Leaseholder Remediation (Building Safety) Bill [HL]
Friday, 11 September 2026
Contributions
Second Reading
Moved by
Baroness Pinnock
That the Bill be now read a second time.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, the terrible Grenfell tragedy exposed serious, deliberate and dangerous building practices that put, and still put, lives at risk. The estimate from the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee is that 3 million people may be affected. There are between 5,900 and 7,400 buildings over 11 metres with unsafe cladding, and the National Audit Office estimates that between 9,000 and 12,000 buildings of 11 metres—or five stories—or more have fire safety defects. Of those with unsafe cladding, the latest government figures show that over 2,200 buildings of 11 metres or more have not even started remediation. The impact on leaseholders is profound. Inside Housing reported that one in five contemplated suicide when faced with the enormity of the safety scandal. Insurance premiums soared, with some leaseholders paying up to £2,000 for a flat, and the average being 56% higher than those without defects. Service charges and waking watch costs add to the significant financial burden on leaseholders. Leaseholders are paying a very high price when they have done absolutely nothing wrong. The bricks, mortar and dangerous cladding are not theirs. Others are profiting, or have done, from this scandal: construction companies, contractors and material suppliers. My Private Member’s Bill seeks final and swift justice for the thousands of leaseholders whose lives have been for ever harmed by the scandal of deliberate wrongdoing by others. The principles underlying the Bill are these. First, leaseholders will not be liable for any costs incurred by remediation of building safety defects. Secondly, leaseholders must not have costs included in their service charges, and any who have already fallen foul of this dubious practice can apply to the First-tier Tribunal for repayment. Thirdly, all leaseholders will be covered by the provisions in the Bill, whatever the height of their building. The Government have always argued that buildings below 11 metres are a much lower risk and so are not covered by the Building Safety Act. However, one leaseholder in a low-rise block has a bill of over £65,000 for remediation. Under the provisions of this Bill, the 1.3 million leaseholders in low-rise flats will also, rightly, be protected. Fourthly, all systemic defects, as well as unsafe planning, are covered by the Bill, and are listed in Clause 3. Those four principles form the bedrock of the Bill. The second part of the Bill defines liability and, for the first time, includes the manufacturers or suppliers of materials that contributed to a systemic defect. The manufacturers of the highly flammable cladding that contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire have so far escaped liability. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry report spells out their culpability, and the police have yet to bring prosecutions. This Bill rights that wrong. The Government have focused their efforts on the removal of unsafe cladding. The failure also to concentrate on other safety defects, such as the lack of fire stopping or compartmentation, has resulted in buildings being deemed safe once cladding has been removed, when they are not. Part 3 of the Bill deals with getting the work done by setting a clear, legal timeframe for work to be completed. Thousands of leaseholders are living in dangerous buildings nearly 10 years on from the Grenfell fire. This will not do. People deserve much better than the procrastination that has been permitted. The Government’s remediation acceleration plan demonstrates an understanding of the need but is inadequate in its failure to enforce timely action. The Bill radically changes that approach by expecting a remediation plan within 28 days of the Building Safety Regulator confirming that systemic defects exist. Further, the Government are required to publish a new and more demanding remediation acceleration plan, including target dates for the completion of work. Clause 17 details the timeframe for completion of remediation. Once a plan has been issued, there are 24 months to get the work done and, where defects are identified as being urgent, six months. There are penalties too in the Bill for non-compliant developers, as they will be banned from involvement in any residential building work and from applying for such. So far, manufacturers of, for example, the ACM cladding that largely contributed to the deaths of 72 people, have avoided financial penalties for their failures, some of which were deliberate. Under Clause 12, those responsible for remediation will be able to recoup costs from manufacturers where the product failed to meet the relevant British standard or European harmonised standard. Such action is long overdue. To protect residents from future building disasters, any new development over 11 metres or five storeys has to hold a developer’s licence from the Building Safety Regulator. Part 5 of the Bill enhances the rights of leaseholders to vital information about the building and any defects. A protected leaseholder under the Bill will also have new rights to claim against the responsible person for any loss as a result of a systemic defect. An award from the First-tier Tribunal can include damages due to identified losses and any remediation costs already paid by the leaseholder. For too long, leaseholders have been battling for justice without direct support from an identified person. The Bill creates a leaseholder remediation ombudsman to do just that. The Bill puts the rights of leaseholders first and foremost. For the first time, all buildings, of whatever height, are included. The Bill lays the responsibility and the costs of remediation where they belong: on developers, contractors, and material manufacturers. Leaseholders have new legally enforceable rights and dedicated support where needed. Leaseholders will be fully protected from all remediation costs, with a legal route for recouping those already charged. I have many to thank for their knowledge and expertise in forming this comprehensive measure: the Property Institute, End Our Cladding Scandal and, in particular, Adam Ball and Mark Fisher. The Bill demands that justice for leaseholders is at the heart of putting right the scandalous and disastrous behaviour of those responsible. I beg to move.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
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.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on this building safety Bill. I admire it for its hard-line radicalism in firmly establishing that, if a residential leasehold building has serious systemic defects, the leaseholder who did not design, build or sign off the works should not be the person who pays for the clean-up. One proposed change that is quite radical, as we have heard, is the no minimum height or storey threshold. Although I tend to agree with both the Labour Government and the Tories before them that there are fewer fire safety issues in lower-level buildings, I would rather the law was less rigid about risk assessment than using the tape measure approach and fetishising 11 metres. I also appreciate that the Bill is aiming to expand protections for all leaseholders, when it comes to building safety and regardless of which storey their flat is on. But I have one concern: could this backfire and share the miseries caused by the building safety regime downwards, even to ground-floor flats? This matters because of the unintended consequences of excessive risk-averse regulations. After the tragedy of Grenfell, there was a rush to caution that was understandable, but that then sometimes led to the law resulting in unnecessary work being commissioned under the banner of safety. I tried to push back against the “remediation at all costs” mentality driving debates on the then Building Safety Bill. That well-intentioned legislation has created layers and layers of costly bureaucracy—think of Part 4— and has contributed to spiralling and exorbitant service charges and maintenance costs for buildings over 18 metres. This in turn has had a devastating impact on individual leaseholders and even the leasehold property market. According to Hamptons, 37% of England’s leasehold flats have service charges exceeding a threshold at which many mortgage lenders will not lend, leaving affected flats effectively unmortgageable, hard to insure and extremely difficult to sell. Do not let us make lower-storey leasehold flats fall into that sort of quagmire. I appreciate that this Bill intends to move building safety away from service charge recovery towards a more punitive enforcement mechanism to make developers, construction, the supply chain et cetera pay, but all the time I was reading the Bill I kept considering that the real culprit here is leasehold itself. Indeed, leaseholders want to take responsibility for their own homes, but cannot. You have bought your home, and you assume that you will have control over ensuring it is safe, but then you discover that, due to some feudal legacy, you are a mere tenant in bondage to a landlord or freeholder, dependent on them to decide what actions are needed to keep you and your home safe. What we really need to do is to end leasehold for good, but we have been talking about abolishing leasehold since the 1880s. The inherent draconian unfairness of the system has been accepted by Ministers from all parties and championed, indeed, so eloquently and frequently by our own Chief Whip—well, when he was in opposition. Abolition was then a totemic commitment of the Labour manifesto, and I was excited. But here we are, depending on the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, to pick up the rotten pieces of another Government reneged-on promise to end what, to be honest, is bleeding people dry and causing widespread misery for millions of householders. The personal tragedies that this causes are documented very well by groups such as the Free Leaseholders campaign, and it is just shameful. We are reduced to trying to make ever greater numbers of organisations liable for flat safety to take the pressure off leaseholders. Even if this Bill delivers leaseholders better rights—certainly it does on paper—I am worried that its sweeping powers to make everyone else pay will create other regressive social consequences: for example, building owners swamped with information requests; or developers facing pipeline paralysis; or the floodgates being opened to multiple litigation disputes. At a time when housebuilding numbers are so low—it is actually a crisis that we are not building enough houses—I would like the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, to respond on how she believes we can balance the warning from the law firm Devonshire that some of the sanctions in the Bill will “grind construction to a halt, put a pause on ongoing work … until every deficit is rectified”. Is not that just the sort of barrier to growth that we do not need when it comes to urgently needed housebuilding? The country needs that kind of growth to happen. To finish, as the Bill covers conversions and refurbishments as well, it will not be just big construction but small building firms and contractors as well that could be in scope for blame, and that just worries me.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, I, too, take this opportunity to welcome the Minister to her post. I support this Bill and, in doing so, I must first pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Pinnock. As our local government spokesperson, she has lived and breathed building safety for years. I, on the other hand, am the housing spokesman, which means that, while she does the heavy lifting and gets to grips with the complex technicalities, I get the distinct pleasure of standing up here and loudly agreeing with her. Let us be honest: agreeing with my noble friend Lady Pinnock on this issue is probably the easiest job in Parliament today, because we on these Benches believe that she is entirely and profoundly right. We all have an interest in ensuring that any legislative framework is workable, of course, proportionate—and that takes into account what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, just said—and capable of being delivered. Too many leaseholders continue to face uncertainty, financial hardship and lengthy delays while defects remain unresolved. Campaigners have argued that stronger protections and clearer obligations are required if confidence is to be restored and remediation accelerated. I noticed from some of the latest figures that sales of flats have stalled, and it is not surprising. This is a big sword of Damocles hanging over their construction. I strongly agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, regarding leaseholders and those in shared ownership, for whom he is a great champion. I can only do the nodding dog in the back of the car, but I welcome his expertise in this area. There is much common ground between this Bill and the Government’s forthcoming remediation legislation. Both seek to ensure that unsafe buildings are remediated —tick—and that those responsible are held to account. The difference is largely one of emphasis. The Government’s Bill will, I expect, focus on getting buildings fixed as quickly as possible. My noble friend is focused on making sure that the people living in them are treated fairly while this happens. Frankly, we need both. A building can be remediated without a leaseholder being protected, but that would still leave an injustice unresolved. These two Bills are not rivals; they complement each other. The Building Safety Act 2022 was a decent start, but it left behind gaps so wide you could drive a fire engine through them. The most glaring of these is the arbitrary 11-metre-high rule, which has been mentioned. I have spent a lot of time looking at housing, and I am still searching for the scientific evidence showing that smoke checks the height of a building before it decides to be dangerous. If you live in a flat that is 11.1 metres high, the law shields your wallet. If your flat is 10.9 metres high, in essence, the law says, “Best of luck, here’s a five-figure bill for repairs”. It is absurd. A building’s height should not dictate human safety. This Bill would sensibly strip that artificial barrier away. We also have to talk about what counts as a defect. The current system seems to assume that, if the cladding is safe, the building is paradise. But leaseholders are routinely hit with massive bills for things such as rotting wooden balconies, faulty fire doors and internal wiring that looks like it was put together by an optimistic amateur. My noble friend’s Bill introduces the concept of systemic defects. It says quite simply that, if the developer builds it badly or wrong, the leaseholder should not have to pay to fix it. Imagine buying a brand new car and, several hundred miles down the road, it breaks down while you are in the driving seat, and you are told, “Well, it was a defect that was caused in the factory, but you’ve got to foot the bill to put it right”. I think you would, quite rightly, have a few choice words to say. This is why I hope Ministers will look carefully at some of the strongest features of this Bill. Its wider protections for leaseholders, its broader approach to building safety defects and its challenge to the current height thresholds all have the potential to strengthen the Government’s legislation. Ministers have a wonderful opportunity here to stop tweaking at the edges, look at what we are proposing today and steel their nerves. They can absorb these provisions, scrap the height limits, expand the definition of “defects” and give their own upcoming legislation some real teeth. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, regarding leasehold tenure and look forward to working with her on the forthcoming Bill. I am delighted to support my noble friend, and I urge the Government to steal the best bits of this Bill as soon as possible.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to welcome the Minister to her new role. It is also a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, who reinforced the very strong case that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, set out. I declare my interest as chair of a charity pro bono that owns student accommodation in London, some of which falls within the current limits under the Building Safety Act and would certainly fall within the extended limits of this proposed legislation. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, certainly knows a thing or two about this area. She led the council in Kirklees and spoke from those Benches at the time of Grenfell, nearly 10 years ago. I recall that because I was the Minister in the Lords who spoke on that area. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham was also in the department at that time. I little thought that, 10 years later, we would still be looking at these issues and promises that remain unfulfilled. Successive Governments must take a share of the blame for that. There is no doubt of that. There have certainly been some constructive measures in the Building Safety Act and much compensation has been paid, but much remains to be done. I will say a little bit about that later. It is impossible to think of a constructive case against the civil liability that this legislation deals with at under 11 metres. There is a lot of detail to be looked at in how it applies, capacity issues and so on, but the fact that less serious issues are confronted below 11 metres, which I accept, does not mean that there is not individual harm done to many leaseholders and the many people affected by this, which should be rectified. I back that wholly. I back Clause 12 in particular, which would make provision for liability on manufacturers, who have much to do to fill in some of the gaps that remain in liability. Local government certainly has a share of responsibility, but a lot of the providers of the material have yet to step up to the plate to share some of that responsibility. I have no hesitation in saying that. Therefore, I would like to say something about the clear criminal liability issues, which are still to be dealt with and which this legislation does not deal with. I understand why, but here we are, nearly 10 years after the Grenfell fire, and nobody has been held responsible. It is absolutely astounding. No company has been prosecuted. That has added complications because the provider of the cladding, Arconic, which was damned in the Hackitt review, has not been banned by the Government. It is still a supplier to the Government, as far as I tell. Answers to me indicate that it is still supplying. The Government’s answer to that, no doubt rooted in some legal advice, is that it cannot be banned because this is sub judice and that banning it would have an effect on possible prosecutions. However, those prosecutions are not happening, so the whole thing is circular. It has not stopped the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea from putting Arconic on a list so that it is not used there, so I encourage the Government to ban it. That is what needs to be done. The company has been held liable for damages. Its insurers have come forward and the company has paid some compensation. However, at the same time shareholders are doing very well out of it. They have been paid massive dividends. I am a capitalist. I think we are all in favour of a market economy, but it works only if people are held responsible for what they are doing, and that has not happened. I certainly do not blame the Minister, who is new in post. Nor do I blame the Government, as it has been successive Governments. However, this needs tackling and something needs to be done. As we all know, justice delayed is justice denied. It is an outstanding issue; there have been no prosecutions after 10 years. Memories fade, witnesses die, victims die. This needs tackling. The Government, who are the people who can put this right, must do something about that. In the meantime, I am strongly in favour of this legislation. There is much detail that needs to be looked at as it moves forward, but I am sure that we are all behind the principle. We need to look to the detail—either in this legislation or the Government’s proposed legislation—to make sure that we draw an end to this for the victims of Grenfell, so that they feel satisfied that we have done something about it and that no future Grenfells are dealt with as this one has been.
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.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate in the place—just for today—of my noble friends Lord Jamieson and Lady O’Neill of Bexley. I too welcome the Minister to her place. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. We speak often, on our third floor, and she has spoken on these matters tirelessly and from the heart for a very long time. It really is a very long time, for the House knows only too well why we are here. More than nine years on from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the consequences of systemic building failures are still being felt across the country. The Public Accounts Committee estimates that up to 3 million people may have been affected by the cladding crisis. As of this year, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, between 5,900 and 7,400 residential buildings of at least 11 metres in height have or had unsafe cladding requiring work. However, only 38% have completed remediation, 16% have started and—the truly appalling figure— 47% have not begun at all. This is clearly not good enough. From these Benches, we accept that successive Governments have struggled with this issue, but this is not progress, with many thousands of residents and leaseholders living in unsafe or unsaleable homes. We therefore welcome the intention behind the Bill, which seeks to extend protections, impose enforceable duties on freeholders and developers, and give leaseholders meaningful routes to secure remediation when others fail to act. We agree that leaseholders must be protected and the pace of remediation must accelerate dramatically. However, the Bill raises some significant questions. First, on scope, the Bill applies to any residential building containing one or more leasehold properties, with no minimum height or storey threshold. As we have heard, many speakers have spoken about the benefit of this, but do the Government know how many additional buildings this would bring into scope? Do they have an assessment of the cost implications? Do they have a plan to ensure that the system can cope with the increased caseload? Secondly, this brings me to enforcement. The Bill substantially expands the powers of the Building Safety Regulator, but the regulator is already under intense pressure over significant backlogs and regulatory delays. I think we should say that, under the stewardship of the noble Lord, Lord Roe of West Wickham, decision rates are showing signs of improvement and new turnaround targets have been set. But in this context, there is a question as to whether it is wise to increase the regulator’s powers further at this point. Would the Government ensure that the regulator has the capacity to administer the expanded responsibilities the Bill would create? Thirdly, on the Government’s own housing targets, Ministers have pledged to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, yet only 208,600 net additional properties were delivered last year—a fall from the previous year. On current trends, the Government are on course to miss their target by 400,000 homes. What assessment has been made of the impact of the Bill on housing supply? Leaseholders should not bear the cost of historic failures that they did not create. The previous Conservative Government established that principle through the Building Safety Act, remediation orders, contribution orders and the responsible actors scheme. Over 50 developers signed the building safety repairs pledge, yet progress has been and remains far too slow, as we have said. Let us not forget that behind every statistic is a family living with fear, uncertainty and financial strain. These are people unable to sell their homes, facing unaffordable insurance premiums and receiving service charge demands they cannot pay. As I think everybody has said in this Chamber, these are people who have done nothing wrong and done everything right—saved, bought responsibly and invested in their future—only to find themselves trapped by failures they did not cause. The Bill seeks to address those failures, and we on these Benches support its aims—and, on a personal note, and echoing the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, I really applaud the inclusion of manufacturers for the first time—but, as His Majesty’s Opposition, we will scrutinise its implications carefully and hope that the Government will do the same. I think we can all agree that leaseholders deserve clarity, competence and urgency, not another cycle of delay. We must be sure that this legislation would deliver the protection, accountability and acceleration that has eluded us all for far too long—and, if it is not this legislation, that the Government’s own legislation will properly address the wrongs that the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, seeks to put right.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for bringing this Private Member’s Bill to the House on all these important issues, and I thank all those who have contributed for their very thoughtful and sensitive contributions. The tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives, was a profound failure that should never have happened, and we must ensure that the lessons of Grenfell are learned. It is right that all those affected are at the forefront of our thoughts while dealing with the issues before us. I start by being completely open and honest. I share completely the concerns of noble Lords about the ongoing cladding safety crisis. As we have heard, over 4,000 buildings have been identified as requiring remediation, and too many residents still face uncertainty about their homes and their finances as a result. This crisis continues to leave people stuck in unsuitable homes, while some of those responsible have yet to contribute towards the costs, as we have heard throughout these discussions. That is why the Government committed in our manifesto to accelerating remediation, making those responsible pay and better protecting leaseholders from costs through the remediation acceleration plan. While the Government share the noble Baroness’s objectives, the question before us is not one of intent but of whether the mechanisms proposed in this Bill are the right means of achieving those objectives. The Government’s position is that they are not. Some proposals in the Bill could create worse outcomes for people affected. For example, the noble Baroness’s Bill, in Clauses 1 to 5, seeks to prevent leaseholders from contributing towards remediation costs in all circumstances. Although this is an understandable ambition, it risks creating significant legal and practical challenges. A blanket prohibition is likely to give rise to delays due to concerns around property rights, and it risks greater uncertainty over how remediation will be financed. The proposal also overlaps with existing leaseholder protections established by the Building Safety Act 2022, creating uncertainty about how the different statutory schemes interact. So, while the Government share the objective of further protecting leaseholders from costs, we do not believe that the blanket approach is appropriate. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Young, the Government are considering how we can go further to protect leaseholders from current and future building safety issues, particularly groups not covered by existing protections. There are proposals in the Bill that have already been delivered through changes made since the Grenfell Tower tragedy; for example, we share the noble Baroness’s ambition, proposed in Clause 11, that developers should be strongly incentivised to remediate. The previous Government—full credit to them—introduced the responsible actors scheme in the Building Safety Act, which led 53 developers to sign a contract with the Government to remediate, or to pay to remediate, over 2,600 buildings at a cost to themselves of around £4.2 billion. Any developer that has signed that contract and fails to meet its remediation obligations faces severe commercial consequences. We are also concerned that Clause 11 could have significant unintended consequences. In practice, it could prevent developers with outstanding remediation liabilities from building new homes until defects have been remediated or funded. As outlined by the noble Baronesses, Lady Fox and Lady Sanderson, that risks reducing housing supply and undermining the resources available to support remediation itself. The Government also recognise the proposals to strengthen enforcement in Clauses 7, 8 and 17. We strongly agree with all those who raised the point, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, that construction product manufacturers should play their part in meeting the costs of remediating unsafe buildings where their products have played a part in making buildings unsafe, as highlighted in Clause 12. Although we share these objectives, we do not consider that those approaches would most effectively achieve her desired outcomes. That brings me to the forthcoming remediation Bill. The Government will seek to address these issues through legislation and wider work within the department, which will happen—in response to the noble Lord, Lord Young—when parliamentary time allows. The objectives of that Bill are fourfold. First, we will create certainty over which buildings require cladding remediation and the standard to which that remediation must be completed. Secondly, the Bill will give regulators the powers they need to hold blockers to account, ensuring that those responsible for addressing failures do so more quickly. Thirdly, we will strengthen the law so that construction products manufacturers can, as I have said, be held to account and those who have paid for remediation have a clearer route to recover their costs. Finally, the Bill will ensure that all residents have a route for cladding remediation, even where responsible entities fail, disappear or refuse to act. So, while I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for bringing attention to so many important matters, our focus is on delivering solutions through the existing framework and the remediation Bill. I turn briefly to other points raised. There is enormous concern from across the House about buildings under 11 metres. I want to reassure the House that we have launched new funding, delivered through an extension of the cladding safety scheme, providing access to funding through remediation of unsafe cladding on a number of multi-occupied residential buildings under 11 metres in England. This will be prioritised towards high-risk buildings, focusing on those with the most serious cladding and fire defects. On leasehold protections, those responsible for historic building safety defects must pay for them. Again, we are very mindful of the regime established by the Building Safety Act and we have to make sure that we strike a careful balance between the rights of all parties. We have to recognise that some freeholders have no connection to the original defects. On internal defects, all leaseholders can access support for cladding remediation. Most leaseholders cannot be charged for internal building safety defects through their service charge beyond specified annual caps. Obviously, enormous concern has been expressed about the wider leaseholder system reform. I do not have time to go into that, but it will of course be an issue that we pick up very seriously as we go forward. I cannot emphasise enough the need for construction products manufacturers’ redress. So far, I do not think there has been a single contribution from that avenue towards the work. My time is coming to an end. I stress to the noble Baroness—we have had a conversation about this—that we share her ambitions and concerns but we are determined to find the most deliverable way of delivering on the objectives. I am very grateful for the opportunity to begin discussing this with noble Lords. I hope that the noble Baroness will understand that the Government are unable to support the Bill but, respectfully, I look forward to engaging with noble Lords from across the House as we take these important measures forward, particularly when the remediation Bill is published.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, I thank everybody who has spoken in this debate and for the wide—in fact, unanimous—support, certainly in principle if not in practice, from all those who have contributed. In what I have said and in the Bill I have deliberately not pointed the finger of responsibility or blame at any particular Government. That is not what this is about. This is about seeking justice for leaseholders. It is a difficult and complicated issue but in the end, what this House and the Government need to do, with support from across the House, is to finally address the issues in favour of the leaseholders. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, very much for the expertise that he has again shared, including what the then Opposition—now the Government—said at the time about the importance of finally nailing this issue. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, for raising an issue that I feel very strongly about: that the manufacturers have so far evaded responsibility. If that does not come through the courts, it has to come through Parliament, and we look forward to seeing whether criminal prosecutions are brought. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that I like being radical. The challenge she made was that if we do this to the building sector, it will not have the capacity to build the new homes that we need. By the way, Devonshire, which she quoted, described the Bill as “powerful”, and that will do. My challenge back is this: take the car industry. Whenever there is a systemic problem—brakes or something—it calls its cars in, deals with it and faces the consequences, which sometimes means billions of pounds, and it does it quickly. When it comes to people’s homes, 10 years on we are still seeking to protect the building industry and others. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for her praise, although I do not think I deserve it, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for pointing out some of the legal issues that are now coming. I am just sorry that the Government and the Opposition have been a bit lukewarm in saying, “Yeah, we agree, but we don’t agree”. All I want is for this issue to be finally dealt with properly in favour of leaseholders. That is what I want, and I shall continue to raise it in this House.
Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5404919.