Rough Sleeping

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. Rough sleeping is not inevitable in a country as decent and well off as ours. The cost of a decade of austerity has been over 700 deaths last year on our streets and huge numbers of children and families in bed-and-breakfast and temporary accommodation. It is the defining mark of this Conservative Government. Any improvement on that record is welcome, but today’s figures show that the number of people sleeping rough in shop doorways and on park benches is more than double what it was when Labour left government. That shames us all and it shames Conservative Ministers most of all. It must end.

Today’s figures come with a big health warning: everyone, from the Secretary of State to homelessness charities, knows that these statistics are an unreliable undercount of the true scale of the problem. The figures have been refused national statistics status—a mark of

“trustworthiness, quality and public value”

Yesterday, Labour’s shadow Housing Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), wrote to the UK Statistics Authority to ask it to investigate their accuracy.

That follows new data obtained by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act, showing that Ministers have been dramatically under-reporting the scale of rough sleeping. The BBC revealed that 25,000 people are sleeping rough in England—five times the number recorded by the Government’s statistics. Even on today’s unreliable figures, the Government are set to break their pledge to end rough sleeping by the end of the Parliament. At the current rate of progress, they will not end rough sleeping until 2037, so while the Secretary of State’s ambitious words are welcome, how does he intend to reach his target without further investment?

The announcement today that the Government will go some way towards following Labour’s proposals and fund housing for rough sleepers following the Housing First model is welcome, but we remember that the Secretary of State’s party promised 200,000 starter homes and did not build a single one. When the Prime Minster was Mayor of London, he promised to end rough sleeping in the capital by 2012, but rough sleeping doubled. We are right to be sceptical and ask the Secretary of State to clarify: by what date will these homes will be made available? How will the locations be determined? And is the funding genuinely extra, as he claims, or has it been diverted from other programmes in the Department’s budget?

It is not just that the Government have turned a blind eye to the homelessness crisis for so long—which they have—but they have refused to face up to the fact that they actively created the crisis. They have cut £1 billion a year from local homelessness reduction budgets and there is no commitment to reverse that. They have cut investment in new homes for social rent to record levels, with no commitment to reverse that, and they have failed to deliver on their pledge to end unfair evictions—the leading cause of homelessness.

Much like other symptoms of the housing crisis, such as the spiralling housing benefit bill, the funding needed to tackle rough sleeping will continue to rise if we do not invest in addressing the root causes of the housing crisis. That means more than warm words about bringing health and housing together; it means facing up to the impact of deep cuts to welfare, mental health support and addiction services since 2010. However, the Government are in denial about the root causes of homelessness. Perhaps that is why the Housing Secretary chose to appoint someone as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, with specific responsibility for rough sleeping, who thinks that sleeping rough is a lifestyle choice and who claimed that

“many people choose to be on the street”—[Official Report, 29 January 2020; Vol. 670, c. 858.]

He also claimed that it is more comfortable than going on exercise in the Army— [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order.

[Sarah Jones]

That is particularly insulting to the hundreds of our armed forces veterans who are sleeping rough, who this Government have abandoned despite their years of service to our country.

As the first snow of the new decade falls on our streets outside, we must face up to the human cost of this Conservative Government: two people a day are dying on our streets; 127,000 children are homeless in temporary accommodation; and the rough sleeping figures are five times higher than the official statistics. Homelessness was tackled by the last Labour Government when we inherited a similar scale of crisis. We reduced rough sleeping by three quarters. The Secretary of State’s announcements today will not go far enough to deliver on his targets. To quote Louise Casey:

“We have gone from a beacon of success to an international example of failure”,

and we

“must not allow this issue to be ignored, we must feel its impact and act as the country we are proud to be.”

[Robert Jenrick]

I accept the hon. Lady’s comments and say with all sincerity and humility that we must do more as a country to tackle rough sleeping. That is exactly what this new Conservative Administration intend to do. The Prime Minister and I have put this at the heart of our agenda, and we intend to deliver on the promises we have made today.

The hon. Lady asks me about the statistics, but I think she is misinformed. The statistics published today are not the Government’s statistics. They are statistics produced by a rigorous count conducted by local authorities, with independent verification; they are then compiled independently by Homeless Link, which is the umbrella organisation for some of the most respected homelessness charities in this country, including Shelter, Crisis and St Mungo’s. The methodology, which has been used for 10 years, is broadly the same as that used in most developed countries, including Canada and Japan; it is highly respected and it is vastly superior to the methodology used under the last Labour Government, when the current shadow Secretary of State for Housing, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), was this country’s Housing Minister. That methodology was deeply flawed. It asked local authorities to count only if, in their opinion, there were more than 10 rough sleepers in their area. As a result, there was no count in vast parts of the country. The statistics published today are robust and a huge improvement on those that came before them.

The hon. Lady asks about the rough sleeping initiative and the funding we have put in. In fact, the increases are significant. RSI funding has gone up by 30% this year. We are spending £400 million in the next financial year, and the announcement made today is of an additional £236 million—and yes, it is new money.

The hon. Lady spoke about housing more generally. I have to say that last year we built more homes in this country than we have in any year of the last 30. On average, we are building more affordable homes every year than the last Labour Government built, and more council houses were built last year than in the 13 years of Labour Government. Where does Labour have control? In Wales. How many council houses were built in Wales last year? Fifty-seven. How many were built the year before? Eighty. How many in each of the three years before that? Zero, zero and zero. What is the No. 1 challenge facing the Government in achieving our housing targets? The failing Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

The hon. Lady asks about our commitment to a fairer deal between tenants and landlords. In the Queen’s Speech, we said we would introduce a renter’s rights Bill, which will be a significant piece of legislation. We are in the process of drafting that Bill, which will absolutely bring an end to section 21.

Finally, the hon. Lady made some disparaging remarks about my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway). I point out politely that in the past few years, he has spent over five months sleeping rough on the streets of London, Birmingham and New York city. I may be mistaken, but I do not think the hon. Lady has done that. I do not think any other Member of this House has spent so much time with members of our homeless population. I know for a fact that he has members of staff in his office in this House whom he has mentored off the streets and into a better life. Sometimes, he asks unacceptable questions, as George Orwell would put it, but we have to ask unacceptable questions sometimes if we as politicians genuinely want to tackle the big questions of our age. To tackle rough sleeping, we have to tackle addiction.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Due to my quasi-judicial role in the planning system, I cannot comment on the merits of the plan itself. I can say, however, that a number of hon. Members, including my hon. Friend, have made me aware of their concerns; even, I think, the shadow Secretary of State is campaigning against the plan. These matters will be looked at by a planning inspector should the plan reach submission.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

Flats have a crucial role to play in meeting housing demand, especially for first-time buyers. In London, the price gap between a flat and a house is more than £160,000, but the entire market for high-rise flats has ground to a halt, because the Secretary of State has repeatedly failed to publish flammable cladding tests and mortgage lenders have taken fright. Up to 600,000 people are now in unsellable properties, and The Sunday Times put the number much higher at 3 million private flats now exposed. So after promising the results repeatedly since last summer will the Secretary of State tell us when he will publish the test results and how he will fix this problem that sits squarely at his door?

[Robert Jenrick]

Like the hon. Lady, I am committed to tackling this issue. We want to bring about the largest change in building safety standards that this country has known in a generation, and we are doing that in many different ways. We have done it through banning ACM, the most dangerous cladding on buildings. We have done it through launching a new building safety regulator; there was no building safety regulator in this country, and successive Governments had failed to do that. I will be publishing the results of the Building Research Establishment’s studies. The reason for the delay is that we want to ensure that the right studies are done and as much work is done as possible. We will be guided by the experts and by expert evidence. I will not publish results until experts tell us that they are ready to do so, and I expect that will be in a few weeks’ time.

Office Block Conversions: Essex

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham. I will stick to the subject. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on securing the debate. It is timely, given the “Panorama” programme that we saw a couple of weeks ago. I hope that if he has not already done so, the Minister will watch it. It was very powerful. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) on her contribution pointing out some of the problems with permitted development, not least of which is air quality. That had not yet been discussed, and it was interesting.

Permitted development is a symptom of the way the housing system has broken. The principle, as the right hon. Member for Harlow said, of making it easier to build housing, is clear, but the consequences since its introduction are obvious. It has not increased affordable housing, which is what we would hope for. The ad hoc nature of the development can be seen in Harlow, Luton and Croydon, and in Croydon it has meant overdevelopment of office space. There is now a gap, because businesses that want to come into the area cannot, as everything has been converted through permitted development. Also, a lot of quite unsavoury people are making quite a lot of money. That was obvious in the “Panorama” programme about permitted development in Harlow.

I think that permitted development was introduced to allow developers to bypass the normal planning process. It gets people off the hook in spatial terms, and with respect to the need for windows in flats, and it makes it possible for unsanitary, unsafe and unpleasant conditions to develop. Plenty of people have written about the issues and brought them to our attention, and many of the examples used are from the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency. Vicky Spratt has done a lot of work on the matter in the i newspaper, and has raised cases, including one in my constituency, where leaseholders have bought such properties through Help to Buy. So it is not only the planning situation that has made what we are talking about possible; the Government are also funding it through Help to Buy.

The Shelter report that came out of the “Panorama” programme was helpful and showed the scale of the problem. Inside Housing has been good at highlighting the issue, and has talked about the warehousing of poverty by the housing system—something that the right hon. Gentleman referred to. A good piece of work was done by Tom Copley in City Hall in London showing that only 0.4% of the new homes built under permitted development in London are affordable. More than half of the permitted development homes in London are smaller than the minimum space standard that one would hope to see.

Last year 12,000 homes were created under permitted development, and there were 5,000 in London. There were more than 600 in my borough of Croydon, but I will not talk too much about that. The Grenfell Tower fire showed how flawed the building regime system is. Permitted development is one part of the system that has created the problems described so well by the right hon. Member for Harlow. In total, 54,000 new housing units have been created by conversion from offices since 2016. However, in research by the Local Government Association it is estimated that more than 10,000 affordable homes would have been created under the normal planning process, but have been lost, because they were not created under permitted development. That is why Labour has committed to scrapping permitted development—not because we do not think offices should ever be converted to residential use, or because we do not want more homes to be built, but because we see the consequences of permitted development, which are grave.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors found that permitted development has

“allowed extremely poor-quality housing to be developed”,

with only 30% of homes built through permitted development meeting national space standards. As the right hon. Member for Harlow pointed out, in recent weeks Shelter and “Panorama” have exposed the impact of a kind of slum housing on vulnerable people who are placed in his constituency and elsewhere. The investigation revealed how different elements of the housing crisis are layered together to create a truly awful situation. Councils that already suffer the impact of record low investment in social housing under the present Government simply do not have the supply of genuinely affordable council housing. There are more than 1 million people on council waiting lists, and multiple failures in the private rented sector—whether it is the growing number of no-fault evictions, spiralling rents or poor quality accommodation —mean that more and more people are left with nowhere to go but temporary accommodation. Councils are left to try to find somewhere to house them.

Shelter’s investigation revealed that 90% of the £1.1 billion spent by councils on temporary accommodation went to private landlords and letting agents. The research revealed how investors were purchasing office blocks, which they would then convert to temporary accommodation without local authority planning permission, before charging them out back to councils at huge expense, despite the sub-par standards. In one case that was highlighted by Shelter, a temporary accommodation provider bought a permitted development block for £8 million and leased it to the council for £1 million a year for three years, before selling it to the same council for £13 million, making a 50% profit, plus millions in rent.

I will not talk in much detail about Croydon, because we are mostly discussing Essex, but it is the epicentre: it has more permitted development units than any other part of the country. I have dealt with many cases of substandard accommodation, including Delta Point, Canterbury House and Green Dragon House. Those have been converted, and there have been all kinds of issues. One instance speaks to the point made by the right hon. Gentleman about the buildings being built for paper, not people: we had a block with a boiler system that was intended for people using the office space in the day. It was nowhere near good enough for the hundreds of people living in the block, so it failed and people went weeks without water and heating. We had to step in to try to solve that problem.

Those of us here today—we are quality, rather than quantity—are saying that the system is flawed. The Secretary of State has accepted that it is flawed. The Royal Institute of British Architects has called for an end to the scandal of families living in homes that are smaller than budget hotel rooms. I hope the Secretary of State is having some second thoughts. The consultation was originally introduced to look at expanding permitted development, but he has made remarks in the Chamber and elsewhere that suggest he understands that there are problems that need to be fixed. The nature of retail and office space is changing, and traditional high streets are changing, but converting everything into residential at great speed with no quality is not the way to help our high streets.

From our perspective, permitted development as it stands is better off scrapped, but if we are not going to go that far, I have some questions for the Minister. Does he accept that this is a significant problem, which is affecting a lot of people? If so, what does he propose to do about it? When can we expect the result of the consultation, and how does he see permitted development fitting into the solution to the huge problems of the housing crisis, examples of which we have heard about today from Harlow, Luton and Croydon?

Leaseholders and Cladding

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

We now have the pleasure of listening to my old friend from Croydon Central, Sarah Jones.

3.37 pm

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on securing what is clearly an incredibly important debate. We could spend many hours talking about leaseholders and cladding, which reflects the scale of the problem right across the country.

As right hon. and hon. Members would expect, I spend quite a lot of time talking to leaseholders, whether through the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold reform, the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership or the UK Cladding Action Group. I have had the privilege of talking to many of them about some of the issues they face. As has been articulated so well, these are lives that have been turned upside down completely due to issues for which they bear no fault. What they bear is the cost, anxiety and stress. Their lives are on hold, and it is incredibly upsetting for everyone who has been involved.

It has been nearly a thousand days since the Grenfell Tower fire, and since then we have had two Prime Ministers, three Secretaries of State and four Housing Ministers—everything but a partridge in a pear tree. We might have another reshuffle tomorrow. Hopefully we will not, because we want the Ministers and the Secretary of State to stay and fix some of the problems.

Most of the issues have been explained well in the debate, so I will focus on some particular questions to the Minister. If she does not have time to answer them all today, it would be great if she could write back to us. My first point is about the remediation of ACM cladding, which has been talked about a lot. We know that nine in 10 private blocks with Grenfell-style cladding are still covered with such cladding.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

There are still several blocks with flammable ACM cladding. My constituents at Sesame Apartments in Battersea are still living in a building that is wrapped in unsafe cladding. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Minister should give us some definitive deadlines for when those private blocks will be made safe?

[Sarah Jones]

I completely agree.

We know that 75 private block owners do not even have a plan in place to remove this cladding. Will the Minister confirm that, as the Secretary of State promised on 20 January, the Government will name all block owners who fail to put a plan in place by the end of January? Will she publish those names in tomorrow’s building safety update?

The Government’s £200 million fund for ACM removal on private blocks is nine months old, yet just a single block has so far been accepted for funds, and none has been made safe as a result of the fund. Labour has for years called on the Government to legislate to ensure that building owners cannot pass costs on to innocent leaseholders. Even with the £200 million fund, leaseholders are still exposed to risk, because state aid rules mean that fund payments are capped at €200,000 per property.

As the Mayor of London and the National Housing Federation said, the fact that the fund covers only ACM cladding creates a two-tier system. Will the Minister explain what protections she is putting in place to ensure that leaseholders are not handed the bill in the event that remediation costs exceed the state aid cap? What is she doing to protect leaseholds in blocks with other forms of dangerous cladding from being unfairly passed those costs?

Research from Labour revealed last year that up to 600,000 people are now stuck in unsellable flats because of flawed Government guidance relating to advice note 14, which is compounded by the failure to publish the Government’s tests into suspect non-ACM cladding. In recent weeks, new advice has been issued, and a new form from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors—the EWS1 form—for buildings whose cladding status is uncertain. In spite of those changes, in the past few days I, like others, have dealt with constituents who have been able to complete their sale. One constituent is facing major delays and bills over the work that she has been told needs to be done. Will the Minister give some clarity on how many sales are still being held up, how many EWS1 forms have successfully been signed off, and what the Government are doing to ensure that leaseholders are not being ripped off for those forms?

Interim measures such as waking watch, which other hon. Members have mentioned, were put in place after Grenfell as a very temporary measure before remediation works were undertaken. However, nearly 1,000 days on, leaseholders are still paying exorbitant costs—thousands of pounds per year—as a direct consequence of the Government’s failure to hold building owners to account and make their blocks safe. What plans does the Minister have to ensure that leaseholders who cannot afford to continue paying the costs are supported?

On non-ACM and data collection, ACM is the tip of the iceberg. High-pressure laminate and other forms of cladding are just as dangerous and should be removed. However, two years on, Ministers have failed to audit residential blocks, so we still do not know how many blocks are covered in HPL or other types of potentially lethal cladding. Ministers promised that that work would be completed by March this year, but an Inside Housing investigation report revealed that 70% of blocks remain uninspected, meaning that it is virtually impossible to reach that deadline. It is ridiculous that the Government have often shifted their deadline on publication of the non-ACM test results. Will the Minister today commit to a date for the publication of the tests, or explain to us the reason for the delay?

[Meg Hillier]

Does not the delay in getting the data in speak to the lack of expertise available? I spoke to one of my housing associations at the end of last week, and it is having to assess its buildings in risk order. Many people in not so risky buildings will never get the work done to get the necessary paperwork—the data—to get a mortgage, which is also important for the property owners.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

That is absolutely correct. There is a whole raft of areas in which different evidence is gathered and different work needs to be done. There are questions about all those things. We do not know whether the people doing waking watch are doing it properly and are properly trained. We are spending money on things that we are not sure about. The lack of people doing those jobs is an important issue.

The announcement on 20 December that the height limit for removing ACM had shifted from 18 metres to 11 metres means that there are potentially thousands more blocks implicated in the cladding scandal than originally thought. That means that tens of thousands more leaseholders, who previously thought their blocks were safe, have now discovered that work needs to be done and that the Government do not deem their building safe. Additional safety requirements are welcome, but when it comes to building safety, it is unclear why the Government took two and a half years to decide that buildings between 11 metres and 18 metres were equally unsafe. Will the Minister clarify why they took so long to determine that blocks of that height should also have their cladding removed? Does the Department know how many residential blocks of between 11 metres and 18 metres exist across the country? How many are covered in Grenfell-style cladding? If the Government do not know how many blocks are covered, is there a plan in place to collect and publish that information, as has been done with blocks of 18 metres and above?

For two and a half years, we have had a merry-go-round of buck passing, and hundreds of thousands of people across the country are suffering as a result. It is disappointing that the Secretary of State was not asked about this more when he was doing the media rounds at the weekend, and that we have not seen more action. It is also disappointing that the Government are not engaging with leaseholders. A meeting in London was recently organised by the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, and 100 leaseholders were there. They were asked whether they have had regular engagement with Ministers, and not a single hand went up. We need to talk to people so we can understand the issues that they are facing.

If the Government are serious about the claims and pledges they made in the days and weeks following the Grenfell Tower fire, about their role in keeping people safe, about their commitment to homeowners, and about the principle that leaseholders should not be paying, it is time to act. I know this is difficult. It is a very big problem, and it will be very complicated to solve. If the Government act and do the right thing, the Opposition would thank them very much for doing so.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I now invite the Minister to answer all those questions. She has about 12 minutes, and perhaps she can allow a minute or so for Hilary Benn at the end.

Flats and Shared Housing: Fire Risk

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) on—as the Select Committee Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), said—his incredibly thoughtful, considered and detailed speech. We will all be listening to the Minister’s response.

Nearly a thousand days since the Grenfell tower fire, it is hard to know where to begin on the chaos of building controls and safety systems in this country. Before this debate, the Royal Institute of British Architects, which is a well-respected body, sent a briefing in which it said that it remains deeply concerned that, apart from the ban on combustible cladding in certain buildings, regulations remain exactly the same as they were when the fire occurred over two years ago.

I will run through events since the fire. Following the fire, the first phase of the public inquiry was 18 months overdue, and the response to the Grenfell survivors was woeful, as the Government admit. On the removal of ACM cladding, nine in 10 private blocks are still covered in it, and three-quarters of all residential blocks with that cladding are still wrapped. A thousand days on since the fire, developers and freeholders are not taking responsibility at all, as my Friend the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) said, but the Government also need to step up to the plate. I congratulate my hon. Friend on the number of times that he mentioned Redrow and Laing O’Rourke. I hope that their public affairs firms, to which I am sure they direct significant resources, will pick up on this debate and take some action.

The Government are more than a year overdue in publishing the results of testing of suspect non-cladding materials other than ACM cladding. They told us that publication would be set for summer, then autumn, then before Christmas, and now spring. How much longer will we have to wait? The delays and contradictory advice in government guidance mean that up to 600,000 people are now trapped in unsafe or unsellable buildings—their lives are on hold and they do not know whether their flats are worthless. In my constituency, there are several cases of people who cannot sell and are trapped. Last week at my surgery, I saw some people who work in the NHS and who are moving to Southampton in two years to start a new job. They cannot sell their flat because they have not got the paperwork that says whether it is safe.

On sprinklers, which have been mentioned, Labour research from last year revealed that just 5% of tall council blocks are fitted with sprinklers. The two-tier system that the Chair of the Select Committee talked about is growing ever wider; there are some rules for new buildings but not for people in existing blocks. That is completely unfair and the Government have offered no funding to help with the retrofitting of sprinklers.

No legislation has been promised. Ministers have made 21 announcements on building safety since Grenfell and have made repeated promises to legislate, but nothing has reached statute, not even a draft Bill. Will the Minister give us a date for the introduction of the fire safety Bill? That would be very helpful.

We still do not know how deep the scandal goes. That is perhaps the most worrying aspect of all, because the Government have still not audited tower blocks, which they should have done straight after Grenfell. Despite saying that HPL cladding is lethal and must be removed, Ministers cannot tell us how many blocks have HPL—or other types, such as timber cladding, as mentioned—or where they are.

Last week’s Government announcement was welcome, but it is a half-hearted response, long overdue and too weak. We have been calling for naming and shaming developers and freeholders since last June, but the Government have set December in the timetable. Why wait? Seventy-five block owners still have no plan, although they have had two-and-a-half years of warnings. Why not name them today?

Reducing the height threshold for sprinklers and combustible cladding, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East said, serves only to increase the gulf in our two-tier system. The Government apply a safety standard for those in new blocks but not for those in existing blocks. That disproportionately affects social housing tenants because, fundamentally, they are the ones in the existing blocks. Thousands of blocks over 30 metres do not have sprinklers—let alone those over 11 metres—because they were built before Labour introduced the 30-metre threshold for sprinklers.

Why do we need more consultations when last year we had months and months of consultations on Approved Document B, which covers sprinklers, combustible cladding, fire doors and more? The responses were clearly in favour of greater safety, so why wait? Why not legislate now? Why ignore the recommendations that for specialised housing, such as care homes and hospitals, the ban on combustible cladding should apply to all heights of buildings? Talk to anyone in the fire service and they will say, “We need to have sprinklers in care homes.” The London fire service advises that every new school built should have sprinklers. The cost is about the same as putting in carpets, but only 3% of new schools built have sprinklers. We need to address all such issues.

There are also some big questions about the announcement that ACM cladding should be removed from all buildings, regardless of height. If that is what the Government are suggesting, the implications for Government, local authorities, housing associations and leaseholders are profound. If the Government had always been clear that ACM buildings below 18 metres must be remediated, as the Secretary of State implied last week, why are they not collecting information on how many buildings there are and where they are? Why are they not publishing the information in the monthly building safety updates? Why are those buildings not entitled to help from the ACM remediation fund, or will they be going forward? Have the residents been informed? What guidance was sent to local authorities to indicate that that was the Government’s view? Most of all, why did the Government guidance, post Grenfell, in amendments to building regulations last year, explicitly refer to buildings over 18 metres?

Finally—I want to give the Minister plenty of time to respond—the scandal at the heart of all this is that hundreds of thousands of leaseholders and people in blocks do not know what is happening to them. They do not know what they will have to pay. They do not know whether they will be able to move out of their blocks. They are suffering deep anxiety and stress. We all have people in our constituencies in that situation, although rather highlighting those in my constituency, I will highlight some who have been trying to get in touch with the Secretary of State for a long time. For months, the residents of the Skyline Central block in Manchester have been asking him to intervene after they were charged up to £25,000 each. The deadline for when they were supposed to pay has now passed, but they have still not heard from the Secretary of State.

Nearly 1,000 days after the fire, everything comes down, fundamentally, to trust. There are so many problems that the Government have yet even to begin to solve. They have a responsibility to do so. The Government won a large majority in Parliament, on which I congratulate them, but now they have a responsibility to fix the problems, which will not go away and are only getting bigger as we uncover more and more issues at play. Please, no more excuses and no more delays.