Oral Answers to Questions

Mike Amesbury Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right—we should look to developers and to building owners to remedy the defects in their buildings. We have made available to owners who are not able to remedy those defects quickly and effectively £1.6 billion in order to remedy those defects. As I said in my earlier answer, we do not want and we do not expect hard-pressed leaseholders to bear unfair costs of defects for which they are not responsible. That is why we are working quickly to bring forward a long-term solution to ensure that costs are met, that defects are remedied, and that the position that leaseholders find themselves in is remedied too.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab) [V]]

A belated happy new year to you, Mr Speaker.

Clauses 88 and 89 of the Government’s proposed Building Safety Bill will impose a charge on leaseholders, not developers and not the industry. Ministers now refer to “affordable” cost and a 30-year loan on top of current debts, including for waking watch, which we still have no remedy to. Adding insult to injury, Ministers are trying to gag recipients of the building safety fund from speaking to the media. That is just not going to happen. Have Ministers learned nothing about transparency from the Grenfell inquiry? Is it not about time that Ministers stepped in and made sure that the developer community shoulder their responsibility for this mess?

[Christopher Pincher]

The Government have stepped in: they have spent £1.6 billion of public money on remediating the most difficult and challenging buildings that require help and support. We have made a further £30 million available for waking watch. The Building Safety Bill to which the hon. Gentleman refers—one of the most significant pieces of legislation in this Parliament —will be brought forward to make sure that building defects such as we have seen are things of the past. In the meantime, we will work at pace to find solutions that resolve the question of building defects such that we do not see hard-pressed leaseholders enduring difficult, unforeseen and unfair taxes. If those leaseholders wish to step forward and make comments themselves, who am I to say that they should not? We live in a free country; let them speak.