Building Safety Defects

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I take that as a helpful interjection. We need to think about how we protect leaseholders, and sometimes statutory protection is a good thing. We know that the Building Safety Bill, that will have finished Committee in the House, provides a vehicle to do precisely that, but I cannot say any more on the subject.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

What is the Government’s response to the statement on 10 December from the chair of the board of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, in which he calls for the EWS1 checks not to be scrapped for buildings under 18 metres and estimates that there are 77,500 low-rise buildings that urgently need fire remediation work, at an estimated cost of £15 billion?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

We have quite a lot of the data on the number of medium-rise buildings, and there are far more medium-rise buildings than there are high-rise ones. The figure of 77,000 is broadly correct, but the number within that requiring remediation is very small indeed. I cannot give the noble Baroness those statistics, but I have seen our survey work. The number requiring mitigation is also very small. Frankly, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors seems to be more interested in how it can raise money for surveyors than being proportionate in terms of the approach towards this crisis.