Building Safety Bill

Mike Penning Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I am sure that it is in order, and that is the question that the hon. Lady is asking me as the Chair. It is in order for the Minister to lay a written statement when he decides it is the right time to do that, but if there is a question of information that the hon. Lady is suggesting ought to be before the House in order to inform Members about the Bill that is before us now, I cannot make a judgment because I do not know what is in that statement. However, if the Secretary of State would care to answer that point, it might help the House.

[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. All the documents that are relevant to this debate on Second Reading of the Bill are on the Table except the written ministerial statement that the Secretary of State has just referred to. For some of us who have been in the Chamber for some hours now, I am sorry, Secretary of State, but that is not acceptable.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

The right hon. Gentleman is not speaking to the Secretary of State; he is speaking to me. I cannot see what is on the Table, and the Clerk is not telling me that the right hon. Gentleman is wrong. Let us just clear up this matter.

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[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

Welcome to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, and perhaps I should declare an interest as a former firefighter and a former fire Minister.

I took the promise of the Housing Minister, who is a good friend and an honourable Gentleman, that the previous Bill, the fire Bill, was not the vehicle in which to bring forward measures to protect the leaseholders in my constituency. I tabled or signed some amendments as probing amendments, but then withdrew them, and I took a lot of flak from leaseholders in my constituency, who said I had let them down. I am not going to let them down with this Bill, because it was supposed to address their concerns.

Thousands of my leaseholders are trapped within their properties. Thousands of them have already paid unbelievably large amounts of money which they cannot afford, and even if they could afford to pay it is morally wrong in the first place.

[Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)]

While I understand that the ministerial statement was late in being shown to us, does my right hon. Friend agree that there is much in it to be optimistic about?

[Sir Mike Penning]

I agree. There is a lot in it that is good. I did not have a chance to read it while the Secretary of State was still making his speech because I am not that brilliant at doing such things, but I have read it since the Secretary of State sat down and there are some good things in there. There are questions about it and I hope to serve on the Bill Committee; I hope those on the Treasury Bench listen to me on that, although that might be slightly difficult for Ministers.

I completely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), I agree with the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), and I agree with much that was said from the Opposition Front Bench as well. This should not be party politics; this should be about what is right and what is wrong. This is a homeowning nation, and that includes freeholders and leaseholders, and the party I am proud to be a member of is a home- owning party.

On Grenfell, I pay huge respect to the families who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were injured, and to my former colleagues who went in the right direction with their paramedic friends and the police when the rest of the public quite rightly got out of the way— the bravery of the firefighters at that incident is to be commended.

However, there are issues that are not addressed in the Bill. This is not all about cladding. It is about the remedial works people are being charged for and the fire watch. I have heard of situations where residents in one block—a fairly low-rise block, actually—were told they could not have any mats outside their front doors. As a former firefighter, I think that is bonkers. They were told to take pictures of the wall in the communal areas. That is not what went wrong at Grenfell; what went wrong at Grenfell was a systematic failure across the picture—including within the fire service, to be fair. I was trained on high rise and in high-rise fires we told residents to stay in their flats. We told them they were safe in the stairwell, but often they would not be.

There is one area that fascinates me. We have heard about insurance and keep talking about insurance premiums, but where are the insurance companies paying out on premiums paid by the developers and contractors? When I was a builder I could not walk on to a building site without having liability insurance.

We can do this; we did this as a Government when the mesothelioma Bill went through this House and we compensated people dying from asbestos who could not find an insurer or a contract. The Government intervened to compensate those families and loved ones, and that is what we will have to do here, too.

I will be joining my colleagues on amendments that we have signed, and if I cannot serve on the Bill Committee what a great opportunity there will be for me on Report, not because I want to be difficult, but because I want to get this right for leaseholders. I was promised the previous Bill was not the answer. This has to be the answer to put things right.

Building Safety Bill

Mike Penning Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

We certainly want to ensure though the Bill, that the building control mechanism and the industry are improved. I think that a suite of measures, including the introduction of better building control measures, the retrospection of the Defective Premises Act and further work that we may choose to do, working across parties, will help ensure that a very complicated and detailed set of challenges, which have emerged recently but have been developing over many years, are properly addressed.

[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

I want to clarify, should I be lucky enough to catch Madam Deputy Speaker’s eye later, where my speech might be going. This is retrospective legislation, and that is fantastic—if we can track down the freeholder, the developer and the insurer. If they cannot be tracked down, where does that burden come? Surely we can find a way—I may suggest this in my speech, but I wonder whether the Minister has thought of a way—by which the unfairness of the impact of what we are now prescribing in the Minister’s legislation on those in cases where we cannot find them, as opposed to where we can, can be resolved.

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the forewarning of what his speech may contain. I would say to him that quite apart from the body of case law that exists with respect to the 1972 Act, and quite apart from the fact that even if a company has become defunct directors can still be held liable for the decisions made, as it were, “on their watch”, the challenges that he has described are the sorts of things that we will want to discuss in this place and in the other place, across parties, to ensure that such challenges are addressed.

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[Daisy Cooper]

When we started on the Fire Safety Bill, I tabled the first amendment to the Bill to try to protect leaseholders from these unimaginable, eye-watering costs. The Government said repeatedly that that Bill was not the place for it. Eighteen months on, we have had a huge cross-party effort, and while we are considering this second piece of legislation there is still no guarantee to protect leaseholders from those costs in law. The Government’s tone has changed, and I welcome that, but their position has not. I welcome talk about working cross-party and collaboratively, but I urge the Minister and the Government to make clear assurances on the record today, because I do not believe that the good will displayed in the House will last much longer if we do not get better answers.

The Secretary of State announced last week that the loan scheme will be scrapped and that cladding costs will be covered for buildings over 11 metres. Where is that statutory protection? It should be on the amendment paper today, and we should be discussing it in this House, not kicking it into the long grass.

On non-cladding problems and fire safety defects, the Minister must be aware that since the Secretary of State made his announcement last week there has been a huge rush of bills and enforcement notices because freeholders think they can get away with suddenly asking leaseholders to pay for these first safety defects. Will the Minister make a strong statement at the Dispatch Box today that he intends to issue a moratorium on freeholders issuing such enforcement notices, as that is what is needed?

I welcome that action under the Defective Premises Act will be extended to 30 years, but the Minister knows as well as I do that, as we showed in Committee, the current legislation is condemning leaseholders to years and years of litigation, litigation, litigation. In some cases, they may have to take their freeholders to court twice before they can take those responsible to court. That is not a satisfactory situation.

The Government keep saying that they want to work with freeholders and developers to find a voluntary solution, but cladding victims and fire safety victims have given the Government the answer time and again. They are asking the Government to stump up the cash to make homes safe and to use their power to go after those responsible.

I listened very carefully to the Minister’s carefully crafted answers on when we might see some of these legal protections. I note that the Bill’s Second Reading in the House of Lords is scheduled for the start of February, yet the Secretary of State has indicated that he wishes to continue his discussions with those responsible until March. When questioned by other hon. Members on whether the House of Lords will see these amendments, the Minister said it “may include” in the other place, not that it “would include”. Will he make a clear commitment from the Dispatch Box today that the statutory protections announced last week will, in fact, be amendments to this Bill, that those amendments will be introduced in the other place, and that sufficient time will be provided in this House for us to discuss them? If the Government make any attempt to railroad this Bill through without those protections in place, he will have a very significant cross-party fight on his hands.

[Sir Mike Penning]

I do not think there is a conflict, but I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. As an ex-fireman, although my concerns and thoughts are with the victims of the Grenfell fire and their families and loved ones, I say that we must put on the record our thanks to the emergency services, and particularly the firefighters, who have to live with what they saw—most of them will never have seen such an incident in their life. They went in one direction while, quite understandably, the public went in the other.

I do not disagree with anything I have heard in the House today. My constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), and I are as one. If this is not sorted in the other House, as promised, we in this House will sort it. That is not a threat but a promise. The Minister, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister, as we heard, have been brilliant in changing direction. They realised the risk that no thought at all had been given to leaseholders.

I declare an interest because my daughter has a leasehold property. When she bought it, why would she have dreamed that this situation would occur and she would face such penalties?

When I intervened on the Minister, I said I would mention a way out. Those hon. Members who have been here long enough will remember that I took the Mesothelioma Act 2014 through this House. The Act compensated people whose lives, through no fault of their own, had been devastated by asbestos. We could not fine the insurers, the companies, the directors or the shareholders, so they had suffered and they had not got compensation. This Bill is an opportunity to resolve the problem for leaseholders where we cannot impose fines.

There is no reason why leaseholders should drag themselves through the courts. We are trying to sort the matter out in this House. We should put a levy on the insurers. Without any doubt, the insurers got the premium from these companies, because otherwise they would not have been allowed to build the properties, so liability insurance was in place. The fact that we cannot find the developers—some have gone offshore in parts of my constituency—is irrelevant now. If we can find them, fine, but if not, we will levy the insurers.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel. We have already done it with the mesothelioma Bill. Originally, we gave the victims 80% of the compensation that they would have got through the courts. Eventually, we gave them 100%. This House was unanimous in its support of the Bill as it went through its stages. It was probably one of the easiest Bills that I have taken through the House—apart from having to pronounce mesothelioma, which, to this day, still troubles me, as Members may have notice.

This is an option that I have mentioned to the Minister before. I have said that his civil servants can come and talk to me, or to anybody at the Department for Work and Pensions who took that legislation through. I am more than happy for that to happen. Sadly, though, no one has talked to me about this—I am gently looking towards the civil servants in the Box, which I am not meant to do. This is a great opportunity to right a wrong that we can see coming down the line here.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Were claims to go through the courts, they would be aimed at the developers, the builders, the architects, the surveyors, the component suppliers, the building controllers and the building regulations specifiers, all of whom were insured or operating under Government. We need to get them altogether around the table and say, “What will be the total liability?” We would save the lawyers’ costs and get the money in very fast. Leaseholders will be protected. Their homes will be safe and they will be saleable.

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[Sir Mike Penning]

The Father of the House is absolutely right. When we put to the insurers this idea that they should compensate those people whose lives and loved ones had been affected by the asbestos, did they like it? No, they hated it. They fought tooth and nail not to do it, but we did it, and we did the right thing. When we come to part 5, Mr Deputy Speaker, I hope to catch your eye again.

May I just touch on a point that many colleagues have raised today? If people, in fear of threatening letters from lawyers and bailiffs, paid the remedial costs on their lease in good faith, how can it be right for us in this House to say that they did the wrong thing, while the people who held off paying those costs did the right thing? That sticks in my throat. It cannot be right that we penalise people who feel that they did the right thing. I said this to the Secretary of State during his statement. I am not saying that he dismissed it; he probably just thinks it is very difficult. Yes, it is very difficult, but that is what this place is for—when things become difficult, we resolve the problem. We have an opportunity with the insurers.

As we have heard from Members across the House, these bills are dropping on people’s doorsteps now, and it is happening in my constituency. They are innocent people who have done nothing wrong other than wanting to get on the housing ladder. Today we have an opportunity to address this. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) that we do not need to move these amendments now. We will wait to see what happens when the Bill goes to the Lords, but by golly we will move them if it comes back.

[Hilary Benn]

The one thing that has united the House today has been support for the principle embodied in new clause 13. There is a huge burden of expectation now on the shoulders of the Minister and the Secretary of State because of the commitment that was given in the recent statement, and we are all anxious to see how the Government intend to fulfil it.

The right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning), whom it is a great pleasure to follow, asked earlier what happens if the funds are not forthcoming from those who are still in existence who were responsible. The answer is that there is a mechanism already in place, which is the levy that the Government previously announced. I have no objection to adding insurers to those who are levied, because it is a collective failure on the part of the industry. That is the point. Even if we put on one side debates about cladding, for every one of the buildings that have been discovered to have missing fire breaks, I can guarantee that the plans specified that the fire breaks should be installed, but they were not. As a result, we have a generation of shoddy, unsafe buildings and it is our constituents who are feeling the pain.

Secondly, once we have sorted out who is paying, we really have to find a way of getting the work done. I must say to the Minister that having observed, as we all have, the back-and-forth between managing agents, freeholders, developers and the building safety fund, we can see that that is not a very efficient way to solve the problem. That is why the buildings works agency approach that my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) spoke about earlier is such a good idea. It is a good idea for two reasons. First, we would have a body whose job was to find, fix, fund and then recoup through the levy that we have discussed, which would be quicker. Secondly, it would avoid the stand-offs that are taking place. I have seen one case where the expert advisers to the building owners have said that the zinc cladding on wooden battens is not safe, but the building safety fund has said that it is.

Another reason that the Government should adopt our proposal for a buildings works agency is that it would be the perfect vehicle to review the safety assessment of all of the buildings, which the Secretary of State spoke about last week, and in the end be the referee—the judge and the jury—that says what is safe, what works and what work needs to be done.

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[Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

I want to thank hon. Members across the House for the work they have put in. I also pay tribute to the Minister, whom I have spoken to on a number of occasions about the issues facing my constituency. I know that the Government have been listening and working really hard with colleagues to get to a place where people can be satisfied. As has been mentioned, the landscape is really complicated and the Government are trying to right some wrongs of the past.

I very much welcomed the Secretary of State’s statement last week, but I want to echo what has been said by colleagues across the House about what comes next and the protection that we will give to leaseholders. For example, at the Wharf in my constituency there has been a lack of clarity and transparency from the management company about the cladding and fire safety works that need to be carried out. The management company, Y&Y, is in the process of taking the leaseholders to a first-tier tribunal to award costs, adding a 5% commission. Since the statement last week, I have asked the management company if it could please pause this activity until the Government have moved further, but it has said that it will continue to go to the first-tier tribunal for costs. That will put some of the leaseholders in a really difficult position. Some of the people occupying those properties will not be able to pay those bills if the management company goes ahead with its actions before they have been given any security by the Minister, so I want to labour that point. We are also talking about historical payments that have been made, but this is happening as we speak.

[Sir Mike Penning]

One option for someone with a freehold property is normally to claim on their buildings insurance’s legal protection. A leaseholder has to pay the premium to the freeholder but does not have any protection. This is another area of the law that could be changed.

[Kelly Tolhurst]

My right hon. Friend is quite right. I welcome many of the amendments, and I welcome a lot of what is in the Bill. I am pleased with the extension on limitations.

During covid, a fire ripped through a building on the Causeway in my constituency. Again, it is not a high-rise block and is under 18 metres. Other hon. Members have mentioned firebreaks and the lack of such work. Coincidentally, further structural defects have been found in the investigation work carried out after the fire. They would not have been found if the fire had not ripped through the building in 2020.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said, these buildings have been signed off. I was a marine surveyor in a previous life, and if I had signed off the builds of boats that had major defects, my professional indemnity insurance would have had to pay out and I might not have got insurance next time around because of my poor performance. How is it acceptable that people can sign off such buildings and give certificates to the residents—our constituents—who buy them? That gives the residents confidence in the quality and safety of what they are buying. We need to look at the insurance argument; it is a valid point. To be frank, it is a scandal that those poor individuals have bought those buildings. The profession has a lot to answer for, as far as I am concerned.

Ultimately, I want to press the Minister on what assurances and comfort he can give my constituents who are watching the debate and who have been following the Bill with bated breath for many months, hoping that it will be their salvation.

Building Safety Bill

Mike Penning Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 20th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Andrew]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that important point. He will be aware that we are trying to avoid any leaseholders having any contributions to make at all. The first port of call will always be the people who developed the building in the first place. I hope to come on a bit later to the valuation of properties, which might address some of his points.

Importantly, we proposed that those leaseholder contributions be subject to a firm cap and that costs paid out in the past five years count against the caps. The Government originally proposed that leaseholders’ contributions be capped at £10,000, or £15,000 in Greater London, and we believe that creates a fair balance. It is the Government’s assessment that the vast majority of leaseholders would pay less than the caps, and many would pay nothing at all. None the less, the other place voted to reduce leaseholders’ capped contributions to zero. I am afraid the Government cannot accept the amendments.

We believe that in those circumstances, setting the cap on leaseholder contributions to zero is not a proportionate approach. Placing the entire burden on freeholders and landlords in circumstances where they are not at fault and are not wealthy will only increase the risk that remediation that is needed to ensure that residents are safe will not happen at all. We are therefore restoring the caps at £10,000 outside London and £15,000 in London, as originally proposed, and have made a small number of other technical improvements to those measures.

[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister to his position on this very interesting Bill that is going back and forth. The one group of people who took the money right at the start for the developers and builders was the insurance companies. The developers could not have built those properties without having the legal protection of insurance. Sadly, the Minister has not mentioned the insurance companies once in this situation, but that is where the burden should fall, instead of on the leaseholders. Does he agree?

[Stuart Andrew]

Actually, the responsibility lies with those who built the building defectively in the first place. They are the ones we are chasing. I pay tribute— I should have said this right at the beginning—to officials in the Department, who have worked incredibly hard to get this new package of measures from the developers in place. It has not been an easy task, but they have done it with great passion and have been incredibly successful. As I say, it is the developers who should be paying, and we expect a minimal number of leaseholders to pay.

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[Mr Betts]

Absolutely. It is important that the money is available to make sure that all buildings are safe, that everyone is safe in their home, whether they be a leaseholder or a social housing tenant, and that the money provided to make those buildings safe comes from the various funds the Government have identified, and is paid fairly and equally to blocks, whether they are in the private sector or the social housing sector. I hope the Government will listen to that view, which has been expressed by the NatFed and the Local Government Association, to which I am grateful for helping with my amendments today. Just to declare that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association and very proud to be so, and I think its campaign, along with the NatFed’s on this issue, is fundamentally right.

[Sir Mike Penning]

What an awful long way we have come with this Bill. On the previous Bill, the Fire Safety Bill, we were told categorically that that was not the right vehicle for the sorts of remedial help people needed in all our constituencies and that this was the Bill. To be fair to the Minister and his civil servants, there has been huge movement—huge movement—compared with where we were when there was considerable unrest on the Conservative side of the House as well as around the House. One of the reasons this Bill has been changed so much is that there was general unrest across the Floor of the House as to what the Bill was actually saying and doing. Can I pay tribute to my colleagues on this side of the House? With a majority of this size, the Government could have ignored us, but they could not because there was too much unrest on this side of the House and the campaigning went on. I want to pay tribute to my colleagues on that point.

Is the Bill perfect? No, it is not going to be perfect. But do we need this Bill on the statute book in this Session? Yes, we do. That is why I will personally be supporting all the measures, and not voting for any of the amendments to send it back to the other place. I think a lot of the work can be done through secondary legislation. The Minister has indicated that. More work could be done, particularly in my opinion—I have said this on Report and Third Reading, and the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), has touched on it, as have all of my colleagues here—with the insurance companies. The Father of the House cited how all the professional bodies that were responsible for building these properties—all of them—were insured, yet the insurance companies have got off scot-free.

I know that those in the Department will say—I have said this before, but let me just repeat it—that it would be very difficult to get the insurance companies to retrospectively pay for this work. That is what they said about mesothelioma, where companies had gone bust and people were dying and suffering from that horrible asbestos disease, but the Government actually brought the legislation forward so that we took a levy from the insurance companies to cover those missing employers, and we could do it with the missing companies. We could do it if we wanted to really do it, and I hope—I am going to go on and on to everyone in this House—that this can be done. Look at the way the Department for Work and Pensions did that Bill. I know a lot about it because I took it through the House, so I am slightly biased. It can be done.

I want to pause for a second, and I declare an interest as a former firefighter. I have nothing but admiration for our firefighters and emergency services who went into Grenfell, when others were quite understandably coming in the other direction. They saw things they never dreamed they would see in their careers. We do not want to see that again, but fires do recur, and our emergency services do a fantastic job. I hope that they are getting the psychiatric support for what some of those sights will have created in their lives. That will affect their lives going forward, and I have asked this question before of several Ministers.

However, the key to this Bill today is that we get it on the statute book. We can do more work through secondary legislation. I think it is absolutely imperative for our constituents that we get it on the book today, so that the other House listens to us and we get this on the statute book before the Queen’s Speech.

[Hilary Benn]

Like many Members have already done, I begin by acknowledging the progress that the Government have made. I think the House would like to thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for Housing for effecting the transformation from the laissez-fair approach that the Government took previously to a really hands-on approach now—I also pay tribute to the civil servants for the work they have obviously done advising Ministers—and for asking themselves, “What are all the levers we can pull and the legislation we can enact to force people to live up to their responsibility?” I also thank Members on both sides of the House—it has been a team effort—but echo the point made by the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) that, given the Government majority, dissent on the Conservative Back Benches has been really important in getting us to this point. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Members for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith).

The reason above all others that we have got to this point, however, is the leaseholders’ refusal to give up. They looked at the situation they found themselves in through no fault of their own and basically said, “We’re not having it, because it’s not fair.” The House now acknowledges that and recognises it, so we should, above all, applaud their determination and persistence and that of all the cladding groups, including the Leeds Cladding Scandal group in my constituency, where, like many speakers today, I have constituents who are affected. It shows what can be done if people do not give up, which is a really important life lesson.

Having said that, our constituents have lived with years of uncertainty and it is not quite over yet—a point to which I shall return. Reference was made to a video of one of the fires. We all saw what happened at Grenfell, but there was also the fire at The Cube student accommodation in Bolton, and we saw how quickly it went up. I think the official report said, in effect, “The building did not perform according to expectations”. If that is not understatement, I do not know what is. The truth is that we are dealing with a load of buildings that were badly built and unsafe, and people got away with it for far too long. Let us try to put ourselves in the position of those who live in those buildings. Never mind the fear of a bill arriving which they have no hope of paying; there are the waking watch costs, the insurance, the uncertainty, the inability to get on with their life or to sell, and going to bed every night thinking, “Well, if there were a fire, would I get out if the building went up in 11 minutes?” It is a scandalous position that people have been put in through no fault of their own.

I have a few brief points to make. The first is that I stick to the principle that I and many other Members have advocated from the start, which is that leaseholders, because they are not responsible, should not have to pay anything. My hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), who spoke so clearly a little earlier, was absolutely right when he said that they should not have to pay. A cap is better than an uncapped bill, but why should they have to pay anything at all?

Secondly, we have discussed the position of buildings under 11 metres this afternoon, and I think the local case for including them is extremely strong. Replying to interventions, the Minister for Housing said that he is prepared to look at them on a case-by-case basis, but it seems to me that he could do that even if the Government chose to include them in the scheme.

Thirdly, I seek clarification on a point my hon. Friend raised about what happens if leaseholders have already paid up to the £10,000 cap but there are further costs. What if there is a continuing need for a waking watch? If the bill is not paid, the fire service may say to leaseholders, “You’re going to have to leave the building. We’re shutting it down because you don’t have a waking watch still in place.” What happens in those circumstances? It would be scandalous if leaseholders who have already paid the £10,000, or £15,000 in London, were to suffer that for want of someone to pay the bill.

Fourth is a point that has not been raised in the debate so far, but some constituents have contacted me about it. The Government have decided to limit the number of leaseholders who are not resident—buy-to-let landlords—who can benefit from the scheme. Morally, I do not see how anyone can argue that they are more responsible for the failings of others than residential leaseholders. Also, if a building has a lot of buy-to-let properties and the buy-to-let landlord leaseholders cannot come up with their share of the money to fix the building, that has an impact on the residential leaseholders living in the building, and the net result could be that the building does not get fixed and they continue to bear costs that they cannot bear. I say “cannot bear” because ultimately that is the reason the Government have had to move. It was a fantasy to think that leaseholders would come up with sums of money they simply do not have—ridiculous. It was never ever going to happen.

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[Bob Blackman]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in particular as chairman of the all-party group for fire safety and rescue. As I mentioned in an intervention, I have been involved in prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill from its beginning and in the various reports the Select Committee produced in the wake of the Grenfell fire. The eye-watering aspects of building safety across this country really only came to light with that terrible tragedy at Grenfell, nearly five years ago. We have all learned a lot.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing, who is new to the job and to the Bill, on the rapid progress that has been made since he was appointed. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who has dramatically changed the whole approach taken in this Bill. The Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), is no longer in his place, but I think he recognises the dramatic changes that have taken place during the passage of the Bill through the other place.

When preparing for today’s debate, I thought of one or two ironies. The first was that the Second Reading debate was so shortened that we all got three minutes to speak, but today, although we have a reasonable amount of time to debate the issues, the business managers are encouraging us not to go on too long. That seems suitably ironic.

There are several issues to address. I thank the Minister for making it clear that this will not be the end of the process. Secondary legislation will come along on the back of the Bill, and that will be the detail that really matters to the people we represent—the leaseholders, who are the one party in all of this who are completely innocent and should not be penalised in any way, shape or form. It is a contradiction that we are asking leaseholders to make a contribution to fire safety costs and cladding remediation for which they have no responsibility.

I welcome the cap, but I do not see why that cap has been set at a particular figure. Many of the people we are talking about are not wealthy. They may have bought their leases a long time ago, and they are often living on fixed incomes and have no disposable income to put towards the costs, because they are paying the other bills for their properties. They are not able to stump up huge amounts of cash. As has been said, many of those people have been presented with eye-watering bills, such as £250,000 or more, to fix fire safety issues that are definitely not their fault, are clearly the responsibility of the developer in the first place and should have been put right since.

Also in preparation for this debate, I had a look at the Select Committee’s first report on prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill—the Chairman of the Committee may recall it. If the Government had accepted our proposed changes, we probably would not be here today discussing Lords amendments. Almost all the proposals in our report are now in the revised Bill. That is a significant change and demonstrates that when we are dealing with issues of such a technical nature, prelegislative scrutiny is the right way forward. I commend its use to Ministers in the future.

I have a couple of points to make about where we are now, to put them on the record so that we can get through this phase in the secondary legislation. I would like clarity from the Minister on the position of housing associations when pursuing developers who have developed social housing that is clearly not fit for purpose.

[Sir Mike Penning]

Go for the insurers.

[Bob Blackman]

I agree with my right hon. Friend, but let us make it clear that it should not be housing associations paying for the costs of remediation—it should be the developers who did the work in the first place, under instruction. If the developers are no longer in business or have retired, will housing associations have access to the building safety fund? That will be important, because—as Opposition Members have said—the cost will fall on those paying rent in housing association properties, and that is unfair.

Will the Minister make sure that proper protection is given to the affordable homes programme? Otherwise we will not get the new properties developed that we all want to see to enable more social rented accommodation in this country.

One change in the Bill is that from 18 metres in height to 11 metres. In reality, the lower height properties do not have the compartmentalisation that high-rise flats have. As a result, there is a greater inherent fire risk in lower level designs. If a fire breaks out in one of those units, it is likely to spread rapidly across a broader range of properties. That is a serious fire risk and it needs to be remediated. I welcome the move from 18 metres to 11 metres, but it does not design out the original problem. We need to make it clear in the future that designing out such risks has to be paramount.

Another issue is disabled access. One concern is that when disabled people have to leave a property to flee a fire, disabled access is not always available. That has to be taken into consideration. From my reading of the Bill, that does not appear to have been given proper consideration and we need to look at it in the secondary legislation.

Since Grenfell and the publication of the original draft Bill, a raft of new high-density, multi-storey blocks of flats have been erected. Most of them now need fire remediation. I find it bizarre that developers would ignore all the suggestions of what needed to be done, but they have. We had an example earlier this year of a developer putting in a planning application for a 44-storey tower block in east London with only one stairway. It was outrageous, but it was only the intervention of the fire brigade and local residents that prevented that planning application from being approved.

Another issue is the commonhold versus leasehold model. I believe that more people should exercise common- hold, because I want to see more people enfranchised. The Bill appears to suggest that they would be penalised for doing so, but that cannot be right and the Minister needs to correct that.

I shall mention two other issues briefly. What happens to overseas ownership of buildings? Will we pursue those people to the nth degree or will they get away scot-free? My right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) referred to the insurance companies. To me, they have not so far put their minds to the problem.

The Bill is vastly improved compared with when it left this place. I will support it wholeheartedly today on the basis that we will not draw a line under it and that will be the end of it; secondary legislation will be required to amend it further. The evidence that was presented to the Select Committee suggested that we still do not know exactly how many buildings need fire remediation, how many need cladding remediation, and what the cost of that work will be. Until we have that data, we will not be in a position to say what the total cost will be to the Treasury and the Department, and how it will be funded.