Fire Safety Bill

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 22nd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. The plight of people in shared ownership properties is dire and needs to be looked at by the Government, as does the plight of the many thousands of people who are still trapped in unsafe buildings or buildings they cannot sell, who face extortionate bills for remediation work or who face huge increases in insurance and waking watch costs and other costs that they simply cannot afford. People are going bankrupt.

We cannot feel it in this place, but every time we have a debate or a vote on this issue, thousands of people write to all of us and say, “We are hoping against hope that you do the right thing this time.” We have people writing with heartfelt pleas. Their stories are stark, and every time we have this conversation, people’s hopes are raised, and there is a groundswell on social media and in our inboxes of people saying, “Maybe now the Government are going to do the right thing.” They are watching us now, hoping that we are going to do the right thing. It is very sad that the Government are indicating at the moment that they are not going to take this issue seriously.

This is taking a heavy toll on people’s mental health and putting millions of lives on hold. Leaseholders have been trapped in this impossible position for too long. Throughout the passage of the Bill, we have continually campaigned on this issue, and we welcome the latest amendment from the Bishop of St Albans. Like Labour’s previous amendments and those tabled by Members on both sides of the House, this amendment would prohibit the cost of replacing unsafe cladding being passed on to leaseholders or tenants.

In February, the Housing Secretary told thousands of people across the country that they will be locked into years of debt to fix fire safety problems that were not their fault, and we hear that the Government have decided to lay a motion to disagree with the Bishop of St Albans’s amendment. That is a direct and deliberate betrayal of the promise that Ministers have made over 17 times that leaseholders should not be left to foot the bill. Over the weekend, I wrote to Members of Parliament across the House who have constituents affected by this, urging them to back the amendment, and I sincerely hope that together we will stand up for the rights of leaseholders today and all Members will do the right thing. Given the risk of fire and looming bankruptcy, we cannot wait while the Government delay with inaction and failed proposals to keep leaseholders out of debt.

Today is another chance for the Government finally to put public safety first and to bring forward legislation to protect leaseholders from the deeply unfair situation of paying for fire safety repairs for which they are not responsible. Members across this House are united on this issue and are determined that innocent leaseholders should not foot the bill. Today should be the day when people across the country can go to sleep with a great sense of relief that the Government have listened and put into law protections for leaseholders, so I sincerely hope that the Minister will change his mind. It is not too late for the Government to do the right thing and protect innocent leaseholders across the country.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

A three-minute limit is being imposed now on all contributions. Apologies to those Members who are on the call list and simply will not get in because there will not be enough time.

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[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab) [V]]

I will be supporting the amendment moved by the Bishop of St Albans, because in circumstances where leaseholders are beset by worry, fear and uncertainty, it will provide them with the reassurance that they will not have to pay to fix a problem for which they are not responsible. It will also make the Government realise that they have to come forward with a different solution.

There are two problems here: the first is dangerous cladding and the second is other fire safety defects, which have been discovered in building after building. The Government appear to be in the position where the funding they have announced will pay for the remediation of missing fire cavity barriers where they are integral to the replacement of dangerous cladding, but not where they are not—in other words, where they are elsewhere in the building. I do not really understand that. Can the Minister say whether, if the works the Government are prepared to fund through the scheme are completed, the buildings in question will be declared safe so that the waking watch and insurance costs disappear even if the other fire safety defects have not been fixed?

Time, however, is not on our side, because we know how long making all of these homes safe is going to take, even if all the necessary funding had already been identified.

There are detailed inspections to be done, tenders have to be put together, firms found who are willing to do the work, and scaffolding and building materials have to be ordered before the work can even begin. So, given the scale of this, it is going to take a long time. But that is the one thing that leaseholders do not have, because, as we have heard, they are paying bills that they cannot afford.

Even worse, the bills are now starting to arrive on their doormats demanding payment to fix the cladding. One recent example was a demand for £71,000. It might as well be for £1 million, because there is no prospect of leaseholders being able to find that kind of money.

So the longer this goes on, the more likely we are to see leaseholders becoming bankrupt. What are the local authorities going to do when they turn up at their door and say, “I’m homeless; I need somewhere to stay”? And make no mistake: the anger that leaseholders are feeling at the moment will be something else again when they find themselves being made homeless through no fault of their own.

So, let us do the right thing today to protect leaseholders, and then the Government can turn their attention to finding an answer that will actually work. At a time when people are getting bills to the tune, as I have just said, of £71,000 through the letterbox, to stand up and say, “I’m really sorry, but this isn’t the right legislation” demonstrates a failure to understand the nightmare that so many of the people we represent are living through.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I will call the Minister to wind-up the debate at five to 9.

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

First, may I put on record my thanks to the Lord Bishop of St Albans and the Bishop of London, without whom this amendment would not be back here tonight?

Not to try to outdo the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), in my hand this evening I have an invoice. It is an invoice for service charges and remediation of fire safety defects; it is an invoice for nearly £79,000. Imagine for one moment you are trapped in a flat you have been told is unsafe. Night after night you go to bed with the fear of fire. You cannot sell your flat because it is worthless. Everyone knows that none of this is your fault, but then an envelope drops through your letterbox. When you open it, there is a bill for £78,000 to put defects right that are not of your making.

I am asking Members across the House to vote tonight to agree to the Bishop of St Albans amendment—better, or formerly, known as the McPartland-Smith amendment to the Fire Safety Bill. I am asking them to vote with us tonight because bills like this one have already started to arrive and they are not going to stop. Everyone knows what is happening, and if they do not they should open their emails and read the heartbreaking experiences of their constituents. This is not politics; it is not ideology—in fact I do not know what it is, but is it any wonder that some leaseholders feel that there is some sort of a conspiracy against them?

Are we going to let the innocent continue to pick up the tab for the guilty? What are we doing about the developers, the contractors and the manufacturers? What are we doing about the insurers and the National House Building Council? What are we doing about local authority development control and others that signed off these buildings as safe? Are they sleeping soundly in their beds tonight?

There is an economic reason for voting for the amendment, and there is a political reason for voting for it, but beyond that there is a moral reason. If this Bill becomes law, we will be abandoning hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and I am not going to have that on my conscience.

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[Kevin Hollinrake]

After the previous debate, I offered my hon. Friend the opportunity to sit down and look at an amendment that might work, in concert with the Government.

The other difficulty with the amendment is that it would put the onus back on a building’s freeholders. Many people would say that that is fine—that it is better than the leaseholders having that responsibility—but I do not think it would put the leaseholders in a better situation, because the freeholder would simply close down the company and hand back the responsibility, which would fall back on to the leaseholders. I simply do not think the amendment works.

I have a couple of general comments. I was a member of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee at the time of the Grenfell tragedy, and the first thing for which we campaigned—straightaway, like many Members in this House—was a complete ban on combustible cladding. That is exactly what the Government stepped in to do. Of course, that ban is prospective, and it left a retrospective issue. The Government have clearly stepped in on the retrospective issue of cladding on high-risk buildings, which is exactly what the Select Committee campaigned for—those 1,700 high-risk buildings that were over 18 metres. That is what the £5 billion of funding remediates.

Many people in this debate have asked about the other elements, such as the missing fire breaks. It is of course absolutely right that we cannot expect leaseholders to take on a debt of tens of thousands of pounds; that is simply not right. We need to take a risk-based approach to the issue. Lots of buildings, particularly lower-rise buildings, can be safely remediated without necessarily replacing cladding: sprinklers, fire alarms and other systems can make those buildings just as safe.

We need to form a coalition of people right across the sector—be it building owners, contractors, managers or manufacturers—to find the best risk-based solution to the problem while minimising the cost for anybody, not least leaseholders. Of course developers should pay, and in many cases they have—Persimmon has just put £70 million to one side to remediate some of its buildings—but the difficulty is that we are often trying to deal with developers that are no longer there. The levy that the Government have introduced is absolutely the right solution, and I urge them to extend it to materials manufacturers and in particular insulation manufacturers, which I feel are principally responsible for the scandal of the situation in which we find ourselves.

On leaseholders, we of course do not want to see anybody go bankrupt as a result of these costs. There is a cap on costs for lower-rise buildings; it may well be that there should be a cap on the costs of remediating these issues for any leaseholder in any building. We should look into that, along with the possibility of the Government top-slicing the risk to make the insurance costs much lower. There are solutions and we all need to work together to provide them.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call Sir Robert Neill, who must resume his seat at 8.55 pm or before.

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I have great respect for my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and his expertise in this policy area. I accept that the amendment is not at all perfect, but it is the only thing that is currently available to keep the issue in play, which is why, unfortunately, I cannot support the Government tonight. I had hoped we would have a solution by now.

The simple point is that whoever is at fault—there may be a number of them as this has happened over a period of time—the people who are not at fault are the leaseholders who bought in good faith. They relied on surveys and regulations that appeared to suggest that their properties were in order and had no reason to think otherwise. It therefore cannot be right that they are out of pocket, regardless of the height of the building. I quite understand that there may be perfectly good reasons for using 18 metres as a threshold of risk for prioritising work, but it has no relevance to responsibility, moral or otherwise, so it is an arbitrary cut-off point.

I had hoped that Ministers would have taken the opportunity between the previous debate and this one to come up with a further scheme. I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister, who I know is trying to do the right thing and has put a great deal of money into the matter, to continue to think again and work urgently on this matter because, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) said, time is pressing. The only people who do not have the cash flow are the leaseholders. By all means go after those at fault, be they builders, developers or contractors, but in the meantime we cannot leave leaseholders, who have done nothing wrong, facing bankruptcy because they are effectively in negative equity and are having to fork out for a significant amount of costs, as are my constituents at Northpoint in Bromley.

This is destroying people’s lives. None of us wants to do that and I know that the Government do not want to do that. To find a solution, we have to cover the costs for those people who are not in a position to fund these costs over the length of time between this Bill imposing a liability on them and the Building Safety Bill coming along perhaps 18 months—12 months at best—down the track. It is covering that gap that needs to be done. That gap has to be covered in a way that treats and protects all leaseholders equitably regardless of the height of the building. I hope that the Government will use the opportunity of this going back to the other House to think again and urgently to crystallise a solution that we can all join around. The intentions are the same across the House, but we must have something that does not leave leaseholders—those who are not at fault—exposed. It is not a question of caveat emptor. They relied on professional advice and assurances. They are not the ones at fault. Be it loan or grant, either way they should not be picking up the tab for something that was not, ultimately, their responsibility.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

In order to observe social distancing, the Reasons Committee will meet in Committee Room 12.

We will now suspend for three minutes.