Leaseholders and Cladding

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

We now have the pleasure of listening to my old friend from Croydon Central, Sarah Jones.

3.37 pm

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on securing what is clearly an incredibly important debate. We could spend many hours talking about leaseholders and cladding, which reflects the scale of the problem right across the country.

As right hon. and hon. Members would expect, I spend quite a lot of time talking to leaseholders, whether through the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold reform, the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership or the UK Cladding Action Group. I have had the privilege of talking to many of them about some of the issues they face. As has been articulated so well, these are lives that have been turned upside down completely due to issues for which they bear no fault. What they bear is the cost, anxiety and stress. Their lives are on hold, and it is incredibly upsetting for everyone who has been involved.

It has been nearly a thousand days since the Grenfell Tower fire, and since then we have had two Prime Ministers, three Secretaries of State and four Housing Ministers—everything but a partridge in a pear tree. We might have another reshuffle tomorrow. Hopefully we will not, because we want the Ministers and the Secretary of State to stay and fix some of the problems.

Most of the issues have been explained well in the debate, so I will focus on some particular questions to the Minister. If she does not have time to answer them all today, it would be great if she could write back to us. My first point is about the remediation of ACM cladding, which has been talked about a lot. We know that nine in 10 private blocks with Grenfell-style cladding are still covered with such cladding.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

There are still several blocks with flammable ACM cladding. My constituents at Sesame Apartments in Battersea are still living in a building that is wrapped in unsafe cladding. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Minister should give us some definitive deadlines for when those private blocks will be made safe?

[Sarah Jones]

I completely agree.

We know that 75 private block owners do not even have a plan in place to remove this cladding. Will the Minister confirm that, as the Secretary of State promised on 20 January, the Government will name all block owners who fail to put a plan in place by the end of January? Will she publish those names in tomorrow’s building safety update?

The Government’s £200 million fund for ACM removal on private blocks is nine months old, yet just a single block has so far been accepted for funds, and none has been made safe as a result of the fund. Labour has for years called on the Government to legislate to ensure that building owners cannot pass costs on to innocent leaseholders. Even with the £200 million fund, leaseholders are still exposed to risk, because state aid rules mean that fund payments are capped at €200,000 per property.

As the Mayor of London and the National Housing Federation said, the fact that the fund covers only ACM cladding creates a two-tier system. Will the Minister explain what protections she is putting in place to ensure that leaseholders are not handed the bill in the event that remediation costs exceed the state aid cap? What is she doing to protect leaseholds in blocks with other forms of dangerous cladding from being unfairly passed those costs?

Research from Labour revealed last year that up to 600,000 people are now stuck in unsellable flats because of flawed Government guidance relating to advice note 14, which is compounded by the failure to publish the Government’s tests into suspect non-ACM cladding. In recent weeks, new advice has been issued, and a new form from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors—the EWS1 form—for buildings whose cladding status is uncertain. In spite of those changes, in the past few days I, like others, have dealt with constituents who have been able to complete their sale. One constituent is facing major delays and bills over the work that she has been told needs to be done. Will the Minister give some clarity on how many sales are still being held up, how many EWS1 forms have successfully been signed off, and what the Government are doing to ensure that leaseholders are not being ripped off for those forms?

Interim measures such as waking watch, which other hon. Members have mentioned, were put in place after Grenfell as a very temporary measure before remediation works were undertaken. However, nearly 1,000 days on, leaseholders are still paying exorbitant costs—thousands of pounds per year—as a direct consequence of the Government’s failure to hold building owners to account and make their blocks safe. What plans does the Minister have to ensure that leaseholders who cannot afford to continue paying the costs are supported?

On non-ACM and data collection, ACM is the tip of the iceberg. High-pressure laminate and other forms of cladding are just as dangerous and should be removed. However, two years on, Ministers have failed to audit residential blocks, so we still do not know how many blocks are covered in HPL or other types of potentially lethal cladding. Ministers promised that that work would be completed by March this year, but an Inside Housing investigation report revealed that 70% of blocks remain uninspected, meaning that it is virtually impossible to reach that deadline. It is ridiculous that the Government have often shifted their deadline on publication of the non-ACM test results. Will the Minister today commit to a date for the publication of the tests, or explain to us the reason for the delay?

[Meg Hillier]

Does not the delay in getting the data in speak to the lack of expertise available? I spoke to one of my housing associations at the end of last week, and it is having to assess its buildings in risk order. Many people in not so risky buildings will never get the work done to get the necessary paperwork—the data—to get a mortgage, which is also important for the property owners.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

That is absolutely correct. There is a whole raft of areas in which different evidence is gathered and different work needs to be done. There are questions about all those things. We do not know whether the people doing waking watch are doing it properly and are properly trained. We are spending money on things that we are not sure about. The lack of people doing those jobs is an important issue.

The announcement on 20 December that the height limit for removing ACM had shifted from 18 metres to 11 metres means that there are potentially thousands more blocks implicated in the cladding scandal than originally thought. That means that tens of thousands more leaseholders, who previously thought their blocks were safe, have now discovered that work needs to be done and that the Government do not deem their building safe. Additional safety requirements are welcome, but when it comes to building safety, it is unclear why the Government took two and a half years to decide that buildings between 11 metres and 18 metres were equally unsafe. Will the Minister clarify why they took so long to determine that blocks of that height should also have their cladding removed? Does the Department know how many residential blocks of between 11 metres and 18 metres exist across the country? How many are covered in Grenfell-style cladding? If the Government do not know how many blocks are covered, is there a plan in place to collect and publish that information, as has been done with blocks of 18 metres and above?

For two and a half years, we have had a merry-go-round of buck passing, and hundreds of thousands of people across the country are suffering as a result. It is disappointing that the Secretary of State was not asked about this more when he was doing the media rounds at the weekend, and that we have not seen more action. It is also disappointing that the Government are not engaging with leaseholders. A meeting in London was recently organised by the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, and 100 leaseholders were there. They were asked whether they have had regular engagement with Ministers, and not a single hand went up. We need to talk to people so we can understand the issues that they are facing.

If the Government are serious about the claims and pledges they made in the days and weeks following the Grenfell Tower fire, about their role in keeping people safe, about their commitment to homeowners, and about the principle that leaseholders should not be paying, it is time to act. I know this is difficult. It is a very big problem, and it will be very complicated to solve. If the Government act and do the right thing, the Opposition would thank them very much for doing so.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I now invite the Minister to answer all those questions. She has about 12 minutes, and perhaps she can allow a minute or so for Hilary Benn at the end.