Joe Powell

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. At the very least, there needs to be independent scrutiny of these assessments so that people can feel reassured that someone is checking whether they pass muster. It should be about the whole of the building being made safe—I think the Secretary of State referred to that. Cladding defects are an extremely important component, but there are internal fire defects that also need to be assessed, which have contributed to rising costs. I welcome the remediation backstop in the Bill that will give Homes England and local authorities the power to step in, but that should not only be a tool of last resort. It should be something that gets the system moving as quickly as possible, because leaseholders in particular have ended up shouldering the burden in recent years. To give one example—others have already spoken about leaseholders they represent—residents at Shaftesbury Place in Earl’s Court approached me in 2024 after receiving huge increases in their service charge, driven by a disputed fire risk assessment which led to a massive spike in insurance premiums for the building from £15,000 a year to £310,000. The following year it went to £375,000. For one leaseholder, their annual bill for the insurance went from £269 to £4,146. The landlord, Notting Hill Genesis, which is in a shared ownership scheme, told leaseholders that the insurance rise was linked to a fire risk assessment that it had commissioned, but residents disputed it alongside the classification of the building as high-rise. In fact, it had even miscalculated the number of storeys in the building when it did the assessment, which obviously undermined confidence in that assessment. The Building Safety Regulator later agreed and removed the building from the high-rise register. Until recently, several residents were still receiving legal threats about the non-payment of those charges, causing them huge worry and anxiety—let alone their concerns about the value of their investment in the shared ownership scheme.