Contribution
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on introducing the Bill, and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Blake, to her new responsibilities on the Front Bench.
At the moment, there is legislation that protects leaseholders and shared owners, but not all buildings are protected, not all leaseholders are protected, and not all safety defects are protected. It is worth making the point that the people we are talking about did before they bought what every noble Lord would have done: they employed qualified solicitors and qualified surveyors, none of whom found any problem at all. Likewise, the lenders who supplied the mortgage did exactly the same. So the people we are talking about are in no way responsible for the problems that confront them.
What are these problems? They include non-cladding defects not being fully funded in government schemes, leaving buildings half safe; non-qualifying leaseholders facing ruinous costs, which is not the position in Wales, where they have no such exclusion; eye-watering buildings insurance premiums; high service charges; and costly and ineffective waking watches. Unlike other home owners, these leaseholders cannot sell and move if they need to move for a new job or if their family has grown.
One particular injustice, touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, relates to leaseholders in a building under 11 metres with unsafe cladding—perhaps the same cladding as Grenfell had—where the insurers insist on remediation as a condition of insurance. Those leaseholders are not protected by the Bill.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, progress has been unacceptably slow. Some 2,146 buildings are still waiting to start and, of the 1,833 that have been completed, many are incomplete because only the funding for the cladding has been granted.
The previous Government did a lot, but not enough. They were rightly held to account by the then Opposition before the election. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, spoke of
“the utmost importance that this building safety issue moves forward without any further delay”.
Crucially, she did not confine the crisis to cladding; she referred to families trapped with
“dangerous, flammable defects, whether that is cladding, missing fire breaks or wooden balconies”.—[Official Report, 27/3/24; cols. 770-771.]
Perhaps more relevant is a commitment made from the then Opposition Front Bench on 26 April 2022, when the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, spoke in support of an Opposition amendment:
“We on these Benches have consistently argued that all leaseholders should be protected from the cost of remediating historical cladding and non-cladding defects and the associated secondary costs, irrespective of circumstance”.
She then criticised the then Government:
“In sticking rigidly to the position that a minority of leaseholders will have to pay sums that, although capped, are still significant, in order to resolve a scandal that they played no part in causing, we believe that the Government are not acting equitably and will not ensure that the most vulnerable leaseholders will be protected”.
She concluded that:
“If the Minister is unable to accept it, we will seek to divide the House, with a view to ensuring that all leaseholders are fully protected”.—[Official Report, 26/4/22; cols. 205-206.]
When the Government produce their own Bill—and it would be good to hear when that might happen—I hope the Bill will fulfil all the commitments that I have just mentioned. In fairness to the new Administration, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has recognised the stress and emotional upset caused by these issues, and particularly referred to Vista Tower, where leaseholders are facing a second round of works to fix the non-cladding defects left untouched and during the first remedial project.
All leaseholders and shared owners need to be protected from building safety costs, with no arbitrary height, residency, wealth or ownership exclusions. All serious building safety defects should be covered, including internal and structural defects. There should be a government delivery and funding backstop across all funding schemes, which fixes first and then recovers from responsible parties later, so people have certainty and confidence restored to the housing market.
Nine years after Grenfell, leaseholders and shared owners should not still be navigating a maze of height thresholds, qualifying leases, partial schemes and voluntary promises. The Bill begins with the right moral and practical principle: innocent leaseholders did not cause the problem; they must not pay for it.