Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he plans to take to support leaseholders who will be required to pay costs towards new building cladding under proposals in the draft Building Safety Bill.
The new building safety regime will systematically address historical structural defects to buildings by requiring safety case reviews and reasonable improvements. It is unacceptable for leaseholders to have to worry about the cost of fixing these historic safety defects in their buildings that they did not cause. Government has repeatedly said that building owners should step up and not pass these costs on to leaseholders, where possible.
Where developers or building owners have been unable or unwilling to pay, we have introduced funding schemes providing £1.6 billion to?accelerate the pace of work and?meet?the costs of remediating the highest risk and most expensive defects – Aluminium Composite Material cladding and other unsafe cladding systems like High Pressure Laminates.
The department is working on proposals to protect leaseholders from unaffordable costs caused by historic building safety defects. We will provide an update before the Building Safety Bill returns to Parliament.