Asked by: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, with reference to the Developer pledge letter, published 13 April 2022, what steps he is taking to progress the implementation of the Developer pledge.
Answered by Marcus Jones - Treasurer of HM Household (Deputy Chief Whip, House of Commons)
On 13 July we published the draft of a contract with developers. The draft contract, once finalised and executed, will turn the commitments made in the pledge into a legally binding agreement.
Publication marks the start of a four-week period of engagement, during which we will refine the contract as necessary. As well as discussing the contract with developers during this period, we will engage other interested parties including representatives of building owners, managing agents, residents, leaseholders, lenders and insurers.
We plan to have the terms of the contract finalised by 10 August. We expect developers to have signed the contract by the end of September.
Asked by: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, if he will make an assessment on the financial impact on UK pension funds of the Building Safety Act 2022.
Answered by Marcus Jones - Treasurer of HM Household (Deputy Chief Whip, House of Commons)
The Building Safety Act puts in place legal protections for leaseholders from historical building safety costs. The Act legally protects qualifying leaseholders (those living in their own home or with no more than three UK properties in total) from all costs relating to the remediation of unsafe cladding and contains robust and far-reaching protections from non-cladding costs, including those relating to interim measures such as waking watches. Where those directly responsible (for example, developers) cannot be held to account, building owners and landlords, rather than leaseholders, will now be the first port of call to pay for historical safety defects.
The Building Safety Act spreads the costs of fixing historical building safety defects as fairly and equitably as possible across the system. If building owners and landlords on 14 February were, or were related to the developer of the building, they are liable for the full cost of remediating all building safety defects, whether cladding or otherwise, to the benefit of all leaseholders. Qualifying leaseholders will be protected from all costs for remediation works if the building owners and landlord have a net worth of more than £2 million per in-scope building.
It is not our default expectation that building owners and landlords, including pension funds, will have to fund remediation works from their own resources: we want them to pursue those responsible for defective work, including associated companies of developers and manufacturers. That is why y there is now a toolkit of measures available under the Building Safety Act 2022 to enable that to happen.
We have retrospectively extended the limitation period under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act 1972 from 6 to 30 years; we have extended the reach of civil liability to associated companies of developers, including trusts, to ensure that some of the largest businesses in the sector who have used shell companies and other complex corporate structures to be pursed for contributions; and we have created a cause of action which will allow manufacturers of construction products to be pursued where defective or mis-sold products have been used in buildings.
Asked by: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, if he will consult (a) building owners, (b) managing agents and (c) residents of buildings on the delivery of the commitments pledged by developers for buildings those developers no longer own or control.
Answered by Marcus Jones - Treasurer of HM Household (Deputy Chief Whip, House of Commons)
On 13 July we published the draft of a contract with developers. The draft contract, once finalised and executed, will turn the commitments made in the pledge into a legally binding agreement.
Publication marks the start of a four-week period of engagement, during which we will refine the contract as necessary. As well as discussing the contract with developers during this period, we will engage other interested parties including representatives of building owners, managing agents, residents, leaseholders, lenders and insurers.
We plan to have the terms of the contract finalised by 10 August. We expect developers to have signed the contract by the end of September.
Asked by: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what measures his Department will take to locate polluters under the first tier of the waterfall model of liability contained in the Building Safety Act 2022 before placing liability on other parties.
Answered by Marcus Jones - Treasurer of HM Household (Deputy Chief Whip, House of Commons)
Under the Waterfall model set out in the Building Safety Act 2022, developers are the first to pay for the costs of remediating defective buildings, rather than the leaseholders that have previously been liable for costs
During the previous Secretary of State’s appearance before the Levelling up and Housing Committee on 13 June 2022, he announced that a new Recovery Strategy Unit has been established to help pursue and expose developers who have failed to pay for defects that they have created.
The unit will identify and pursue these individuals and firms using all appropriate means, including through the courts, to ensure that developers do the right thing and take responsibility for defects they created.
Asked by: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, if he will commit to not developing any forms of rent control as part of the planned white paper and legislation on reform of the private rented sector.
Answered by Stuart Andrew - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
The Government does not support the introduction of controls on the amount of rent that landlords can charge in the private rented sector. Historical evidence suggests that rent controls would discourage investment in the sector and would lead to declining property standards as a result, which would not help landlords or tenants.
Asked by: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what Government body will determine (a) which buildings are most at risk due to dangerous cladding and (b) a matrix of which buildings to remediate first.
Answered by Christopher Pincher
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is prioritising remediation on the highest risk buildings. After the Grenfell tragedy, the Government identified the high-rise buildings with the highest risk ACM cladding and made sure that interim measures were installed to reassure and protect residents while remediation of those building is taken forward.
Government funding is targeted to high rise buildings (18 metres and over) with ACM and other forms of unsafe cladding. The fire risk is lower in buildings under 18 metres and costly remediation work is usually not needed. Where fire risks are identified, they should always be managed proportionately. The Government has therefore focused its financial support on high-rise residential buildings over 18 metres because we know that the risk to multiple households is greater when fire does spread in buildings of this height. As the Secretary of State said in his announcement on Monday 10 January, taxpayers should not be funding the remediation of 11-18 metres buildings. It is for industry to develop a solution to this problem and ensure that leaseholders living in their own flats in medium buildings do not pay a penny to remediate historic cladding defects that are no fault of their own. That is why we are asking the industry to step up and agree how they can fund cladding remediation in the next two-three months. Detailed information on which buildings are eligible for Government funding can be found in Prospectus Annex A: Technical Information of the Building Safety Fund Prospectus, available at: www.gov.uk/guidance/remediation-of-non-acm-buildings#prospectus---outlining-eligibility-for-the-fund.