Leaseholders and Cladding

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his urgent question and for welcoming the proposals that we have tabled in the draft Building Safety Bill. He asks a number of important questions.

First, the hon. Gentleman asks whether the building safety charge will be retrospective. We envisage that the building safety charge will cover ongoing costs that leaseholders may have to pay for legal costs, building safety inspections and the like. In our proposals, we have said that the Secretary of State will be able to prescribe costs to ensure that unfair building safety charge costs do not fall unreasonably on the leaseholder.

We will of course look very carefully at the 80-page report from the Select Committee. I think there are somewhere north of 40 recommendations in the report. We want to look at it carefully and considerately, because we recognise it forms an important part of our answer to the challenge of building safety. I hope that we can develop a cross-party approach to our further scrutiny of the Bill when it comes before Parliament.

The hon. Gentleman asked me whether leaseholders will pay any costs at all. The point of introducing £1.6 billion of public money is to make sure that in the buildings that are most at risk and where there is no means to pay, the state steps in and supports those leaseholders, but, fundamentally, we expect developers and owners to step up and execute their responsibility to pay where buildings have been defective.

I cannot say that there will not be some costs at some point related to some defect in historical building safety that will not fall upon the leaseholder, but we want to make sure, through the public money that we are spending and through the work of Michael Wade, that we find innovative solutions to make sure that such costs are as minimal as possible. We cannot write an open cheque on behalf of the taxpayer. That would send the wrong signal to developers and those who are responsible for these buildings that they do not have to pay because the taxpayer will.

The hon. Gentleman asks about my noble Friend the Building Safety Minister in the other place. I can tell him that Lord Greenhalgh is working round the clock to find solutions to the challenges that face leaseholders up and down the country. He is determined, with the work that he is doing with insurers, developers and the financial services sector, to ensure that we come up with those solutions, and I look forward to working with him closely as the Bill, which he will introduce to Parliament, works its way through both Houses.

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

It is on record that I am a leaseholder, but I am not affected by these proposals or problems.

The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and I chair the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold and commonhold reform. We give our support to the work of the Select Committee, which, in this report, as in its previous one on lease renters, has laid out starkly one of the problems of some particular tenants. Social tenants do not have to pay, ordinary tenants do not have to pay; it is leaseholder tenants who have been lumbered with unimaginable anxiety and with costs beyond possible chance of payment. Until we get a full grip not just on the very high buildings and the aluminium cladding but on all the problems, including the developers who used wood for balconies in ways that were against the house building regulations, we are going to be left with a frozen part of the housing market in every single one of our constituencies.

We are grateful for the work that my right hon. Friend and his colleagues have done, but he should go on paying attention, as I think Lord Greenhalgh has, to the work of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, which was the first campaigning charity to get a grip of the scale of the problem. Also, will he say a word about waking watches, which are going on too long and at too high a cost?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his contribution and for his ongoing interest in and commitment to this very important area of work. As I said earlier, we do not want leaseholders to carry the burden of these costs. That is why we are working with Michael Wade, who has a 40-odd-year history in the insurance market, to find innovative solutions to what is a very complicated problem. It is why we have also put aside a significant amount of public money in this financial year to remediate the buildings that are most at risk where the owners have no other means of paying.

My hon. Friend also asks about waking watch. We have published data on the costs of waking watch so that leaseholders are able to see the relative differences in charges by waking watch providers. It is entirely wrong that some providers charge so much, and I would point leaseholders to that data so that they can better understand where they may get better service. They may also know that alarm systems can pay for themselves within seven weeks and obviate the need for waking watch.