High-rise Buildings: Remediation

Stephen McPartland Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I am grateful to be following the wonderful speech by the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), who gave an emotional account of the GP who has had to put his whole career on hold. That is something we have seen up and down the country. Lots of people have had to become experts on building safety.

There is a grave misunderstanding of how many people are affected. There is still no register of how many buildings and people are affected. The estimates vary, but they suggest that up to 5 million people are affected, and that hundreds of thousands of buildings are currently deemed to be unsafe in one way or another.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) for securing this important debate. Since the emergence of this issue, he has led the way on a range of points. Once again we are celebrating the Government’s wonderful intervention, and my hon. Friend is moving us on to the next stage of the debate and the next stage of the campaign by leading the way, as he always does—standing up for his constituents and making sure that they get the best possible service they can from their Member of Parliament and the Government.

I welcome the Minister for Housing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), to his place. This is our first opportunity to debate this issue and I am grateful that he is here. I feel this will be a positive relationship. It is quite well known that we did not always see eye to eye with the previous Ministers and Secretary of State, but we feel we are now in a much better place, and that everybody is listening and working together. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), is also working with us incredibly well, as did his predecessors. This is all about working cross-party and making sure that we represent our constituents up and down the country.

In terms of remediation, my constituency has a building called Vista Tower, which has been iconic during this campaign. Leaseholders paid about £200,000 for their properties and the remediation bills they received were £220,000, so the remediation costs are more than the value of the properties. That is why my constituent Sophie Bichener reached out to me. At the beginning of the campaign I found it difficult to understand what the issues were, because I am not a building safety expert; neither was Sophie. We worked on the issue, and that was when we got the ball rolling some 18 months ago, but it remains incredibly difficult.

I thank the Minister because the Government’s intervention means that those leaseholders will not face costs of £220,000. At most, they would be capped at £10,000. As the Minister knows, I am keen that the £10,000 cap is a waterfall, so the developers were first, then the freeholders, and in the last possible scenario it would be the leaseholders, but with a cap of £10,000. The cap should take into consideration costs, such as a waking watch, as the hon. Member for Sheffield Central mentioned, where my constituents were paying more in waking watch costs every month than they were paying on their mortgages—and that was just one fire safety cost.

On mental health, as the hon. Member for Ipswich said, residents were told to work from home because the global pandemic made it not safe to go outside, but they were in a building that was not safe to live in, so they had nowhere to go. They had to lay their child’s head down to sleep every night in a building that was unsafe. The fire department and everybody else were talking about how unsafe the building was and how anything could happen. People are having to walk up and down the building 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ensure that it does not catch fire and that if it did, everyone would be able to get out in time.

The impact on leaseholders’ mental health, during a global pandemic, was intolerable. As the hon. Member said, animals would not be treated like that in this country. It is incredibly important to understand how those leaseholders feel. I welcome the Government’s commitment of over £9 billion. They have done the waterfall that we suggested. We are trying to get a commitment from Government that any costs incurred to leaseholders over the previous five years would be taken off that £10,000 cap. If that was the case, my constituent would not be facing a bill of £220,000; it would be zero. That is the level of the Government’s intervention on the issue. I welcome that and thank the Government, who have tried to work with us.

Now we need to move towards remediation. We are winning the debates and the arguments, but the reality is that none of the buildings up and down the country are being made safer. A dialogue is still taking place. People are still living in those buildings. One building that I visited during my campaign that is also iconic is New Providence Wharf, where a fire took place. It had a waking watch, but they could go up only so many flights before they had to leave themselves because it was so difficult.

Again, it was very hard meeting people who lived there. I met NHS consultants and a lady who had a number of children. During the fire, she was sitting on the floor because she did not know which child she had to leave behind, and the neighbours came and picked the other children up and got them out of the smoke. It was the people in the building who rescued each other. Everything failed—the smoke alarms and fire doors. They had all the kit, but none of it worked.

At the moment the building is shrink-wrapped in Monarflex. It has to be Monarflex because it is weatherproof. Those people have been living in this shrink-wrapped, weatherproof place, which currently looks like shredded toilet paper because the storms have shown that it is not remotely weatherproof and it has been ripped apart. They have been living in darkness for 12 months, and working from home during that time. As the hon. Member said, animals would not be allowed to be kept in darkness for 12 months.

Residents have reached out and given me a few examples. They came up with a wonderful idea, which we would like the Minister to take away and think about. It is something that the hon. Member for Ipswich and I have talked about, which is to develop a code of practice for remediating buildings. If a building is going to be shrink-wrapped in Monarflex, what needs to be done to prove that is the right material? How long can it stay up for, and what measures can be put in place instead? Cladding rightly had to be removed quickly, so the scaffolding went up, the cladding was removed and the building was shrink-wrapped. Then there is a 26-week delay as everybody works out what to do, but people live in that building during that 26-week delay.

People gave me examples of security. Obviously, the buildings are accessible if people climb on scaffolding. One lady had somebody peering into her flat in the early hours of the morning—they had climbed up the scaffolding. I was given examples of noise. People often do not understand how intrusive the remediation works are. We are talking about knocking walls down and the noise is intolerable, especially when having to work from home. There is probably a health and safety issue. If we put a noise monitor in a flat, would we find that the noise exceeded acceptable levels?

Another issue is the scheduling. We have talked about the huge delays. That does not sound like much of an issue, but it is. I have been told about tiles that had to be removed and then they were going to go back up, but five months later the tiles are still being removed because of the need to fix the firebreaks. The tiles insulated the properties, so people now have no insulation and their heating bills have gone through the roof. They are in a concrete box shrink-wrapped in darkness. Those are the conditions that people currently live in.

I am incredibly excited that we have more than £9 billion from the Government. They have accepted that leaseholders are the innocent parties. We have to remediate the buildings now, but no one has been prepared. My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich has seen it at first hand in his constituency, but none of us is prepared for what will actually happen. That is something else that I would like the Minister to take away and think about, and it might help him. Some of the buildings are probably so bad that leaseholders do not consider them to be homes any more; they consider them to be millstones. So will the Minister consider compulsorily purchasing some of these buildings from the leaseholders, or give them the opportunity to sell them to the Government? We could knock the buildings down, hand them over to housing associations and allow them to be rebuilt properly as new affordable homes. We would be replacing stock. Instead of remediation, we would be starting afresh and creating huge affordable housing stock up and down the country, and people would not have to live in buildings that had been remediated because they were so bad.

Oddly, the more remediation work the building needs, the more intrusive and difficult it is for the leaseholders living in the building. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich mentioned, we need to find a balance around mental health and living in those buildings. Perhaps we could offer leaseholders the opportunity to sell and allow the housing associations to go in and provide affordable homes. Many leaseholders want to have a child—or another child—and move on with their lives away from those buildings. Will the Minister consider that?

Another thing I want the Minister to consider is a building safety-type register. The Building Safety Bill creates a new regulator. According to the insurance industry, one reason why premiums are so high is that they do not know what the buildings are made of, so they assume the worst-case scenario, and as a result the premiums have to stay high and could go up at any time. Although a lot of the buildings are safe, insurers do not know what materials have been used. If the Building Safety Bill stated that there had to be a register of all new buildings and what exactly they were made of, as in Scandinavia, in the case of any new buildings built from, say, January 2024, we would know exactly what they were made of and we would not be in this position, going forward.

In the case of applications to the building safety fund for support or remediation works, we could say that the buildings had to be analysed to identify what they were made of. We would then have a database of buildings in the country and could identify which were the worst affected. We would know that buildings are made of x, y and z. That could help with insurance costs and would allow the Department to prioritise which buildings need to be fixed quickly, because we would know which were the most dangerous. I urge the Minister to talk to the insurance companies. It is in their interests because they do not want to pay out, and they know which of their insurance products are the most effective for insurance purposes.

We need to work with each other to try to resolve these issues on a cross-party basis, as we have done throughout the campaign, and we need to continue to listen and try to move forward. I am grateful that we have £9 billion to end our cladding scandal, and I thank the UK Cladding Action Group and the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership for all the work that they have done to get us to where we are today. As we move into the remediation of buildings, however, it will be very much as my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich has described: it will be a living hell for a number of people who are already close to breaking point because their mental health has suffered. I urge the Minister to consider those points, and I look forward to meeting him a number of times to discuss them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stuart Andrew]

I will happily commit to go away and look into that issue for the hon. Gentleman, and I will get in touch with him afterwards to update him on that. It is important to say that we have also improved the information available to leaseholders and residents about the building safety fund, with the new online services that provide real-time updates, but I take the point that he has just made.

Clearly, the mental health aspect is a very important issue. I have outlined the steps that the Government are taking to meet a lot of the financial costs of removing the cladding and how we are doing everything within our power physically to speed up remediation. However, in response to the points that hon. Members have made today, I will also say that we also recognise that the building safety crisis has taken a very heavy toll on people’s mental health. Of course, my Department regularly engages with leaseholder groups who have shared with us terrible examples of people being sick to the stomach with stress over the last few years because they are trapped in homes that they are unable to sell or that they cannot afford to fix. We believe that bringing these matters to a swift conclusion through the measures that I have spoken about today is the best way to alleviate the stress and concerns of so many leaseholders.

We know that many residents living in these buildings, including many who have had to endure 24/7 waking watches or who have faced acute financial difficulties, understandably need access to proper mental health support. That is one reason we are working across Government to ensure that all people, regardless of their residential situation, get that help and support they need. Where residents in buildings fitted with flammable cladding need specific mental health support, we are encouraging them to contact their GP to discuss these issues and ensure they are referred to appropriate mental health services. I recognise that we have to look at that in greater detail.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage asked about the contribution of costs to waking watch being offset under the £10,000 cap, and I confirm that is the case. I am sure his constituent will be happy with that.

[Stephen McPartland]

On behalf of my constituents, especially those in Vista Tower, I would like to say thank you to the Minister.

[Stuart Andrew]

That is very kind. I want to conclude by saying that I know there is a united desire across the House to ensure that people are safe and that, more importantly, feel safe in their own homes. Debates such as this are incredibly important, as we work together to achieve that goal, protecting leaseholders while pursuing ambitious reforms, to create one of the strongest building safety regimes in the world. In doing so, we will ensure public confidence in the sector and bring about lasting change, to ensure that the industry always puts residents’ welfare first.

I can assure my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich and everybody who has taken part in the debate that the Government will not take their foot off the gas in making buildings safe. We are determined to ensure that residents’ concerns are properly allayed, by driving meaningful change in the building industry, and ensuring that residents know that they are being properly supported and, more importantly, listened to. We can help drive the biggest improvements to building safety for decades, which will restore public confidence in our housing sector and create a robust, strengthened building safety system that places the welfare of residents at its heart. I conclude by praising again my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich. I know he will not rest until his residents feel that they are being properly listened to, and have those remediation works done as quickly as possible. I look forward to working in this role with him in future.