Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Michael Gove and Fleur Anderson

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Either I or one of my junior Ministers will join my hon. Friend in Gillingham.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

T8.   Some 54 months ago, the Government promised the Renters (Reform) Bill. Since then, 10,000 Londoners have been threatened with eviction and renting is simply too insecure. We are trying again to ask this: when will the Government be bringing in the Bill?

[Michael Gove]

That is a good question; I liked it even better when the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) asked it. As I explained, we will be bringing forward our legislation shortly.

Building Safety

Debate between Michael Gove and Fleur Anderson

Monday 30th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

They should do. Again, the right hon. Gentleman homes in on something that is very important, as have a number of other colleagues. Developers are stepping up to the plate and accepting their responsibilities, with one or two exceptions, and those developers have to alter their behaviour. It is also the case that lenders, for the most part, have changed their behaviour in order to help people who are trapped by their mortgages—but we have to monitor that behaviour. There are others—and the insurers as well as construction product manufacturers are squarely in our gun sights—who do need to do more. I believe that what we have announced today will help, but there does need to be additional Financial Conduct Authority and Government co-ordinated action. If the right hon. Gentleman has not yet received a response to his letter, I hope to lay out in my response exactly what we will do.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

My constituents will welcome this statement, but they will not break out in celebrations just yet. We want to see some action. Two big developments in my constituency, which had unsafe cladding identified three years ago, applied to the building safety fund. Since then they have been given vague promises by the developer but no action from the building safety fund. Can the Secretary of State confirm that those developments will now be taken out of the building safety fund and given to their developers, who will be told to do the remediation by a certain date, so that this lack of clarity over who is responsible for getting on with it is ended, and people can at last sleep well at night?

[Michael Gove]

That is exactly what today’s announcement is intended to achieve.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Michael Gove and Fleur Anderson

Monday 27th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

T5. The Secretary of State promised an overhaul of the building safety fund to put an end to the endless delays to the funding that people in unsafe buildings desperately need, but the delays continue. Three blocks in my constituency—the Swish building, the Radial development and Percy Laurie House—have all been pending for well over a year now, and they have heard nothing from the fund. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss these blocks, and stop these and many applications getting stuck?

[Michael Gove]

Absolutely. In the first instance, I will ask Lord Greenhalgh to investigate, and then we will of course follow up with a meeting.

Building Safety

Debate between Michael Gove and Fleur Anderson

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes an important point and allows me to place on the record my thanks to my hon. Friends the Members for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) and for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland). I completely agree that their campaigning has been incredibly important. It is our intention that the ultimate owner of a building is responsible for all of the safety steps that are required, and we will use statutory means in order to ensure that that happens. That is what we will seek to do with the help of colleagues across the House.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I, too, welcome the statement’s commitment to leaseholders and the fact that it puts businesses on notice, giving them the chance to do the right thing. When will the deadline be up for that chance to do the right thing? Without it, we could just be kicking the can down the road. Leaseholders in Putney will want to know when they can expect to be able to sell their homes and to move on. Will there be a Government guarantee—a letter or similar that they can use with estate agents and others—so that they can move on with their lives? Finally, residents in a Putney building of just under 11 metres have been given a bill of £1 million for remediation. Will they be covered by this?

[Michael Gove]

I will look at the specific case of the building of just under 11 metres that the hon. Lady mentions. More broadly, I would absolutely love to be able to provide people with reassurance that from tomorrow the cloud will be lifted, but as a number of Members have pointed out, there is a complex set of interrelated problems. I believe that we have a means of dealing with them all, and I also appreciate that we need to move at speed. I will come back to the House before Easter with an update on the measures we have taken. I will work with colleagues across the House in order to ensure that we have the right statutory underpinning. Again, I want to confirm that we require everything to go right in order to be able to help everyone who is currently facing difficulties. We will do everything we can. I hope the hon. Lady will appreciate that I would not want at this stage to provide an absolute guarantee for people whose specific circumstances I am not yet familiar with.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Michael Gove and Fleur Anderson

Monday 29th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Michael Gove)]

I have enormous sympathy with leaseholders who are being landed with bills for faults for which they were not responsible and for which the responsibility for remediation truly lies elsewhere. I and my Department are looking at every available means to ensure that the burden is lifted from leaseholders’ shoulders and placed where it truly belongs.

[Fleur Anderson]

I am glad to hear that response. Hundreds of Putney leaseholders are facing agonising waits to get funding through the building safety fund. People in the Radial development have been waiting for 16 months, people in Hardwicks Square have been waiting for 17 months and those in the Swish building have been stuck at stage 2 for 11 months. Meanwhile, one constituent is paying more than £4,000 in insurance for a two-bedroom flat following a 500% hike, which is not unusual. What is the Minister doing urgently to speed up and simplify the building safety fund application process and also to prevent insurers from cashing in?

[Michael Gove]

As the hon. Lady rightly points out, leaseholders find themselves caught in an invidious vice, whereby they are not only having to pay remediation costs, but also find that insurance costs and the capacity to sell on their flat are compromised by the situation in which we find ourselves. Making sure that individuals are in safe buildings is our first responsibility, and to do that we must make sure that the building safety fund pays out and that we get support for remediation from those in the private sector, who also have a share of responsibility. I hope to update the House on our plans shortly.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Michael Gove and Fleur Anderson

Thursday 27th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said in the last Cabinet Office questions:

“Transparency drives everything that the Government do”.—[Official Report, 25 March 2021; Vol. 691, c. 1039.]

However, research by Transparency International found that 20% of the UK’s PPE procurement between February and November last year raised one or more red flags over possible corruption—there are too many secrets. Will the Government now restore public trust and publish all communications between Ministers and their business contacts over these PPE contracts? Will they publish the details of all the contracts that were awarded in the VIP lane and end the secretive emergency contracting?

[Michael Gove]

The emergency contracting procedure, to which the hon. Lady refers, was one that was used by every Administration across the United Kingdom, including the Labour Administration in Wales, and that was because of the pressures that all of us were under. I remember Front Benchers from the Labour party pressing us at an earlier stage in the pandemic, quite rightly, to move even faster to secure that PPE. But, of course, even as were moving more quickly to secure it, there was a seven-step process supervised by civil servants in order to make sure that procurement was handled appropriately. If the hon. Lady has any specific cases where she feels that the process was faulty, I look forward to hearing from her about them, but so far there have been no specific charges from her. More broadly, I welcome emphasis on greater transparency overall.[Official Report, 7 June 2021, Vol. 696, c. 1MC.]

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Michael Gove and Fleur Anderson

Thursday 11th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I do not quite agree with that. It is fair to say that we do need to be vigilant when it comes to the use of public money and the awarding of contracts, but it is the case that, if we look at, for example, personal protective equipment and other goods that were sourced during the course of the covid pandemic, 99.5% of the goods that were sourced were operational and effective. We were also procuring at speed. There were suggestions from across the House as to some of the companies that we should have contracts with. Not all of those suggestions were necessarily absolutely spot on, but what we did do was to ensure that we prioritised those companies that were capable of meeting the needs of the hour.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

The Institute for Government last week highlighted that 99% of the Government’s covid contracts had not gone out to tender. Does the Minister agree that this cannot continue and only leads to suspicion about the nature of the awards and who is getting them? Will he tell the House when the Government intend to wind down the extensive use of these extraordinary procurement powers? Can he give a date?

[Michael Gove]

Again, let me welcome a new member to the shadow Cabinet Office team, and I look forward to working with the hon. Lady and congratulate her on her promotion. It is the case, of course, that we want best practice to apply in all procurement, and the recent Boardman report that the Cabinet Office commissioned emphasises some changes that we can make in order to ensure even greater effectiveness and transparency. At the beginning of the covid pandemic, when there was a global demand for personal protective equipment, we used perfectly legitimate, well-understood expedited practices. There were, as I mentioned earlier, a number of suggestions from across the House, including from Labour MPs, of companies and firms that could help. It was important that we looked at those with speed and expedition in order to ensure that those who were capable, as many were, of providing us with the equipment that we needed were able to get that equipment on to the NHS frontline as quickly as possible.