Fire Safety and Cladding

Robert Neill Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. I completely agree: the leaseholders seem to be the innocent party in all this. They certainly should not be forced to bear the cost, the stress or the worry of having flammable cladding on the place in which they live.

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

It is very clear—the Government have made this clear—that leaseholders should not be left footing the bill. When the developer is also the freeholder, as was the case in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, and is prepared, because of the potential reputational damage, to step up to the mark, the problem is resolved. However, as he will know from experience, a difficulty arises when the freehold is sold on, often to a trust company or a financial institution. Unlike a firm of developers, such a body will not be trying to sell houses to the public and is not subject to any reputational pressures, and will use very common clauses in their leases to pass back to their leaseholders any cost that, say, the local authority or Government push on to them. Do we not need a legal mechanism to override that, which is difficult to do with leases, or, in such cases, to compensate leaseholders directly so that they do not lose out? It has to be one or the other.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I know that he is fighting very hard on behalf of his residents who are living in these circumstances, and he makes a point with which I agree. That is at the heart of our problem with the Government’s response. The Government can say what they like in support of leaseholders, but if they do not act, they are not actually helping them and, unfortunately, a moral obligation is not enforceable in court. We need a legal means of redress for people who have been damaged.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. As the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) will know, residents in Northpoint Tower in Bromley face bills of up to £70,000 each. People simply cannot afford that, and the stress they suffer from receiving that bill and knowing that, unless they find a way to pay it, they will be left living in a block with potentially flammable cladding on, is simply unacceptable.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again and for mentioning the problem at Northpoint. There is a certain insecurity about the risk of human error at the very least with a waking watch, but the difficulty is compounded by the cash flow impact. Most of these leaseholder groups will have a sinking fund that has been set up over the years, but that is quickly dissipated by the cost of the waking watch. In the case of my constituents, there is an enforcement notice running out in April. They could have the waking watch until then, which will exhaust all the reserves and will mean further calls on funds from people who often have mortgages, because they are often first-time buyers, and who effectively cannot raise any more money because the flats are currently valueless. It is a Catch-22: the money is exhausted, and they have no means of raising any more.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention; he makes an important point well. The other course of action that would normally be open to a homeowner—selling their home—is not open, because their homes are unsellable. Nobody will buy a flat in a block that has flammable cladding strapped to the outside of it. Whatever the Minister tells us, if we speak to people living in these blocks, they say that they feel abandoned by a Government who told them in the aftermath of Grenfell that everything would be done to keep them safe. They do not feel that they have been kept safe, and they manifestly have not been.