Building Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-01-19
Topic: Housing
Mathew Richard Allen Rodda (Labour, Centre-left): I offer my support to the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan). My thoughts are still with her community five years after the disaster. I am sure that the whole House would echo that support for her community I also thank the Minister for allowing me to intervene and for partially addressing my points. However, I want to expand on them, because they are very relevant to our discussions. The challenges for many people in my community will come from the sheer complexity of the situation. It is extremely stressful for many leaseholders and tenants, as Members across the House have said. It is very difficult for them to live in buildings with enormous problems. In many cases, they have suffered from these problems for some years, living in a period of prolonged stress and difficulty—both emotional and financial stress—and I look forward to working with the Minister and the Government to try to deal with this very serious problem I will highlight some of the practical difficulties that we need to tackle, as the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), mentioned. The great difficulty for many residents in my constituency and others is that the routes to redress are limited. In many cases, the legal route that the Minister outlined will be extremely difficult Perhaps I can describe the type of blocks that I am referring to. Many of the cases in Reading and in Woodley—a town next to the main town of Reading—involve low-rise blocks, so there has been a delay because they are lower- rise. There are problems from issues other than cladding, and many tenants and leaseholders live in these blocks. In one of the biggest neighbourhoods in Reading, there is a large area called Chatham Place, with a series of blocks and a series of different problems, including wooden cladding, balconies and a range of other things. There is also a combination of leaseholders and social housing tenants in the same block. There are multiple problems, and the Minister is right to explore the legal route to redress, but there are very serious challenges because of the difficulty of getting a group of people together to take action and of tracing the legal entities, companies, developers—in some cases, the developers are overseas—architects and the range of others involved. I ask the Minister to work with Opposition Members to look at the issue again and explore other avenues for toughening up the Bill. I look forward to the Lords amendments and I ask him to come back and look at this Bill again in more detail I wish to make two other points, also on behalf of local authorities and housing associations. The first point, which was raised with me by a local council that represents a town centre ward in Reading, was the difficulty, even now, for local authority officers to understand the exact guidance on different types of cladding. The issue of flammable insulation in walls was raised with me and there does not seem to be a clear answer on that. Secondly, in my area, housing associations were some of the first building owners to take action. However, as was rightly mentioned, these housing associations and their tenants could inadvertently be penalised. Please will the Minister look into that and provide reassurance?