Building Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2022-04-20
Topic: Housing
Rebecca Long-Bailey (Labour, Centre-left): Like many Members on both sides of the House, I welcomed the Secretary of State’s assurances to Parliament earlier this year that leaseholders "are blameless, and it is morally wrong that they should be the ones asked to pay the price."—[Official Report, 10 January 2022; Vol. 706, c. 283.] However, despite the progress that the Secretary of State and Members across the House have undoubtedly made on this issue, there are still inadequate legal protections in the Bill to ensure that residents and leaseholders do not bear the costs of a crisis that they did not cause. I therefore support Lords amendments that seek to widen the scope of the Bill, including the amendment to reduce leaseholder contributions to zero, tabled by Baroness Hayman, and the proposal for an extension of leaseholder protections to buildings of all heights, tabled by the Earl of Lytton and supported by Lord Blencathra and Lord Young. I thank Members of this House for their hard work, and I thank all the cladding campaign groups, many of whose members are present today. I want to mention in particular Manchester Cladiators, which has supported residents throughout Greater Manchester through rain and shine in their hour of need Those campaigners have to keep going, because the sad reality is that many residents in my constituency still fall through the gaps in the proposals that the Secretary of State has outlined so far. Indeed, a recent survey by End our Cladding Scandal of more than 2,200 properties and buildings over 11 metres tall shows that more than 64% of leaseholders outside London and more than 83% of leaseholders in London will not be protected from the costs of non-cladding fire safety defects. The recent pledges from developers to remediate the buildings that they have built over the last 30 years sadly do not go far enough, and there is continued ambiguity about the treatment of non-cladding fire safety defects. Leaseholders in buildings that are under 11 metres remain unprotected, and there is still no funding commitment from house builders for the £4 billion required for the remediation of buildings where the developer no longer exists. As we have heard today, there also remains a huge question mark over social housing Further to that, we still do not know what residents who have already received devastating demands for payment should do. There is no detail at all on how to recoup any sums of money already spent by residents, as sinking funds are depleted to catastrophic levels. For example, one development in my constituency has been unable to receive support from the waking watch relief fund simply because the residents acted proactively to try to reduce the cost of their waking watch by agreeing to fund the installation of a fire alarm system. Because they did this prior to the waking watch relief fund’s cut-off date of 17 December 2020, their application to the fund was rejected. Sadly, had they waited and incurred even more waking watch costs, their application probably would have been successful. The Minister must agree that that makes no sense at all, and this is just one case The Secretary of State informed Parliament in January that he would pursue statutory protection for leaseholders, and that nothing would be off the table. The Bill does not give that protection, and all I ask today is that the Government support the amendments that would protect leaseholders and go some way towards providing that statutory protection that they all deserve.