Building Safety Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Daisy Cooper and Marie Rimmer(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Daisy Cooper
Q
Alison Hills: First of all, once we had our intrusive survey undertaken, we had a waking watch implemented on is, which was at a cost of £400 per leaseholder. I have to say that a whole new crisis has been created as a result of the advice note and the EWS1 process. It is ineffective, it is placing leaseholders under an unacceptable level of financial risk. Personally, I felt more unsafe while they were in the building. They were undertaking activities such as smoking underneath flammable cladding. They were falling asleep. This sounds awful but they were peeing in our car park. We have also heard stories of other leaseholders across the country where single females have been harassed by them, which is completely unacceptable. That is just the first point, which is on waking watch alone.
In addition, we have had to pay increased service charges, which amounts to an extra £200 a month each. Our insurance has absolutely skyrocketed. I have heard of a leaseholder based in a block in Runcorn where it has increased by 1,400%. People are going bankrupt as a result of these interim measures alone, and that is before we even get to the remediation costs. As we have seen already, Hayley Tillotson was a leaseholder who has gone bankrupt as a result of these extortionate costs.
Leaseholders’ finances are being completely wiped out. It is completely unacceptable to put us under this level of financial risk and burden—in the middle of a pandemic as well, one might add, which only adds to the financial and mental health distress. There have already been reported suicides as a result of this crisis. I have to say that my mental health has seriously deteriorated, to the point that I have had to move out of my flat, because I could not sleep, eat or concentrate. It was an horrific situation to be in. Those are the sorts of things that are happening, and that is before we even get to any remediation costs.
Steve Day: Our service charge has doubled because of the waking watch and insurance. It is due to lack of trust in building regulations. The insurers do not trust, the lenders do not trust. That is devastating when you are doing a start-up as well. I do not have the salary that I used to have, and I do not have the savings I used to have because they have all gone on service charge. That is a huge risk.
Let me tell you something else. It is not just about the money for waking watch. I think we forget what it is about. Can you imagine people staring at your home 24/7 because they are so concerned that there is going to be a fire? Can you imagine what that does to you? You go to sleep wondering what on earth these people are doing staring at your building, going up and down the stairs. They are doing their job but their job is very concerning. They are so scared that they might miss it that they are checking things and all the rest of it. Then, there are some who do not do their job. You are in a total stress, non-stop.
It is all to do with the root cause. This is where I come back to the simple scheme that we have come up with. Let us restore trust in building regulations. EWS1s, PAS 9980s—it is a new way of showing building regulatory compliance, because the trust has gone from the lenders and insurers. Let us restore that trust. Full redress is the only way to do it. This is a unique situation, the costs are high and we need you, Parliament, to step up and put in this scheme.
There is so much support for the scheme—you will see that because we will put it out there to you guys as much as we can over the next few weeks. It is growing: we have bishops behind it, the Earl of Lytton and the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association. You have heard that the Association of Residential Managing Agents backs it and we have quite a few people that I cannot remember, but I am happy to write to you.
The support is only going to grow, because as we go through the Grenfell inquiry and we see some of the things that come out, maybe in module 6, full redress will come up again and again. If you want to give out loans to people and you let the industry off with a levy, they will never forgive you, because you did not go for full redress when you could have, and that is what I urge you to do.
Yes, it is unusual to have a leaseholder here coming out with a statutory scheme, but it is not just me—there is a load of experts helping me, all for free, because they believe passionately that we cannot let a levy system and a loan system go in when we have not tried full redress. It is possible, it is simple and it is fast, and we are working hard to limit the judicial review risk to the Government. We will be sending Mr Pincher and his team a new draft from Daniel Greenberg as soon as we can and hopefully getting something in to them, and then we can update you.
Alison Hills: I alluded to this earlier, but this is a very complex issue. There is liability against a number of parties—not just the Government for poor regulation, but developers, manufacturers, people such as Kingspan who mis-sold their products, insurers, Buildmark warranty providers. There are so many people involved here, but it is glaringly obvious that this Bill contains no repercussions at all for those people. The only people who have been legally held to account are the innocent leaseholders. As I see it, the fundamental role of Government is to protect victims and hold perpetrators to account, but this Bill does the exact opposite of that, and it is unacceptable.
Ms Rimmer
Q
It seems to me that polluter pays is the only suggestion that can go forward. We are not saying that the present Government are responsible for all this, but do you know of any other way than the polluter pays mechanism? Is it New Zealand that has the public safety emergency, where the Government have addressed that? It does not seem able to be addressed. Has anyone put forward to you any other schemes or other ways of addressing this? There are hundreds of thousands of family units in these properties—I do express my sympathy; I sincerely empathise and sympathise—but this simply must be addressed.
Alison Hills: Yes, thank you. It does have to be addressed. Obviously, there are the McPartland-Smith amendments, which protect leaseholders to some degree. There are some very helpful amendments—for example, the imposition of implied terms in residential building contracts to ensure that all buildings are adequately designed, comply with building safety regulations and use materials of satisfactory quality. New clause 5 also creates accountability for future builders by importing consumer rights protection into housing law. I fully support the amendments and new clauses, and I think they should be implemented in the Bill, but in terms of how to get the most amount of money from those responsible, the polluter pays Bill is the way forward, because it ensures that the right people are held to account and building safety regulations are adhered to in future. Obviously, Steve has worked very hard on this over the last nine months, so I will pass over to him at this point.
Steve Day: I think the building safety charge is another sign of not trusting building regulation compliance. The heart of polluter pays is not just to solve the crisis now; it is to restore trust in building regulation compliance. We have a set of functional regulations. B4 requires that
“the external walls of the building shall adequately resist the spread of fire”.
It should be very possible, then, with the approved documents, to show and to prove whether someone is liable for those defects.
We are getting very confused in this crisis. We need to bring it back to the two boxes of developments. We have one where the builders just did not keep to the regulations. We do not need to worry about the quality of the regulations—they just did not keep to them, not using the right fixings. Metal should be on firebreaks but they used plastic. Some are missing firebreaks. It is very simple stuff, which is very unappealable and very easy—low-hanging fruit. That is the box of not conforming to the regulations at the time—guilty. Not guilty, for the developers and the manufacturers, is the other box where the regulations were complied with at the time, but post Grenfell those regulations have changed. It is almost a retrospective liability, changing the goalposts. That is a failure of regulation, so that is where the public money would come in.
All we want is £5.1 billion of public money. We do not want to go to the Treasury unless we have to. We want to get that pot as big as possible for all those defective buildings—it is simple stuff, remember, such as fixings, adhesive pattern, firebreaks and so on—to make that £5.1 billion go further. That is what we are doing. I hope that our proposal shows that we have thought about how this might work with existing precedents. There is some discussion on whether the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the apportionment process could be open to judicial review, because you might say, “If you’ve got a set of percentages and you’re just giving x per cent, y per cent, and so on, that could be open to challenge.” We have listened to that and we are working with Daniel Greenberg on a different, and much simpler, approach, which we will make you aware of, that will not be open so easily for judicial review.
We also heard Mr Pincher’s comments in the Chamber on how many determinations we have to do. Remember that we are proposing that it is a public body, potentially under Homes England, and we have a de minimis limit. We do not have the reports that MHCLG has but we have a mechanism. It can set what the de minimis limit is before we have those determinations, and then basically there is a control mechanism for how this works. We have created the scheme so that in the primary legislation the scheme requirements are set out. It has to be in place six months after Royal Assent, but we do not prescribe exactly all the parts of the legislation; that will be done in subordinate legislation. We are prepared to do that work as well, because that is how much we believe in this.
I cannot answer all your questions on this today, but Daniel Greenberg has said that when the conference season is over, we will book a meeting room in Parliament and invite MPs and peers to come and hear our proposal, with the depth required so that you can scrutinise it properly. Perhaps the Earl of Lytton might come and help as well.
Building Safety Bill (First sitting)
Debate between Daisy Cooper and Marie Rimmer(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Daisy Cooper
Q
Dan Daly: There is a lot to be admired in what other countries have done, and certainly in that particular example, but you have to remember that they were some way ahead of where we are and where we started from. There was already a single regulator in place in Victoria that was able to be instructed to take on some of this work. The number of buildings and the scale of the issue were much smaller than where we are. I think in total there were around 2,300 buildings, looking at a much broader spectrum of buildings—healthcare buildings and schools above two floors, and all other buildings above three floors. We know that, when we are looking in this country at buildings above 18 metres, we are already talking about 12,000 buildings—that is just high-rise residential. When we talk about buildings above 11 metres, we are probably closer to 100,000. If you take on the full range of where they were in Australia, the numbers just keep increasing exponentially.
There is something to admire in where they were—certainly the fact that sprinklers and alarm systems were in much wider use in those buildings, so that, in the fires that they saw, nobody died. There were measures in the buildings to tackle those instances early, and equally to alert people to the fires. It is certainly something that we have been talking about and pushing for: the wider use of sprinklers and alarm systems. It is good to see that there has been some change and movement in that, as part of the work that we have gone through so far. You cannot discount what has gone on. We should always look to learn, but there is something about scale and scope here that is different.
Sir Ken Knight: Can I just add to that, Chair? I had the privilege to host both a political head and an official head from Victoria very early on after the tragedy at Grenfell. Remarkably or not, they were very complimentary about the work taking place in the building safety programme—as you will recall, the Victoria high-rise fires occurred several years before Grenfell itself. They were impressed, even though none of us is satisfied that the pace is enough on all of these things. Of course, they had the luxury that they had no fire deaths at all. It was a wake-up call for Victoria as well—to realise that they could not wait for the tragedy of the 72 fire deaths that we saw here to do things.
For all of us who have been in touch with other countries, there is lots to learn from them. However, it is also about the capacity: the numbers of buildings, and the significant number of high-rise buildings, that will be covered even in the first-stage proposal in scope in the Bill, compared with the total number in somewhere like Victoria.
Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)
Q
Sir Ken Knight: It is quite a significant part of Dame Judith’s report, of course, and that mixed economy has come through into the Bill. It is actually something that I support, providing that there is a level playing field in the competency, ethics and assurance of those doing the work. That is covered in the Bill, in a great deal of how the Building Safety Regulator will need to bring that to bear. The Bill makes the point, though, that in those buildings of higher risk the Building Safety Regulator is the enforcing authority for building control purposes—not either of those two bodies. I think that that is right. However, it is about levelling up the playing field for the competencies and assurances that are in place with some bodies and not others at the moment. There is a bit to go, but I personally do not object to that outcome, providing that the private sector actors involved in that are not directly employed by those for whom they are doing the work in seeking the outcome for the approvals.
Dan Daly: I do not have much different to say. The inability to choose your own building control body is important, particularly for developers that have wrapped up a number of those services within their overarching companies. Having some independence of that is important. There needs to be some robust checking if there is private sector involvement; that is the important element, and hopefully that is part of the role that the Building Safety Regulator will be able to take on. I suppose that is something to come in the guidance that will follow this Bill. We have issues of competency and capacity across the sector, so we need to keep our mind open to all those avenues, but with the appropriate checks and balances in there and the appropriate safeguards to ensure there is no compromise on safety in favour of profit.