Leaseholders and Cladding

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on securing this important debate and on his comprehensive overview of the problem.

In my constituency alone, more than 20 privately owned buildings across seven developments were found to have ACM—aluminium composite material—cladding. Far from meeting the Government’s target of remediating them all by June this year, work has been completed on only one, Babbage Point. Although work is well under way at two other sites, New Capital Quay and Greenwich Square, it has not even begun on the remaining four, not least because of the difficulties with the application process for the private sector remediation fund.

When it comes to cost, in two cases—City Peninsula and the Greenwich Millennium Village—the developers have done the right thing and committed to covering the full cost of the remedial works and the required interim fire safety measures. In the case of New Capital Quay, leaseholders are being fully protected from those costs because the National House Building Council accepted a claim to pay the cost in full following an investigation.

Those in other blocks, however, have not been so fortunate. At Babbage Point, the original contractor and building owner, Durkan, has strenuously avoided committing to covering the cost of the completed remedial works should its application to the fund be unsuccessful. It has passed on the full cost of 23 months of waking watch, which has been in place for so long only because it dragged its feet.

As we have heard, the cladding crisis now extends far beyond ACM cladding. My local authority has identified at least 24 buildings, and counting, with a type of HPL—high pressure laminate—cladding where leaseholders are likely to find themselves in protracted legal disputes between building owners and the original contractor. There are an unknown number of buildings that have serious issues with defective fire stopping and compartmentalisation, as in the Barratt Homes-constructed Royal Artillery Quays development. Again, leaseholders there are at risk of being hit with significant costs.

There are also an untold number of leaseholders in scores of local developments unable to sell their homes or remortgage because of the unintended impact of the guidance from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Minister should know that, although the EWS1 process has worked in some cases, in many others it has not. I have cases where large mortgage providers have rejected the form outright and others where forms cannot even be issued because of a lack of indemnity insurance coverage.

It is clear that the steps taken to date have not even begun to address that set of interconnected problems. It is perhaps understandable that Ministers and their officials might be overwhelmed by a crisis that continues to grow in scale and complexity, and baulk at the potentially colossal drain on the public purse, but this crisis is not going to disappear. As we have said time and again, the Government have a responsibility to act decisively to fix it. Ministers must start by going beyond moral suasion and compel developers to do the right thing. In cases where that does not work, they must step in to expand the scope and amount of funding to remediate where necessary, and oversee a nationally co-ordinated response, so that nearly three years after Grenfell, we can finally get a grip on the issue and protect leaseholders, as they were promised in the wake of that tragedy.