Tom Hunt
Main Page: Tom Hunt (Conservative - Ipswich)
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
Due to time constraints, and because I have not had an opportunity to raise this before, I will talk exclusively about one issue. We have heard a lot about the struggles faced by many leaseholders and had debates about the Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Bill, but I want to talk about St Francis Tower in Ipswich. Its leaseholders were successful in getting funds through the building safety fund to carry out remediation work to the tower block, but I have been shocked by what has happened since.
The building manager, Block Management, has decided to cover the entire tower block in shrink-wrap, which could be on there for up to 12 months. I was invited by the residents to see the conditions in which they are expected to live and I was absolutely shocked. They are living in small, one-bedroom flats with no balconies and, in the middle of a pandemic, in a hot summer, they have got virtually no natural light. To make it even worse, they were not consulted or informed that it would happen. Then the building manager put bars on the windows, so now the residents can barely open their windows to get fresh air. So the residents have no natural light and barely any fresh air.
In all the time that I have been a Member of Parliament, seeing 100 of my constituents living in those conditions is probably the most shocking thing that I have come across. I find it deeply disturbing that Block Management has behaved in this way. Despite many interventions from me, and despite local media including the Ipswich Star and BBC Radio Suffolk highlighting the issue, I have still not had a proper response to a letter I wrote to Block Management about six or seven weeks ago, although we should be having a meeting soon.
We hope that a lot of remediation work will be carried out through things like the building safety fund—a lot of it needs to be carried out because dangerous cladding needs to be removed and various defects must be resolved—but it must be done in a way that is sensitive to the quality of life and mental health of those living in these structures. We need to have a debate on that.
I would like to work with the Government in holding Block Management to account and to support my constituents, who are going through great distress because of its behaviour. They are being treated like animals, not human beings. It is a disgrace, and I will fight for them. I will mention Block Management and its behaviour in the Chamber as many times as I need to until it meets the residents and resolves this issue.