Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lady Pinnock on presenting her Private Member’s Bill—the Leaseholder Remediation (Building Safety) Bill—to your Lordships’ House. It is a vital tool in remedying the remaining outstanding issues arising from the failures that led to the Grenfell Tower fire and many other fires over many years. I also want to thank her for her determined campaign over the years, not just in your Lordships’ House but broadly across the country, working with leaseholder groups, to resolve the issues for leaseholders. I declare my interest as a vice-chair of the All-Party Fire Safety and Rescue group. The Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, stands as a reminder of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 in which 72 died, 70 were injured and 223 escaped, the victims of the Lakanal House fire of 2009 in which six died and 20 were injured, and survivors whose lives were all irrevocably changed. As others have already said, thousands of buildings remain unsafe, and government funding covers only the replacement of cladding. The noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, rightly said just now that the criminal liability following the Grenfell Tower fire has not been resolved and this must continue to be a priority for the Met Police. I understand there are still a large number of open cases, which should be encouraging, but I hope that they include manufacturers of construction products, too. I want to focus on how the Bill clarifies and strengthens where responsibilities sit, especially for leaseholders who have, through no fault of their own, been severely let down by the state not closing loopholes, and by failures of builders and the housing sector. It is needed because, despite many reports and reviews, including Acts of Parliament such as the Building Safety Act 2022, and building standards statutory instruments, the developers and builders are still refusing to shoulder the responsibility for their failings, or for their suppliers and subcontractors, and are expecting everyone else to do so, including leaseholders, who face not just inexplicable bills for failures by others but, because of that, find their flats unmortgageable, unsellable and unlettable. It is an absolute scandal, and it is extraordinary that it requires a Private Member’s Bill to remedy the issue, given that the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and the Hackitt report made it clear how standards needed to change urgently and who was responsible. It is worth remembering that the problems uncovered after Grenfell included cladding panels on the outside of the building that were not appropriately fireproofed but which were sold as such and which contractors put up on the building, some of which were not inspected properly. There is no doubt that this was against regulations, and the Judith Hackitt report exposed many other breaches of regulation, not just at Grenfell but, as more buildings were checked post Grenfell, across buildings recently built or renovated. Scandals have been uncovered across the country. In one tower block, a whistleblower reported that, the week before a fire inspection, all the fire doors by the stairs on each floor were removed and replaced by approved ones, and a few days after the inspection, the new ones were removed and the old ones were returned. This was not a few pockets of bad practice; this was illegal practice in order to save money—illegal practice that could cost the lives of residents in the event of a fire, as happened at Grenfell. The last Conservative Government believed that the Building Safety Act remedied the legal loopholes, but, as my noble friend Lady Thornhill and others have said, it excludes buildings below 11 metres in height, as if they never caught fire and as if illegal cladding were safer at a lower level. The Grenfell Tower fire started on the fourth floor and was immediately dangerous at that level and above. My noble friend Lady Thornhill listed the other building defects not covered by the BSA, of which there are many. We need to face up to the fact that the remediation work on the 4,000-plus buildings over 11 metres is still nowhere near complete, while thousands of leaseholders in buildings under 11 metres are still caught in a Catch-22, with unsafe blocks of flats with non-compliant ACM cladding and developers insisting that leaseholders should pay, rather than those that actually put up the illegal cladding. The Bill in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, addresses these points and puts the responsibility where it lies, back with those developer and construction companies. This Bill clearly sets out the liability and recovery arrangements, remediation obligations, responsible parties and contractual arrangements. My noble friend Lady Pinnock and others have outlined the appalling effect that this remediation crisis has had on leaseholders, who have watched their flats lose substantial value, so that many are now in negative equity and the sales market has stultified. Some leaseholders are also being asked to pay for 24-hour fire watch on their building, even though it is clear that the defective work that has made it unsafe should be the responsibility of the developer or contractor. This Bill remedies that. The other problem is that it is evident that, in many cases, there are still no real deadlines or timelines for making homes safe. The G15 organisation, which represents the largest housing associations in and around Greater London, says that it will take until 2036 to complete all its remediations—nearly two decades after the dreadful fire at Grenfell Tower. But other owners of large amounts of housing are not even saying when their work will be completed. I say to the Minister that, if the Government do not accept my noble friend Lady Pinnock’s Bill, the current slew of lawfare will continue and possibly grow. The courts have already had a number of cases. In URS Corporation Ltd v BDW Trading, a developer sought to recover the costs of remedial works undertaken to address the structural defects in a residential development. This was in the Supreme Court, which rightly disagreed. My noble friend Lady Pinnock referred to the massive hike in insurance costs for leaseholders. In Tobias v Grosvenor Freeholds (The Central), at the First-tier Tribunal, a landlord had the benefit of an insurance-backed scheme that could have provided a route to remediation costs. The tribunal said that the availability of insurance did not take away responsibility under a statutory regime of remediation of defects. So one party was saying that it did not need to pay as the other party had insurance, even though the responsibility was clearly theirs. This Bill provides clarity about that responsibility. I cited these cases very briefly to illustrate a key point: nine years on from the Grenfell Tower fire, some parts of the industry are still trying to get out of their responsibilities, especially their financial responsibilities, often leaving leaseholders in the firing line. This short, clear Bill closes many of the legal and contractual responsibilities, which will resolve issues for leaseholders of today and tomorrow, and ensure that developers, builders, contractors and housing bodies must take responsibility for their roles under law. I hope that the Minister will confirm that the Government will provide the justice that leaseholders deserve and agree to the progress of the Bill.