Building Safety Bill

Matt Rodda Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

I welcome you to your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate and to follow colleagues from across the House.

The Bill is a step forward. However, I have very serious reservations. I will build on the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) and other colleagues across the House, including the Father of the House, the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley).

First, it is important to focus on the single most important weakness of the Bill, which is that many thousands of existing leaseholders will not benefit from it. They are going to be penalised with exorbitant costs —far above what they could possibly pay off—due to the way in which the Government are tackling this deep crisis and the insufficient funding to make good the very serious problems with leasehold properties around the country that have become more and more apparent in the four years following the Grenfell disaster. It is simply deeply unfair that people who bought properties in good faith, in Reading and across the country, should have to pay enormous sums of money to make those properties fire-safe and to deal not only with cladding, but with a range of other issues that I will address in my short speech.

There is also the serious issue of properties under 18 metres. In my area, many blocks are under 18 metres high. I am sure that colleagues across the House will have the same issues in their constituencies. The residents in those blocks deserve to be treated much better by the Government and the industry. Let me give colleagues a small example by describing a desirable, beautifully designed block with an attractive foyer that is central to the town and next to one of the rivers in Reading—a great place to live in many ways, but in the case of a fire potentially a dangerous rabbit warren of small corridors, from which it would be difficult to escape. The block contains a huge amount of fire safety problems and residents may have to pay £150,000 each to get them put right. The problems include: issues with fire doors and with the doors into flats; a lack of internal partitions, meaning that a fire could rip through a block that contains more than 100 separate flats; and a whole range of other difficult problems. Those issues are not addressed by the Bill and they need to be.

I wish briefly to mention the confusion about the EWS1 form and lack of information until the very last minute. There are serious issues with getting the forms and it is right that the Government look into them, but it surely cannot be right to present that information as a written statement on the eve of the debate. I ask the Secretary of State and his colleagues to reflect on that, because it caused a great deal of confusion and concern today and was perplexing.

Let me say equally briefly that there is already a model for how to resolve this issue, and that is the Australian model, as mentioned by colleagues from all parties. Ultimately, it is a question of leadership from the Secretary of State.