Fire Safety and Cladding

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I hope that hon. Members will accept that I may not be able to stay until the end of the debate: I am on an extended convalescence from a bad leg. I welcome the initiative of the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) to address low standards—a point also raised by the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed).

I have one or two points to make to the Government. First, the cost of remedy, especially for the leaseholders I am concerned with, in addition to everyone else affected, could be reduced if the Government waived the VAT on the cost of remedial works. That would reduce a £120,000 charge to £100,000, which would be worth while for all concerned. The second point is that leaseholders, apparently, do not have a right to get in touch with anybody legally about these issues; they are not party to the insurance or to the building and they are not written in anywhere. I ask the Government to find some way of deeming that leaseholders do have an interest and retrospectively have had an interest in the people who put up these blocks and the people who run them.

I have a third suggestion; many of my suggestions come from the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, which has already been mentioned by the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick). It is that every freeholder of every block affected should declare who they are and how they can be contacted. There must be no more hiding behind offshore entities. The managing agents should make sure they declare who these people are. Let us have them in front of Select Committees talking about who they are and how they will respond to this issue.

We accept that there will be many legal disputes. My suggestion is that the Government should get all the parties together and try to get a test case in front of the Supreme Court as quickly as possible, preferably within the next six months, to determine who has what liabilities. Once that is settled, it will be easy to see the people who are left out.

Whether the developments are the converted office blocks mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) or purpose-built residential blocks, we ought to be able to recognise an analogy with cars. Even if a car passed the tests for it to be sold new, if a defect turns up the car manufacturer still has the responsibility to put it right. Martin Boyd of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership has made that point very clearly—I make it, too, on behalf of the all-party group on leasehold reform.

The leaseholders are particularly stuck. In social housing, we know that the tenants will not have to pay. We also know that by law a leaseholder is a tenant. I think we should put leaseholders in the same situation as social housing tenants, otherwise we will freeze too much of our housing.

I am grateful to have had the chance to make some of these points at length; one could make them at greater length. Nevertheless, the hon. Member for Croydon North has done a favour to the House and to the country in securing this debate, and I hope that the Government will be able to move forward today and in days to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) on securing this very important debate.

I will highlight the plight of leaseholders in Heysmoor Heights, Liverpool—it is a 16-storey building. Those leaseholders are now being presented with bills for £18,000 each to replace dangerous cladding and to provide fire safety measures that have been deemed essential following the Grenfell Tower disaster. I commend the very swift action taken by Merseyside fire and rescue service; it acted very quickly. The dangerous cladding has now been removed from Heysmoor Heights and alternative covering is now in the process of being put up. However, as I say, the leaseholders are facing these bills.

I wrote to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government about this issue and on 11 December he replied. He stated that, in such situations:

“I urged those with responsibility to follow the lead from the social sector and private companies already doing the right thing, and not attempt to pass on costs to leaseholders.”

That is simply not happening. At Heysmoor Heights, leaseholders of modest means are being asked to find £18,000 each, and the fact that payment plans are being discussed does not make any difference to that essential figure. That is a bill for £18,000 to keep people safe in a situation that they could not possibly have anticipated.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Is that situation not an illustration of the terrible leaseholder landlordism, which treats leaseholders as tenants when it is convenient for the landlord and as property owners when it is not?

[Mrs Ellman]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I call on the Minister to honour the commitment that the Secretary of State made in his letter to me. This issue is about leaseholders. They face paying bills to keep them safe and they could not possibly have anticipated this situation. I call on the Minister to honour what has been said. Leaseholders should not face these bills.