Fire Safety Bill

Kim Johnson Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Thank you, Marco. We lost your video early on, but we could hear you perfectly.

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab) [V]]

I welcome the Bill but, nearly four years after the Grenfell disaster and despite assurances by the Government, hundreds of thousands of people are still living with the fear that they could be next. It is a scandal that this is the first and only piece of primary legislation on fire safety that this Tory Government have brought forward to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again.

In Liverpool, 10% of buildings are still covered in highly flammable cladding, with a further 5% covered in fire-retardant cladding. Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service has suffered a 35% cut to its funding and lost one third of its firefighters since 2010. Austerity has combined with roll-backs and safety regulations to make a perfect storm.

Time and again, we have heard promise after promise that the recommendations of the first phase of the Grenfell Tower inquiry will be fully implemented, yet the Bill does not include a single recommendation from the inquiry’s first phase. Does the Minister agree that his Government have fundamentally failed to take the necessary steps to keep people safe in their own homes?

Today, and for months now, we have heard from Members across the House about the nightmare situations faced by many leaseholders across the country who have been left physically, mentally and financially trapped in dangerous housing. Many of my constituents have contacted me for support. They are worried sick about being trapped in unsafe housing, crippled by costs they did not incur and with no end in sight.

One pensioner wrote to tell me that he had just been sent a bill for £20,000. He has no savings and no possibility of paying the bill. Two young NHS doctors want to sell up and take positions in hospitals in the north-east, but they cannot; they are trapped in a flat they cannot sell, faced with the possibility of mounting debts due to flammable cladding that they did not install.

I ask the Minister how he sleeps at night, knowing that his Government’s move to cut red tape has left hundreds of thousands at risk in their own homes, and how he can justify asking the leaseholders of those unsafe homes to foot the bill. It is the responsibility of this Government to identify the buildings covered in dangerous cladding and make them safe before another disaster occurs, and to bring the companies that profited from cutting corners and compromising the safety of residents to justice.

Enough is enough. We are now at a crisis point. Instead of further delays and prevarication, I call on Members across the House to do the right thing today and back Lords amendments 2 and 4 so that we can get a grip of this crisis before it is too late.

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

The first surgery I ever had as a Member of Parliament was about the issue of cladding. It was with residents of St Francis Tower in Ipswich. They were being chased for bills of thousands of pounds for unsafe cladding that they had nothing to do with; it was not their fault. Since that first meeting, there has been case after case after case after case. It is a huge issue in Ipswich, a huge issue in my constituency, and it is destroying the lives of many of my constituents. That is why I am speaking here today.

There has been a significant move forward since that first meeting; since that first surgery appointment, we have moved forward. The £5 billion support has helped many of my constituents. The waking watch fund, although I do not think it will be enough, is a step in the right direction—we are getting there—and the Building Safety Bill is itself 100% necessary and welcome. However, I am still at a point right now where there are a significant number of my constituents who are leaseholders, often living in buildings over 18 metres, where there are significant issues to do with fire safety that will cost thousands of pounds to remedy, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Marco Longhi) has just touched on, and the support announced recently does not cover them. So they continue to have this uncertainty hanging over them, not just at a regular time but during a pandemic, when, more often than not, they have a million and one other concerns and anxieties influencing their lives. Ultimately, that is why I believe that we have moved significantly forward. I am very interested in the possibility that a Building Safety Bill will pick up on the issue and make sure that we address those leaseholders who are living in buildings that are unsafe and where there are significant issues and significant costs are currently being placed on them. It is not specifically about cladding; there are other issues and other factors that make these properties unsafe.