Fire Safety Bill
Debate between Paul Blomfield and Ruth Cadbury(3 years ago)
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Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and all the Members who have spoken since the Minister sat down.
Ministers, including the Prime Minister, have said in the House and in the other place on many occasions that leaseholders would not have to pay for fire safety failures not of their making, so why do the Government still disagree with the Lords amendment? The Minister said yesterday and just now that the Government do not have time to draft appropriate amendments to the Bill in the way we seek, yet they have had seven months since Second Reading and five months since Third Reading—plenty of time to try to sort this out.
The safety scandal exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire affects up to 1.3 million flats. Current leaseholders cannot sell, and potential leaseholders cannot get new mortgages until they can prove the homes are safe. Insurance is impossible to come by. Worse, residents of those flats live with the fear of being trapped by a fire in their home. Leaseholders live with the fear of unaffordable costs for the remediation being imposed on them.
The human cost is incalculable. In my constituency alone, at the Paragon estate, built by Berkeley, about 70 homeowners, along with hundreds of assured tenants and students, were evacuated with a week’s notice and cannot return. A fire raged up the cladding of Sperry House in the middle of the Great West Quarter estate built by Barratt Homes. Leaseholders in at least 25 blocks in my constituency that were built by volume house developers face unknown costs, including for waking watch, for the replacement of flammable cladding and wooden balconies and, most expensive of all, to address the lack of fire breaks or proper compartmentalisation.
The building safety fund does not even cover the cost of cladding remediation throughout the country, let alone any of the other failures in these buildings, and it provides loans only for sub-18-metre blocks. Nor does it support housing associations with the cost of rectifying the safety failures that affect the social rented flats for which they have found themselves responsible through planning gain, so they are having to take the repair costs from the funds meant for the building of new social rented housing.
Unamended, the Bill will mean that leaseholders will be forced to pay. They should not have to pay—they did not design or build their flats and they do not own the building their flat is built in. This Parliament, with the support of this Government, could take the burden from leaseholders now, but instead we are told that we have to wait for a different Bill, the content of which is unspecified, as is its timetable. That is unacceptable.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab) [V]
We have heard a lot recently about the Prime Minister’s honesty and integrity. It is important to our democracy that people can trust the word of their leaders, but this debate highlights that issue yet again. As I reminded the House yesterday, on 3 February the Prime Minister told us that
“no leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable costs of fixing safety defects that they did not cause and are no fault of their own.”—[Official Report, 3 February 2021; Vol. 688, c. 945.]
It was a clear statement of policy—an unambiguous pledge to those who face ruin as a result of fire defects that are the responsibility of developers. Yet the Prime Minister has consistently whipped his Members to oppose amendments to the Bill that would honour his pledge.
I have listened carefully to the justifications from Ministers for opposing the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and by the Bishop of St Albans, and we heard them again yesterday. The Minister described the amendments as “laudable in their intentions” but
“unworkable and an inappropriate means to resolve a problem as highly complex as this.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2021; Vol. 693, c. 264-265.]
His ministerial colleague in the other place, the Minister for Building Safety and Communities, said that it was
“the Government’s view that the Bill is not the right legislation in which to deal with remediation costs.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 April 2021; Vol. 811, c. 2207.]
So, they are not the right amendments and it is not the right legislation.
Surely the Government should embrace the new Lords amendment, because it gives them the opportunity to draft their own proposals in separate legislation and to honour the Prime Minister’s promise to leaseholders. The Minister claimed today that it will take time; the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) rightly pointed out that they have had time. It has been five months since the hon. Gentleman tabled his amendment and three months since the Prime Minister’s promise: if the Minister genuinely felt that the objectives were laudable, he has had time to come up with his own proposals. Those in the Metis building, Wicker Riverside, Daisy Spring Works and other buildings throughout my constituency deserve nothing less, because they face bills of up to £50,000 each to fix the mistakes of others. Unlike the Prime Minister, they do not have access to private donors. They face bankruptcy and ruin, trapped in homes that are unsafe and unsaleable, facing unbearable pressure and unimaginable mental strain.
We have to recognise our responsibility. The leaseholders have been let down by not just the developers but a flawed system of building inspections. They are—as I know Ministers recognise—the victims of comprehensive regulatory failure. The Government have to step in, urgently fix the faults and then recover the funds from those responsible—
BIS Sheffield/Government Departments outside London
Debate between Paul Blomfield and Ruth Cadbury
Paul Blomfield
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. We saw a process of consultation, which concluded on 2 May. The trade unions, working with the affected staff, have put in some substantial submissions and alternative proposals, and I shall be seeking reassurances from the Minister that they will be properly considered and their merits given the weight they deserve.
As a number of Members have commented, the “BIS 2020” review might result in some relocation of staff and in the concentration of policy staff in some areas. However, the idea that all policy functions need to be concentrated in London is simply absurd. It is even more ironic, given the wider Government policy that my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) has just mentioned.
This year’s Budget committed the Government to moving out of “expensive Whitehall accommodation”. The Cabinet Office recently launched a raft of measures in a bid to diversify the civil service, after one of the Bridge report’s key findings was that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds were “less likely to move” to London. One such measure that the Cabinet Office is recommending is to take graduate recruitment
“outside of London by establishing regional assessment centres”.
The most recent “Government’s Estate Strategy” expresses a commitment to
“turn around the prevailing tendency to locate head office staff in central London”.
That is Government policy.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree with me, a London MP, that centralisation and the relocating of staff presents a problem for London? It leads to congestion, more overheating, incredibly expensive accommodation, and so on. Most graduates cannot afford to rent in London, let alone buy their own property.
Paul Blomfield
My hon. Friend makes an important point. No one wants this to be seen as a north versus south issue. The proposal flies in the face of logic for both north and south. It makes no sense to add to the overheating in London, so we share a common agenda on that.
Colleagues commented earlier on the northern powerhouse agenda, which Sheffield and south Yorkshire have been deeply involved in and embrace. It is about encouraging the private sector to invest in the north, to build there, to relocate there, and to revive its economy, but if the very Department responsible for building the northern powerhouse wants out of the north, withdrawing 247 highly skilled jobs from the local economy with it, what message does that send?
Today’s debate came about because our key questions were not answered by the permanent secretary. Now is the Minister’s opportunity, so I want to conclude by asking four questions, to which Members and the hard-working staff of the BIS office in Sheffield have been seeking answers since January. I gave the Department advance sight of the questions last Wednesday to allow for full consideration and comprehensive answers. First, in reaching the decision to close the Sheffield office, what assessment has been made of the additional costs of moving the posts to London? That is the core question that we have been asking all along. Secondly, what assessment of the decision has been made against the Government objectives of moving out of expensive Whitehall accommodation, diversifying the civil service, and not locating head office functions in the capital? Thirdly, what assessment has been made of the impression created by the decision to move to London the functions of an office of the Department responsible for the northern powerhouse? Fourthly, aside from the proposals to centralise policy functions in London, what consideration has been given to the other options for achieving the “BIS 2020” objectives?
I understand that the decision, which was at one stage to have been taken by the BIS board tomorrow, has now been postponed and will be announced in the week commencing 23 May. I hope that that reflects a willingness to think seriously about the concerns that have been raised. I hope the Minister recognises that if the proposal goes ahead, the National Audit Office scrutiny we propose in today’s motion will find it flawed. I hope that she will therefore accept that it is the right time and in the interests of good policy making, effective use of public funds and confidence in the case for the north to exert ministerial authority and pull the plug on the closure of the Sheffield office.