Fire Safety Bill

Stephen Doughty Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I shall be supporting Lords amendment 4L today with some regret, because I wish the Government had moved to resolve this issue since we last debated it yesterday; it is disappointing that they have not done so. I support the amendment on the basis that I want the Fire Safety Bill to proceed; I want it to be successful. The truth is that, while the fundamental elements of the Bill are worthy, it none the less has, at present, the effect of causing collateral damage to innocent leaseholders. That flies in the face of undertakings that the Government themselves have regularly given. Despite the huge sums of money that has been put in, as is already apparent, it is not enough.

In the meantime, we need to have a scheme that protects leaseholders, and it is the absence of a provision in the Bill to do that which is the problem. If Lords amendment 4L is not satisfactory to the Government, then there is still time for them to produce their own. I very much hoped that the Government would have acted on the proposals in the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) yesterday. That still offers a way forward, but absent that, at least the current amendment from the Lords gives the means of protection in the interim.

At the present time, leaseholders in blocks, such as Northpoint in my constituency, have properties that are unmortgageable. They cannot move. They cannot raise any more money on them. They have already expended tens of thousands of pounds in costs relating to waking watch and greatly increased insurance claims. That is not satisfactory.

We need a provision that bridges the gap in getting those responsible to pay. None of us who supports this amendment wants the taxpayer to be picking up a blank cheque. We want those who are responsible, who were at fault, ultimately to pick up the tab, but it will take some time to pin the financial responsibility on those people. In the interim, we must have a means of protecting the innocent leaseholders. That bridging arrangement is something that only the Government are able to do. I would have hoped that accepting that, together with commitments to move swiftly in legislation in this Queen’s Speech, was not an unreasonable thing to do.

Having served as a Minister myself, I do not buy the proposition that it is beyond the resources of Government to swiftly produce legislation that remedies the alleged defect that the Minister sees in the current amendment and sets the Bill in good order. There is still time to do that. I beseech the Minister to reflect on this and to come back with the Government’s own proposals in the other House before the end of this Session.

Robustness is a virtue, but when it turns into obduracy it ceases to be a virtue. I do not want the Government to get themselves into that situation. There is still time, and this amendment buys them time to resolve that satisfactorily. I urge the Minister profoundly to listen to this.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). I agree wholeheartedly with what he said, and indeed with the comments made from the Front Bench by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) and by many other Members across the House. I also support the Lords amendment, not least because of the suffering undergone by my constituents in Cardiff South and Penarth and by many others across the UK.

The Minister talked about uncertainty, but as many Members have pointed out, uncertainty is being caused by the Government’s failure to engage with reasonable proposals made from all parts of the House to provide certainty for the very leaseholders who have been affected.

The Minister’s arguments simply do not wash. Our leaseholders have been dealing with this matter for years—the anxiety, the stress and the financial pressure, not least during the covid pandemic over the past year. That has been intolerable for some of them, and I have met constituents who were crying and in a terrible state because of the situation they have been left in. I simply cannot understand the Government’s continued resistance, not least given the cross-party pressure and support.

I thank the Welsh Government—Housing Minister Julie James, my colleague Vaughan Gething and so many others—for meeting with leaseholders in my constituency. They have put pressure on developers and made a commitment to £32 million in the recent budget, and have already committed £10 million. They have an active programme on leasehold reform and, crucially, are making it clear, which the Government here seem unwilling to do, that leaseholders should not have to foot the bill for fixing these fire safety and building safety defects.

We all want the developers to pay and we all want the resources to come through, but the reality is that we all have to stand up and say clearly, once and for all, that leaseholders should not be the ones paying for the remediation. This is not their fault. I will continue to work closely on the issue with my constituency colleague Vaughan Gething, our local councillors, and a range of residents and leaseholder organisations. We are not going away. Some of the stories of how people have been affected have been told passionately today on BBC Wales—the suffering, the anxiety, the pressures.

I am yet to receive adequate response from the UK Government, who have left the Welsh Government and Welsh leaseholders in the dark on the way forward. There is no need for that unless there is something to hide. As the Minister knows, Welsh Government officials have worked constructively with his Department on the passage of the Bill, and are working on a range of issues relating to the building safety Bill, yet it took the Housing Secretary more than a month to respond to the Welsh Housing Minister on the crucial, very reasonable questions she was asking in an offer of co-operation.

I have raised this matter with the Secretary of State for Wales, the Minister and others, yet the letter that came back from the Housing Secretary over a month later said he is

“not able to confirm the details and timing of budgetary allocations to Wales”,

although he says the Barnett formula will

“apply to that funding in the usual way”.

Why can he not give a clear and unequivocal answer about the money that will be available to Wales, and how the Government will work with Welsh officials on the proposed new tax and the new building levy so that we can finally provide some assurance to leaseholders in my constituency and, crucially, across the country?

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and all the Members who have spoken since the Minister sat down.

Ministers, including the Prime Minister, have said in the House and in the other place on many occasions that leaseholders would not have to pay for fire safety failures not of their making, so why do the Government still disagree with the Lords amendment? The Minister said yesterday and just now that the Government do not have time to draft appropriate amendments to the Bill in the way we seek, yet they have had seven months since Second Reading and five months since Third Reading—plenty of time to try to sort this out.

The safety scandal exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire affects up to 1.3 million flats. Current leaseholders cannot sell, and potential leaseholders cannot get new mortgages until they can prove the homes are safe. Insurance is impossible to come by. Worse, residents of those flats live with the fear of being trapped by a fire in their home. Leaseholders live with the fear of unaffordable costs for the remediation being imposed on them.

The human cost is incalculable. In my constituency alone, at the Paragon estate, built by Berkeley, about 70 homeowners, along with hundreds of assured tenants and students, were evacuated with a week’s notice and cannot return. A fire raged up the cladding of Sperry House in the middle of the Great West Quarter estate built by Barratt Homes. Leaseholders in at least 25 blocks in my constituency that were built by volume house developers face unknown costs, including for waking watch, for the replacement of flammable cladding and wooden balconies and, most expensive of all, to address the lack of fire breaks or proper compartmentalisation.

The building safety fund does not even cover the cost of cladding remediation throughout the country, let alone any of the other failures in these buildings, and it provides loans only for sub-18-metre blocks. Nor does it support housing associations with the cost of rectifying the safety failures that affect the social rented flats for which they have found themselves responsible through planning gain, so they are having to take the repair costs from the funds meant for the building of new social rented housing.

Unamended, the Bill will mean that leaseholders will be forced to pay. They should not have to pay—they did not design or build their flats and they do not own the building their flat is built in. This Parliament, with the support of this Government, could take the burden from leaseholders now, but instead we are told that we have to wait for a different Bill, the content of which is unspecified, as is its timetable. That is unacceptable.