Building Safety Bill

Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

Despite repeated promises to make buildings safe and protect leaseholders, and four years on from Grenfell, hundreds of thousands of people still live in unsafe homes and millions are caught up in the building safety crisis. Leaseholders are facing costs of hundreds of pounds a month for service charges, insurance premiums and waking watch, before even getting into remediation costs. The Government’s building safety fund excludes buildings under 18 metres, it is not distributed on the basis of risk, and just 10p or 12p in every pound of the fund has been allocated. There is also uncertainty about who will cover the cost of other fire safety defects and interim safety costs.

I appreciate that this debate has been very technical, but we must ensure that the voices of those leaseholders trapped in dangerous buildings are heard, and I want the Minister to hear testimony from people in Luton South. Tom, who lives in the Point Red building, says:

“We are left with terrible uncertainty, unable to move on with our lives, not knowing if we are going to be bankrupt and homeless by the end of the year. We sleep in a death trap every night.”

This afternoon’s statement and the added issue around the EWS1 forms is yet another layer of uncertainty, as it stands. Tom is a primary school teacher and his partner works with vulnerable children. The key workers we have relied on over the past 15 months have been forced to the edge of ruin month after month due to the life-ruining costs of fixing a problem they did not create. Will the Minister respond to Tom and his partner? How does he propose that they raise money to pay the remediation costs that are not covered by Government funding? It may be a shock to Conservative Members, but we do not all have trust funds or multiple assets to fall back on.

The mental health of innocent leaseholders has severely deteriorated, and the Government should ensure that they can access free support to reduce some of their anxieties and worries. The Bill needed to include explicit legal protections to ensure that millions of pounds of building safety remediation costs are not passed on to innocent homeowners and tenants. I support Labour’s call for a new building works agency that would go block by block to identify which works need doing, and then fix, fund and, crucially, certify them as safe and sellable at the end to allow leaseholders to finally move on with their lives.

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s report stated:

“It would be unacceptable and an abdication of responsibility to make them contribute a single penny towards the cost of remediating defects for which they were not responsible.”

This should not be the leaseholders’ burden to bear. It is developers that created the crisis by putting profit before protections. How can it be that property developers, who make millions each year, are protected, while teachers, nurses, shopworkers, transport workers, carers and pensioners are left to pick up the bill?