Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison, and a delight to be called first. I congratulate the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) on securing this important debate. It is an important opportunity for me to raise with the Minister the many issues that my constituents are facing, which are similar to those that the hon. Member has just described. I welcome the Minister to her place as well. In having this debate, we remember all the victims and survivors of Grenfell.
I also thank all the people across the country who have been campaigning on cladding. I have talked about cladding many times and yet we are still here; that is my frustration. I thank the previous Minister for Building Safety, my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), for her work on the remediation Bill. The Bill will place stronger legal duties on landlords and freeholders to remediate unsafe cladding and other fire safety defects within clear timeframes. That is very welcome. I am also grateful to her for meeting with me to discuss a number of long-running cases that I face in Putney, and I am glad that the new Minister will continue that important work.
I welcome the work of the remediation enforcement unit, the leadership of Lord Roe, and the work of the Building Safety Regulator, but I do not know why they are causing so many delays. I understand that 69 people work for the remediation unit and 500 people work for the Building Safety Regulator. I ask the Minister to look into their work and find out why they are not able to move so many developments ahead at the pace needed. There are long delays, a lack of clear guidance and a lack of connection between the different bodies involved, as I will demonstrate.
I would like to draw the Minister’s attention to several developments that are covered by the developer remediation contract with major developers such as Barratt Redrow and Taylor Wimpey. Despite those contractual commitments, many residents in those developments continue to face lengthy delays before remediation works, which have been agreed and funded, can begin or be completed. In some cases, fire safety remediation has been delayed because structural defects need to be addressed first—if there are problems with the cladding, that often comes with problems with the entire building. In other cases, residents are waiting for final fire risk assessments, EWS1 forms, remediation plans, contractor appointments, updated certifications, smoke extraction systems or the installation of cavity barriers. In all those cases, it is the people in the building who have to chase things up.
One development in my constituency has been waiting for Network Rail to give permission for rear elevation works. Network Rail did not respond to the many repeated efforts by the project team to obtain the permission, so a specialist contractor had to be hired just to get a response, which added a lot of cost for leaseholders.
In another case, many defects have been found at the same time in the buildings of a really large development. Hundreds of families have moved out and moved back, and they have just been told that they will all have to move out again in a rota system, all while fighting for remediation. They have been worried about the safety of their building—they had a waking watch and then they did not—and they cannot sell their homes if they want to, so they cannot get on with their lives. The impact on all those residents of six years of fighting is unacceptable. They cannot sell or remortgage their homes, and they live in uncertainty about when their buildings will finally be made safe.
This is affecting social housing tenants too. For some badly affected social housing in Wandsworth, specifically the Eliot and Wentworth blocks in Wandsworth town, tenants have been waiting for the Building Safety Regulator to give the go-ahead. They cannot have essential kitchen and heating system replacements or other work in the building done until the cladding remediation is completed. The council submitted the application on 31 March. The Building Safety Regulator’s statutory response time for works to existing higher-risk buildings is eight weeks, but it immediately asked for an extension, which is worrying in itself. Here we are in September, and the council is still waiting for a response. The works will take 18 to 24 months. The blocks are in serious need of that repair and the other repairs they are waiting for.
Although I recognise that developers have obligations under the developer remediation contract, my constituents are understandably asking what more can be done by the unit, by Ministers and by the Building Safety Regulator when progress stalls for different reasons. The challenge is not whether a developer has signed up to a contract, but how quickly remediation can move through the assessment, approval and delivery stages, especially when there are other bodies involved.
To conclude, can the Minister explain how the Government intend to support and expedite remediation at developments already covered by the developer remediation contract? What steps can be taken to remove barriers that delay works, to speed up assessments and approvals, and to ensure that developers deliver at pace? The new legislation is very welcome, but leaseholders trapped in affected buildings need to know that existing remediation programmes will also be accelerated. They deserve not only stronger rules for the future in the upcoming Bill, but urgent action on the buildings that have already waited far too long for remediation to be completed.