Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, if he will make an assessment on the financial impact on UK pension funds of the Building Safety Act 2022.

The Building Safety Act puts in place legal protections for leaseholders from historical building safety costs. The Act legally protects qualifying leaseholders (those living in their own home or with no more than three UK properties in total) from all costs relating to the remediation of unsafe cladding and contains robust and far-reaching protections from non-cladding costs, including those relating to interim measures such as waking watches. Where those directly responsible (for example, developers) cannot be held to account, building owners and landlords, rather than leaseholders, will now be the first port of call to pay for historical safety defects.

The Building Safety Act spreads the costs of fixing historical building safety defects as fairly and equitably as possible across the system. If building owners and landlords on 14 February were, or were related to the developer of the building, they are liable for the full cost of remediating all building safety defects, whether cladding or otherwise, to the benefit of all leaseholders. Qualifying leaseholders will be protected from all costs for remediation works if the building owners and landlord have a net worth of more than £2 million per in-scope building.

It is not our default expectation that building owners and landlords, including pension funds, will have to fund remediation works from their own resources: we want them to pursue those responsible for defective work, including associated companies of developers and manufacturers. That is why y there is now a toolkit of measures available under the Building Safety Act 2022 to enable that to happen.

We have retrospectively extended the limitation period under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act 1972 from 6 to 30 years; we have extended the reach of civil liability to associated companies of developers, including trusts, to ensure that some of the largest businesses in the sector who have used shell companies and other complex corporate structures to be pursed for contributions; and we have created a cause of action which will allow manufacturers of construction products to be pursued where defective or mis-sold products have been used in buildings.