Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Maria Miller and Richard Bacon
Mrs Miller
My hon. Friend is right to raise that point, and I was very pleased to see the Minister, and I think the Prime Minister as well, underlining the importance of encouraging more small house builders to be involved, particularly in self-build schemes where they can increase the supply of housing far faster than some of the national builders.
Good building plans are not enough; there needs to be a watertight process to ensure that at each stage every home is built to standard. Few who buy one of the 200,000 new starter homes that the Minister is talking about today will be expert house builders, plumbers or electricians, and by definition none will have purchased a house before. If these people were buying a second-hand house—one that somebody else had lived in before—most would be relying on the professional services of a surveyor. They would therefore be relying on a professional who would give their potential new home a structural health check before the sale was completed.
For the most part, those buying new starter homes will not have that structural health check because it is a new house, a glossy, shiny, perfect new show home that the salespeople are promising them. They therefore think, “Surely there’s no need for a quality check. There are quality checks built into the processes, aren’t there? There are building regulations set out in law, building control performance standards, independent approved inspectors whose only reason to be is to safeguard quality—in essence to safeguard the buyer in this imperfect market.” Yet those who experience problems with new homes quickly discover that too many of those quality checks are not as watertight as they might at first appear. Independent oversight of the building process may not be working in practice as the rules and regulations might imply.
Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)
I am delighted that my right hon. Friend has given way, first because it is a pleasure to hear her speak. Every moment she speaks is a moment we do not have to hear from the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), whom so many of us in the Committee heard droning on like an out-of-tune bagpipe for hours on end. Just by standing and speaking, my right hon. Friend is preventing the House from having to listen to him again, so I thank her for that.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the experience of many constituency MPs as they go about their work and listen to constituency complaints is that the existing process through the National House Building Council does not always provide the reassurance that people are entitled to expect? While it might a bit strong to say that the NHBC is the lackey of the large house builders, it is preciously close to being that.
Mrs Miller
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and pay tribute to him for the work he has done in helping more of my constituents have the opportunity to build their own homes. I did not have the pleasure of sitting across from the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), although I am sure we will hear his dulcet tones later.
Many people who buy a new home will have problems with the house they purchase; they will have a snagging list—chipped paint, ill-fitting doors and so on. I do not deny the importance of getting such matters resolved, and the Minister may well want to address some of the difficulties people can experience in getting those small-scale problems fixed, but, as valid as those concerns are, that is not the point of this amendment. New clause 1 would ensure that every home was checked for significant defects while it was being built and at the end of the building process.
Over recent months, I have received evidence from people up and down the country who have purchased new properties with significant defects from major house builders. Some of those properties have damp-proof courses that are below ground level; some have been built off their foundations; and some have roofs sitting on walls that are not structural. There are also reports of inadequate fire insulation and an absence of cavity-wall or loft insulation. Those are real-life examples of defects in houses that are subject to the current regime. Every one of those building errors should have been picked up during the construction of the house, as part of the building control process. That process exists to ensure that houses are built properly. The approved inspector is responsible for building control performance standards and is, to all intents and purposes, the professional who acts as the eyes and ears of the future buyer.
As matters stand, however, there is no legal requirement for even one visit to be made to a new-build home during the build in order physically to check the building standards. On a new estate, a random selection of houses might be monitored and the results extrapolated as though every house were the same. This is called a risk-based approach, but in reality it feels like a lottery. The fact is that every house could be different. The subsoil across a 300-house estate can change dramatically, for example, and changes in the weather throughout the build can significantly affect materials and the way they work. The current risk based-approach creates an unnecessary lottery for the home buyer, rather than certainty. There is a calculated risk, which is not something that most buyers appreciate, and not something that most buyers would expect to accompany the purchase of a £200,000 or £300,000 house.