Residential Leaseholders and Interim Fire Safety Costs

Welcome to Westminster Hall from the Boothroyd Room. I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice in order to support the new hybrid arrangements. Timings of debates have been amended to allow technical arrangements to be made for the next debate. There will be suspensions between debates. I remind Members participating physically and virtually that they must arrive for the start of debates in Westminster Hall and are expected to remain for the entire debate. If Members attending virtually have any technical problems, they should email the Westminster Hall Clerks’ email address. Members attending physically should clean their spaces before using them and before leaving the room.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered residential leaseholders and interim fire safety costs.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. It is also a pleasure to be back in Westminster Hall and to be able to debate such an important topic today. When I became the MP for Vauxhall in 2019, two and a half years after the horrific Grenfell Tower fire, I did not expect to find so many of my constituents still living in unsafe buildings, blighted by dangerous cladding and other fire safety defects. To date, I have received correspondence from and been contacted by more than 250 individual leaseholders living in 27 different unsafe building developments in my constituency. And that is just in Vauxhall. The sheer scale of the cladding scandal is truly shocking, and it has revealed the full extent of what can only be described as a systematic failure in building safety in this country. But because of the tireless efforts of campaigners and their supporters up and down the country, we know that safety is only one part of this story. Leaseholders who bought their homes in good faith now find themselves saddled with the financial responsibility and liability for problems that they had absolutely no part in creating.

Much has been said recently about this injustice, and I am grateful to colleagues across the House who have called for urgent action to protect innocent leaseholders. Understandably, much of the debate has focused on who should pay for the cost of the remedial works to remove and replace the cladding. However, I want to draw attention to an equally urgent but much less talked about financial aspect of this crisis. That is the eye-watering charges that are being passed on to leaseholders for compulsory interim fire safety measures while they wait for the remediation work to be completed.

The debate will last until 10.55 am. I intend to call the Opposition spokesman no later than 10.32 am and the Minister at 10.42 am. Florence Eshalomi will have two or three minutes to sum up the debate at the end. There are 16 Back Benchers seeking to contribute. I want to make sure that everyone gets in, so I am afraid that I will have to impose a time limit. If we aim for three minutes, everybody should have their say. All Members participating virtually should have a countdown clock on their screens. We will start with Stephen McPartland.

I thank the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) for securing this very important debate. She spoke eloquently and movingly about some of the tragic stories that she has heard about in her constituency in London. Sadly, those stories are reflected in my constituency and in constituencies up and down the country.

The costs of intermediate waking watch measures and of insurance premiums going up by thousands of per cent are just heartbreaking. Even as we speak in these debates, people are going bankrupt, and the Government do not seem to be listening to the howls of pain from leaseholders up and down the country, as they beg for support and assistance.

We are almost four years on from Grenfell and we are not getting this matter right; we are not helping. Unfortunately, the Government are actually making the situation worse by not working with leaseholders and the relevant groups, such as the UK Cladding Action Group—End Our Cladding Scandal. A variety of brilliant recommendations have been made by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, which is chaired by our wonderful colleague, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who is taking part in this debate. It is imperative that we help these leaseholders.

When we look at insurance premiums as a measure, which a lot of people do not recognise, we see that they may have gone up by 2,000% or even 3,000%. The Government are taking 12% in insurance premium tax on those rises, so the insurance premium tax take on those insurance premiums is currently higher than the insurance premiums themselves were a year or two ago. That is astonishing.

On waking watch, the fire services have told us that they have almost no control over it. Waking watch is not new; it was introduced years ago and was used, for example, if a hotel fire alarm did not work. At the moment, however, waking watches are being used by management companies as the first resort instead of the last resort. As a result, our local fire services do not have any ability to go in and help the leaseholders, who are being told, “Well, you need to have a waking watch”. There are no other options for them. The fire services should be given some powers to be involved in a responsible waking watch, when it is needed, or to consider what other evacuation orders or measures could be put in place. And the costs are just staggering. I have constituents in Vista Tower in Stevenage who are paying £15,000 a week and they just cannot afford it; that sum is impossible for them to afford. They are paying almost as much as some of their mortgage payments and they are now going bankrupt.

I am always pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, and I look forward to doing so again today.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing this important debate. My constituents in Edmonton who live in Prowse Court, Golden Lion Court and Brickland Court watched the Chancellor’s speech last week and were left feeling very disappointed. There was not one mention of cladding or fire safety in the Budget.

Leaseholders such as my constituent Jason and his wife moved into their flat in 2007 with their daughter. In January this year, a fire safety assessment concluded that the cladding on Jason’s building needed to be removed. Jason and his fellow tenants have no idea about how long they are going to be waiting for the removal of the cladding or who will meet the costs of that work. All they are certain of is that the interim safety measures must be put in place, including increased fire risk assessments and additional heat detectors. The freeholder of Jason’s building has already begun passing down the costs of these measures, in the form of increased insurance and service charge costs. That has left Jason in debt, unable to move and stuck in an unsafe building that is costing him more and more money. Jason goes to sleep every night knowing that his family is not safe and that there is no end in sight to his worry. To put it simply, Jason’s family are trapped.

I have raised identical cases with the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government to ask that the Government fully fund interim fire safety costs. In their reply, the Government seemed focused only on ensuring that remediation work is completed first. It is incredibly unjust to penalise those who did not cause this cladding scandal to have to wait for remediation work to be completed first, while allowing the property developer to walk away, bearing no interim costs and seemingly no long-term costs.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing the debate, and it is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) in highlighting the concerns arising in the debate.

Given the circumstances, I want to concentrate on two areas. The first is cladding on tall buildings. I congratulate the Government on securing funding to help to remediate that cladding, but the problem is that the cost of removing cladding on tall buildings is often dwarfed by the cost of the fire safety measures that must also be implemented. It is quite clear, as things stand, that leaseholders will be saddled with the costs of the fire safety measures that are required, as well as the costs of the cladding. I should be grateful if my right hon. Friend the Minister would respond to the issue of what exactly is included in the remediation of cladding. At the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, there was some confusion when it was suggested that external areas that are not involved in the cladding, such as different balconies, will now be included in the grant scheme.

The other problem is that we are now told that once a fire assessment takes place, the remediation grants will not be available unless leaseholders sign up to fixing the fire safety issues as well, but those involve eye-watering sums of money. The arrangements, of course, are complex. I think we all agree leaseholders should not have to pay for the remediation, but the issue then is who should. I take the view that the taxpayer should not pay for it. The developers, building owners and indeed suppliers of materials should pay for the fire safety remediation, as well as the remediation of unsafe cladding. There is no doubt that the testing regime was unfit for purpose at the time in question, but emerging evidence from the Grenfell inquiry suggests that manufacturers deliberately decided to use the position on testing to cheat on the system. If so, they should be forced to carry out the remediation at their cost.

In a moment, I will call Dame Margaret Hodge. The speaker after her has withdrawn, so then we will go to Hilary Benn.

I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing this important debate.

In June 2019, a devastating fire tore through the timber balconies of Samuel Garside House in Barking. Residents lost their homes and possessions, and even their pets, and now live in fear, suffering sleepless nights and constant anxiety. Those residents were the first of many constituents impacted by the cladding scandal who have sought my help.

Leaseholders in Barking and Dagenham are not wealthy. Many live hand to mouth, and most cannot even afford contents insurance. Cladding has turned their dream of buying a home into a living nightmare. They face ongoing costs for interim safety measures, and cannot afford them. There are massive bills for waking watches, building insurance and EWS surveys, and the residents cannot sell or remortgage their homes.

At Academy Central, residents have paid £3,500 per household per year for a waking watch. Many cannot afford it and have been doing 24-hour control themselves, which places huge strain on their lives. At Rivermill Lofts, leaseholders have struggled to get an EWS survey. They have been quoted hundreds of pounds per flat, and only 70% of the households have paid up. In the meantime, their flats are worthless. At the Ropeworks, building insurance shot up from £70,000 to £650,000—that is 900%—in two years. At Barking Central, bills for interim measures have reached £6,500 per home. A third of leaseholders cannot afford that, and the cladding grant that they hope to get will not cover the costs of dealing with things such as flammable insulation or faulty firebreaks.

Many leases are buy-to-let, and the landlords often just do not care—at Arboretum Place, only five people turned up to discuss a way forward. The owner-occupiers cannot even begin to sort out the mess if the landlords will not engage. Responsibilities are diffuse, ownership is often shady and stakeholders shirk their obligations. I have had freeholders refusing point blank even to consider that they have a moral duty to help, developers refusing to turn up to meetings and insurers profiteering.

I call Hilary Benn.

I call Sir Robert Neill.