Building Safety Bill

Shabana Mahmood Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kelly Tolhurst]

My right hon. Friend is quite right. I welcome many of the amendments, and I welcome a lot of what is in the Bill. I am pleased with the extension on limitations.

During covid, a fire ripped through a building on the Causeway in my constituency. Again, it is not a high-rise block and is under 18 metres. Other hon. Members have mentioned firebreaks and the lack of such work. Coincidentally, further structural defects have been found in the investigation work carried out after the fire. They would not have been found if the fire had not ripped through the building in 2020.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said, these buildings have been signed off. I was a marine surveyor in a previous life, and if I had signed off the builds of boats that had major defects, my professional indemnity insurance would have had to pay out and I might not have got insurance next time around because of my poor performance. How is it acceptable that people can sign off such buildings and give certificates to the residents—our constituents—who buy them? That gives the residents confidence in the quality and safety of what they are buying. We need to look at the insurance argument; it is a valid point. To be frank, it is a scandal that those poor individuals have bought those buildings. The profession has a lot to answer for, as far as I am concerned.

Ultimately, I want to press the Minister on what assurances and comfort he can give my constituents who are watching the debate and who have been following the Bill with bated breath for many months, hoping that it will be their salvation.

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

I shall speak to Opposition new clause 3 and to the amendments that, although they will not be pressed to a vote this evening, would protect leaseholders from the costs of not only cladding removal, but the remediation of non-cladding defects.

I can hardly believe that it is four and a half years since the horrific fire at Grenfell, and still we are fighting for the robust legal protection that leaseholders in my constituency and across the country need and deserve. It is too easy to assume that removing cladding is the beginning and end of the scandal; the costs of remediating non-cladding fire safety defects are just as ruinous, and blameless leaseholders should not be picking up those costs. I have seen for myself the extent of fire safety defects at various buildings in my constituency, including the Brindley House development, where the scale of the missing firebreaks and other defects was truly shocking. The people who were responsible for putting up that building were grossly negligent and, in my opinion, complete cowboys.

The regulatory failure whereby buildings were declared fit for human habitation when they contained defective or inappropriate fire safety measures, or when those measures were wholly absent, is staggering. When there were negligent and dishonest practices, the costs of remediation should not fall at the feet of my constituents. A commitment to full legal protection for leaseholders from all costs—both for the removal of dangerous cladding and for the remediation of all other fire safety defects—should have been added to the Bill today, because those issues are not new and have been the subject of intense debate for years.

Ministers and their officials know full well the contours of the debate and the issues at stake, so it is not good enough that the Government did not make such amendments today. Instead, we will have to wait to see whether full legal protection is made available when the Bill goes to the other place. We may understand parliamentary procedure and the different staging posts of a Bill, but to my constituents watching from the outside, every single staging post feels like a slap in the face when they are not given the full protection that they need and deserve.

I associate myself with the comments that have been made about insurance, particularly professional indemnity insurance, but I want to mention the increased insurance premiums that many of our constituents have faced across the country. I have been writing to the Government, the FCA and others for more than two years to ask for action against the insurance industry for the huge increase—the hike—in premiums that our cladding-affected leaseholders have faced. That increase bears no resemblance to the mitigations that our constituents have paid for to decrease the risks in their buildings.

People have paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for new fire alarm systems and internal compartmentation to try to bring the risk down in their buildings, yet that is never reflected in the insurance premiums that they have to pay. That is unconscionable. There are big questions for the wider insurance sector to answer, in addition to the buildings industry. It seems to me that someone who has profited from, for example, charging a building in my constituency an insurance premium of £700,000 in total, which has never come down, has some big questions to answer.

I hope that when the Minister brings the Bill back to this place, we get the time for adequate debate and the further amendments that we need. I hope that we take action on insurance and perhaps even—God help us—implore the FCA to do its job and stand by our constituents, who deserve the regulator’s protection. When the Bill comes back, I hope that it addresses all those issues, as it is high time that the Government did right by leaseholders.

[Christopher Pincher]

I congratulate right hon. and hon. Members on their contributions to this important debate and to the amendments that we are debating. In the short time that I have, I will say that I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), who raised the terrible plight faced by her constituents at Brindley House, as did the Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street. Too many people, for far too long, have been far too worried. We have to end this scandal.

Several hon. Members asked whether we intend to bring forward legal protections in the House of Lords. I assure the House that we do. We certainly want to ensure that all leaseholders in medium and high-rise buildings, who live in them or who used to live in them but have had to move out and sub-let because of the situation in which they find themselves, will have put in place the robust legal protections to which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State referred. We want to work cross-party and with interested parties to ensure that those robust protections are right.

We believe that leaseholders should not be asked to pay anything further until those legal protections are in place, as was raised by several hon. Members on both sides of the House. I encourage any hon. Member who is aware of demands from freeholders that their leaseholders pay to make me or my officials aware of that demand.

I am also grateful for the points raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Kelly Tolhurst) about the, shall we say, peculiarities of the insurance system. Some of those are wider issues that go beyond the Bill, but I am happy to discuss how we can resolve such issues with them.

I will certainly work collaboratively with the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda). I am conscious that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) is right that there are limitations through mitigation, but the law can change the culture. That is part of the point of bringing forward the Bill—to change the culture of the sector.

We will instigate a summit with the sector to ensure that it pays what it owes, and if it will not pay voluntarily, we will introduce appropriate mechanisms to ensure that it does. I am conscious that the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), referred to the Defective Premises Act 1972. I may have misheard him, but I think he suggested that that Act is not available for use by leaseholders. That is not correct. Leaseholders are able to avail themselves of the Act, as may any freeholder.

I am conscious, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I have only 14 more seconds in which to speak. Let me reassure Members that we want to work across the House to bring forward sensible legal protections in amendments in the other place, and we will do that as soon as may be.