Building Safety

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I need to reiterate that I can only call Members who arrived at the beginning of the statement. It is the responsibility of Members to make sure they get here in time to hear the Secretary of State’s statement from the beginning. I assure Members that I and the other Deputy Speakers are even-handed about this.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I very much welcome this statement, but I want to ask the Secretary of State about people living in buildings under 11 metres. The Government were not prepared to extend full coverage to them but said they would look at those buildings on a case-by-case basis—a commitment that the Secretary of State repeated this afternoon. Could he tell us how that is going? How many of those buildings have had assistance? What criteria are he and his colleagues using in deciding where to offer help? Does it include, for example, cases where the developers or builders went bust years ago? Does it include buildings where the leaseholders still cannot sell their flats because mortgage companies will not lend on them, despite the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors advice?

[Michael Gove]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. In most cases, a building under 11 metres which might, for example, have cladding on it, or might have some of the materials that in other circumstances would be systemically unsafe, does not have safety risk. We need to look proportionately at each building, and that takes time. Thanks to the energetic efforts of the Minister for building safety, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire, we have reached agreement with a majority of lenders, which are now lending against properties, because through the engagement we have had with them, there is now a more proportionate way of deciding whether or not to lend against those buildings. As we have discussed in the past, however, let us look at individual cases, and if constituency cases and examples have come to light that the right hon. Gentleman feels are not captured by the steps we have taken so far, I look forward to working with him to address them.