Fire Safety Bill

Royston Smith Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 22nd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab) [V]]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak this evening. I have been contacted by and met hundreds of concerned constituents, many of whom are trapped in unsafe leasehold properties. I have also met Clad DAG, a group set up to ensure the voices of disabled leaseholders are heard, and I hope the Minister will also meet them. Many of those I have spoken to bought their first home through Government schemes that they believed would help, rather than hinder, them. They now wish to move on, but are instead facing bankruptcy due to astronomical bills. Understandably, they want to know why those who should be taking responsibility are not.

Let us look at the example of Berkeley Homes and its subsidiary St James. Unlike other developers and housing providers in the constituency, the chief executive officer of Berkeley Homes has refused three times to attend public meetings that I have organised, or to answer leaseholders’ reasonable questions about remediation costs. The company remains in dispute with the owners of Aragon Tower in Deptford about whether the fire breaks in the building are faulty. Meanwhile, more than 160 residents are fearful of what might happen while they are asleep.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

The first thing to say is that I agree with many of the comments that have been made. It simply cannot be right that leaseholders are faced with bills of tens of thousands of pounds. Nevertheless, I cannot support the amendment because I do not think it is effective, for a number of reasons. First, it seems to put somebody—an indeterminate person—on the hook for fire safety remediation forever. As I read it, it is not limited to historical defects.

[Royston Smith]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I do not think I should, because of the timescales, but as my hon. Friend is an author of the amendment, I will.

[Royston Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I want to ask him this simple question, which I am sure he will appreciate. We have been back here three or four times now to discuss this, over and over, and every time I have said that if the amendment is defective, the Government should make it work and have it as their own. Does he agree that that is the way to go?

[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.