Building Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-01-19
Topic: Housing
Robert John Blackman (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chairman of the Select Committee. He and I have spent many happy hours poring over this draft Bill, in the first place, and, going forward, different reports Essentially, there are four separate categories on remediation that fit within the Building Safety Bill. The first, as everyone agrees without question, is, for tall buildings of seven storeys and above, removing the cladding and making the building safe. The second is the buildings of six storeys and below for which the Government came up with the forced loan scheme. I am delighted to see the death of that scheme. I could never see how it was going to work, so that is good news. The other two categories are the tall buildings with fire safety defects and the buildings of six storeys and below with fire safety defects. We can all agree that the one set of people who should not have to pay for remedying this are the leaseholders, because they never designed them and they never knew anything about them before they moved in. However, this scandal still goes on. Only last week, a planning application was presented to the planning committee at Tower Hamlets for a building of 52 storeys with only one staircase as a route to escape. The building industry does not show any signs of correcting what has been done, so we have to correct it I take my right hon. Friend the Minister’s remarks seriously. I look forward to the amendments that are going to be moved in the other place that I hope we can then debate here. However, these are very complex areas and there are immense questions to be answered. I well remember that when we debated the Bill that became the Fire Safety Act 2021, we were told that protecting leaseholders should not be done then but we should wait for the Building Safety Bill—and here we are, right now. The crunch issue is that leaseholders up and down the country have received enormous bills. Some have made arrangements to pay; some have even paid them. They are told, "Tough—you’ve paid and you won’t be compensated as a result." If we had moved the amendments to the Fire Safety Act, we would have protected those leaseholders, but we failed to do so As I have said to the Secretary of State, I welcome his commitment to resolve this issue, but I trust that when we come to the amendments on remediation, we will do two things. The first is that we will retrospectively put a date on what happens. It will not be acceptable to wait until this Bill becomes law and facilitate the unscrupulous individuals who may bill the leaseholders between now and then, which would be outrageous The other issue that is terribly important in this whole process is that at some stage, with regard to all the buildings that we are talking about, someone signed off on their being in accordance with regulations. Insurance covers that particular aspect, so here is an alternative solution. Given that insurance companies insured the people who signed these buildings off, and they were clearly not in accordance with the regulations at the time, let us make claims against the insurance companies that still exist and could be made to pay for this remediation. That would be a much better solution than either the taxpayer paying or robbing the leaseholders. It would at least give us some protection I welcome the Government amendments, and I welcome the conversion that has taken place in the Department to what the Select Committee said in the first place. We are making progress. We are almost there. We have only a little a little way to go before every single one of our recommendations has been endorsed. We look forward to that happening, and indeed to having a Bill of which we can all be proud, which protects leaseholders and protects the industry for the future.