Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
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 of the potential merits of taking steps to encourage (a) shops, (b) pubs, (c) cafes, (d) restaurants and (e) other public facing businesses to publish information on whether their businesses are accessible for wheelchair users.
Answered by Lee Rowley - Minister of State (Minister for Housing)
In offering services, shops, pubs, cafés, restaurants or other public facing business have a duty to anticipate making reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 and disabled people are supported to complain to a business owner, where they face physical barriers. The Government Equalities Office is responsible for the Equality Act.
Building control bodies check for compliance with regulatory requirements including accessibility at the point a building is built.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, whether his Department collects data on the wheelchair accessibility of (a) shops, (b) pubs, (c) cafes, (d) restaurants and (e) other public facing businesses.
Answered by Lee Rowley - Minister of State (Minister for Housing)
In offering services, shops, pubs, cafés, restaurants or other public facing business have a duty to anticipate making reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 and disabled people are supported to complain to a business owner, where they face physical barriers. The Government Equalities Office is responsible for the Equality Act.
Building control bodies check for compliance with regulatory requirements including accessibility at the point a building is built.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, for what reason the cost of (a) waking watches, (b) alarm upgrades and (c) other interim safety measures were not included in developers' obligations in the Developer Remediation Contract published on 30 January 2023.
Answered by Lee Rowley - Minister of State (Minister for Housing)
The Developer Remediation Contract was designed to ensure that developers address life-critical fire-safety defects arising from the design and/or construction of buildings as quickly as possible, so that residents are safe in their homes.
The Government has made over £60m available to replace costly waking watch measures with common fire alarm systems, under the Waking Watch Replacement Fund. The funding has been used to install alarms in over 300 buildings to date.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, whether his Department collects data on the wheelchair accessibility of residential properties when those properties are sold.
Answered by Lee Rowley - Minister of State (Minister for Housing)
The department collects information on the accessibility features of all households through the English Housing Survey.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
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 Financial Conduct Authority's report entitled Report on insurance for multi‑occupancy buildings, published in September 2022, if he will take steps to implement that report's recommendations; and what steps he plans to take to reduce insurance premium costs for leaseholders in multi-occupancy buildings.
Answered by Lee Rowley - Minister of State (Minister for Housing)
On the 30 January 2023, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities announced that we will take action to ban property managing agents, landlords and freeholders from receiving commissions and other payments from insurance firms, replacing such payments with more transparent fees.
Leaseholders will also have more information to enable them to better scrutinise their insurance costs, while also ensuring that leaseholders are not subject to unjustified legal costs and that they can claim their legal costs back from their landlord.
The FCA are currently undertaking their own review of high broker commission identified in their 21 September report which will be published in March 2023. I intend to meet the FCA again to discuss their work.
On 1 December, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) confirmed they are working to launch a scheme to reduce high premiums for those in buildings with significant fire safety issues. Ministers will continue to monitor the progress of the scheme and have made clear that they expect the scheme to be delivered as soon as is feasible to provide urgent assistance to affected buildings.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps he is taking to help people living in flats with unsafe cladding, bought using Help to Buy loans, obtain specialist valuations.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
All customers who wish to pay off their equity loan need to have their home professionally valued first to ascertain its current market value. Those whose properties have building safety issues, such as unsafe exterior cladding, can present additional challenges in valuing. The process to get a valuation and redeem an equity loan for properties affected by cladding can be found on Target, the loan administrator's, website. We are aware that some customers are having difficulties finding a valuer prepared to value their properties, and have been working with the Homes England and RICS to try to find ways to help customers, including potentially unlocking more valuation options for them in the future.
On December 6, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) published new valuation guidance for buildings 11 metres and above with cladding here. This guidance reflects the leaseholder protections in the Building Safety Act which confirmed that those at fault, not blameless leaseholders, will be the ones to pay to fix unsafe cladding, and the solutions in place to fix buildings 11m+. This new guidance will help to resolve difficulties in valuing properties where cladding is present.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of the costs of the Families for Ukraine scheme on the finances of local authorities.
Answered by Felicity Buchan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities)
There is no Families for Ukraine Scheme. There are two separate schemes – Homes for Ukraine and the Ukraine Family Scheme.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, if he will offer additional support to local authorities, in the context of trends in homelessness rates and number of households in temporary accommodation.
Answered by Felicity Buchan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities)
Local authorities have received £316 million through the Homelessness Prevention Grant in 2022/23. This is part of the £2 billion of funding committed to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping over the next three years.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, when he plans to introduce Phase 2 of legislation to ensure leaseholders can purchase the leasehold for their properties.
Answered by Eddie Hughes
The Government is committed to creating a fair and just housing system that works for everyone. This includes our comprehensive programme of reform to improve fairness and transparency in the leasehold market. In the next session of this Parliament we will bring forward reforms to supercharge leaseholders' ability to buy their freehold, helping millions of households genuinely to own their own home with the most significant discounts for those trapped with egregious, escalating ground rents.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, whether he plans to take steps to ensure that building developers, which have not signed the building safety repairs pledge, rectify fire safety defects in buildings they have developed.
Answered by Stuart Andrew - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
The Secretary of State has made it clear that developers must take responsibility for buildings with which they are associated. As of 23 May, 45 of the largest developers have signed a pledge to undertake all necessary life-critical fire safety work on 11m+ buildings they had a role in developing or refurbishing over the past thirty years.
Those pledges are being converted into legally binding contractual commitments, and the Department intends to establish a statutory Responsible Actors Scheme to make sure that industry actors are doing the right thing. The Department is now reaching out to further industry actors who were not involved in initial negotiations, and inviting them to make similarly binding commitments.
We have made clear that we will not hesitate to use our recovery unit and new powers in the Building Safety Act to go after companies and executives who fail to do the right thing.
We have also committed to using a building safety levy on the industry to raise a further £3 billion to pay for remediating cladding on 11m+ buildings where a developer cannot be identified or held responsible.