at the length of the statute book. Fifthly, he said that it would delay the implementation of the Bill, which would be highly regrettable. The Minister has spoken at great length about the costs of delay today but, as my noble friend Lady Pinnock pointed out, it would be highly regrettable to the Government but not to people who are going bankrupt, because this Bill does nothing for them.

Sixthly, the Minister said that loose drafting would lead to litigation. How terrible. Seventhly, he said

“the amendments do not reflect the complexity involved in apportioning liability for remedial defects.”—[Official Report, 17/3/21; cols. 323-26.]

Perhaps the amendments did not but, in my experience, owners of blocks of flats are pretty good when it comes to apportioning liability for costs, because we somehow seem to get that job done every year when we get our service charges. Finally, he said that it would be “self-defeating” as landlords could decide simply to walk away.

Sir Humphrey would have been very proud of the Minister’s performance, but leaseholders listening to his arguments would have realised that they amounted to one depressing fact: the Government were not prepared to fashion a legislative response which dealt with their legitimate concerns. In effect, they were simply saying that they would like to resolve the matter but it was too difficult. There was no willingness on the part of the Minister to commission civil servants to do the work necessary to find a workable solution. Some three and three-quarter years after Grenfell, the Government are completely failing to relieve leaseholders of their concerns and failing to find a way in which to require building owners and contractors to make buildings safe without passing on the costs.

The amendments before us today are a further attempt to move the Government towards meeting what they say are their desired outcomes. They have shown no will to do so of their own volition and it therefore falls to your Lordships’ House to insist again that they do the right and decent thing.