Building Safety Update

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Statement, which we welcome. I am sure that all noble Lords would want every possible step taken to support leaseholders and to speed up the remediation of unsafe buildings.

We have worked constructively with the Government throughout the drafting of legislation to improve building and fire safety and will continue to do so. The issue now, seven months after the original deadline of 10 August 2022, is for all major housebuilders to sign up to the building safety contract and bring an end to the limbo in which too many leaseholders still find themselves trapped. The fact that 39 developers have now signed a remediation contract is a significant step forward.

Can the Minister assure us that the terms of the contract will be properly enforced and that leaseholders affected by this will be kept informed and updated on progress? Remediation to date has been far too slow. Considering that the contract stipulates that repairs and remediation must be carried out only as soon as is practically possible, can the Minister explain what action is to be taken to ensure that leaseholders do not face any additional delays? I ask this particularly in the light of reports that have suggested that some signatories to the contract are planning to carry out new fire risk assessments to determine what defects will now need to be fixed and whether any will not. Surely leaseholders need clear assurances that all defects will be sorted. What are the implications for leaseholders in buildings out of the scope of the contract? Do the Government have a solution for them?

As the Statement rightly says, those who are responsible must pay. It is extremely disappointing that some builders have refused to sign. I commend the Statement for naming and shaming them. I am aware that the Secretary of State has been pretty robust in his language in trying to bring builders who have not yet signed the contracts into line with those that have. I hope that his approach is successful. If not, the Secretary of State has clearly stated that such developers will be prohibited from further development. It would be helpful to understand how such a ban would be enforced.

The Secretary of State referred to the responsible actors scheme in the Statement and in his response to questions asked in the other place. We need clarity on when this will come into force.

We also have a particular concern regarding the number of buildings covered by the contract. As the Statement says, the commitment is to fix at least 1,500 buildings. Comparing that with the department’s estimate of between 6,220 and 8,890 unsafe buildings in the 11 to 18-metre height range, it is tackling only a small part of the challenge faced. How does the Minister envisage this being resolved, and what are the timescales? How many of the outstanding buildings above the 1,500 are the responsibility of those developers who have refused to sign the contracts?

Leaseholders living in buildings with defects that do not come within the scope of the contract are also going to fall by the wayside unless the Government have a plan for these buildings to be remediated as well. Can the Minister provide any assurances on this? During the passage of the Building Safety Act, we said that all leaseholders in unsafe buildings below 11 metres must be protected from costs. The Government said that they would provide support on a case-by-case basis. Does the Minister have a progress update on this? Leasehold is clearly not a good system. I am sure that the Minister agrees with me that we really need to bring it to an end. Is there any action coming from Government any time soon?

To reiterate, we welcome the Statement and encourage the Secretary of State to be as robust as the Statement lays out in dealing with those who are not looking to do the right thing and live up to their responsibilities.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement that she has repeated. On this side, we welcome it and the determination shown by the Secretary of State to deliver the outcomes that he has reported.

We welcome the decision of the leading housebuilders to put their shoulders to the wheel, to make things happen at long last and to relieve the anxiety and stress of many innocent householders. Surely the Home Builders Federation—an organisation that I do not always see eye to eye with—and Stewart Baseley should get a mention for facilitating the process in a very difficult climate.

There are some big buts, however. The firms named in the Statement are failing to deliver their fair share of the massive costs of remediation. That is disgraceful. We endorse the action that the Secretary of State proposes to take to limit their capacity to cause more damage and heartbreak in the future. I appeal to those firms, even if they do not recognise their duty to society or to the families that they have traumatised, to at least now recognise their duty to their shareholders, and to get their pens out and get some signatures on paper PDQ. I note that, in the Statement, the Secretary of State is very much of the same opinion. I assure him that there will be a unanimous view across this House, urging him to get on and achieve that.

We should also recognise that, even after five years, this horrific saga is not over. This settlement is welcome but only partial. There remain, and will still remain, many families traumatised by the terrible failures right across the country which were exposed by the Grenfell inquiry.

Those terrible failures are now for the building industry to rectify. The industry has built homes that should have been places of security but were in fact death traps and that should have been places of warmth and comfort but instead have been left uninhabitable and unsaleable.

When can we expect to see the defaulting contractors finally accepting their liability and playing their proper part in helping desperate families to rebuild their lives? Will the Minister give noble Lords a timescale for further action and some hope for those families left stranded now for five years and growing?

The Statement says this programme will fund repairs for 1,100 buildings. How many homes are in those buildings? What assessment has the Secretary of State made of the gap between this programme of restitution and the enormous further cost of repairs still outstanding on building after building across the country which are not covered by it? How do the Government plan to close that gap? How many homes will remain unrepaired after this scheme comes to its end?

Finally, I will ask the question I know my noble friend Lady Pinnock would ask if she had been able to be here. Do Ministers still stick to their promise that not a penny of the costs of restitution will fall on the families who live in these homes—the completely innocent victims of this tragic episode? If Ministers do still stick by their word, when will we be told how that promise is to be delivered?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, today’s announcement is an important day for thousands of leaseholders living in buildings afflicted by fire safety defects. The Secretary of State announced that 49 developers had pledged to take responsibility for remediating unsafe buildings that they developed over the past 30 years. The pledge committed them to fix life-critical fire safety defects and reimburse the Government for grant funding paid out on their behalf to fix their buildings.

I had a lot more to say, but because of the late time I will just answer noble Lords’ questions—I am sure they will be happy with that. The most important thing is the impact that this will have on leaseholders and residents. They are the most important people in this. Once signed, the contract requires developers to take responsibility for addressing all life-critical fire defects arising from the design and construction of buildings over 11 metres in England and that they have developed or refurbished over 30 years. The developers will be expected to keep residents in those buildings informed of progress towards meeting this commitment. Monitoring and auditing provisions will ensure that the Government will hold developers to account to make sure that they are completing the work properly and at pace.

Talking about pace, we expect the developers to remediate their buildings at pace at all times. Some developers have already started assessing and remediating buildings, which is very welcome. Under the contract that we published this week, developers will be required to set out their plans to identify, prioritise, assess and fix defects as soon as reasonably practical. We will hold those developers to account to make sure that they are completing the work properly and at pace. Developers will be required to report to the department quarterly on progress against their remediation plans and to keep those leaseholders informed of that progress as well. That is an important part of the system.

Another part of the system that is important is the recovery strategy unit that we are setting up. We are further cracking down on those who fail to do the right thing and pay to fix building safety issues through a new recovery strategy unit. The unit is dedicated to pursuing firms that have failed to do the right thing and pay to fix the problems that they have created. It will take forward the most serious cases, holding the worst actors to account and delivering for leaseholders where other routes are not available. There will be some that fall outside all the issues that we have talked about, and the unit will be there to follow those cases. The unit contains an intelligence function to help to identify such cases, which is important. I am happy to say it is being run by Colonel Cundy—who sounds the right person to do it—and it is very happy if any Peers would like to be briefed on the work it is doing, because that is an important piece of work.

Noble Lords have asked about those not signing the contract. It is quite clear that if you fail to sign the contract and comply with its terms then you will not be able to operate freely in the housing market in this country, and more details of that will come out. The Government are committed to laying regulations under Sections 126 to 129 of the Building Safety Act 2022 to implement a responsible actors scheme for residential developers, supported by a system of building control and planning prohibitions that will impose serious consequences on eligible developers that do not sign up.

Both noble Lords said that they would support a robust response to this issue. I do not think I need to assure them that the Secretary of State can be very robust when he wants to be, and he will be very robust over this. He is passionate about the fact that those people should be doing the right thing for the people who live in the houses that they built which were not up to standard. I assure noble Lords that everything will be done, and more information will come out in the next weeks that will add to this Statement today. This is just the first Statement that needed to be made, because the Secretary of State promised he would let people know as soon as the six weeks were up.

I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, would have wanted me to mention buildings under 11 metres in particular. It is generally accepted that life safety risk is proportional to the height of the building, as the noble Baroness knows, but a fire risk assessment and a fire risk appraisal of external walls conducted in accordance with the PAS 9880 principle will often find that lower-cost mitigations are more appropriate in low-rise buildings. We stress again that the responsibility for the costs of fixing historic building safety defects should rest with the building owner. They should not pass those costs on to leaseholders but should seek to recover them from those who were responsible for building unsafe homes in the first place. It is important that any leaseholders in this situation look for support and information on how to ensure that those responsible for their unsafe houses get in touch. I know that many people in this situation have written to the department and are being supported by it. That is an issue, and I thank the noble Baroness, as always, for bringing it up.

I hope I have answered most of the questions. If not, I ask noble Lords to let me know. I will go through Hansard in the morning, but I think the major issues that noble Lords have brought up have been answered.