After Clause 2 - Legislative proposals relating to prohibition on passing remediation costs on to leaseholders and tenants

Part of Fire Safety Bill – in the House of Commons at 2:00 pm on 28 April 2021.

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Photo of Barry Gardiner Barry Gardiner Labour, Brent North 2:00, 28 April 2021

This Bill has been passing backwards and forwards between the Lords and Commons because the Government will not do the right thing and protect leaseholders from the ruinous costs of replacing cladding and remediating internal fire safety defects during construction. By refusing to do so, the Government are making liars out of all the successive Ministers—and, indeed, a Prime Minister—who have told this House that leaseholders should not pay for building defects for which they are not responsible.

Today I want to focus on the impact of the EWS1 regulations and the callous way in which another operator, FirstPort, is treating vulnerable residents in Blackberry Court in my constituency. FirstPort has written to the 27 leaseholders in Blackberry Court, which is a two-storey block of flats, to advise them that the fire safety work will cost more than £20,000. It has not provided a breakdown of costs or issued a section 20 notice, as it is legally obliged to do for any work costing more than £250 per leaseholder. What is most disturbing, however, is that FirstPort has been demanding access to the roof void through the only loft hatch, which is located in the bedroom of my constituent, who is an elderly lady of 94 years of age. FirstPort would brook no objection to this until I intervened to forestall this intrusion and asked it to create new access to the roof void from the common parts of the building. But the fact that it had not yet been able to access the void to survey it means that it must already have been aware that there was no compartmentation in the roof space. Indeed, I have discovered that Blackberry Court, which was built in 2007, never got a completion certificate, despite being covered by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. That prompts the question of why the company had not acted on this fire safety defect before. Some may suspect that the properties were unsaleable and devalued—unless the work was done—because of the EWS1 form. The Government did change the requirements on the form, but the Minister knows that the banks and the mortgage lenders have not changed their stance, nor have the insurers.

Charitably, EWS1 forms are the Government’s attempt to force a proper assessment of fire safety defects. Less charitably, they appear to be an attempt to outsource the crucial work of assessing dangerous buildings after Grenfell Tower to an unregulated private market. Currently, there is no requirement for a surveyor to hold the minimum qualification—professional registration or certification as to their competence—and nothing to ensure a uniform approach as to how inspectors carry out checks. This means that, in some cases, different EWS1 ratings are being given for the same block.

According to Government statistics, there are around 88,000 residential buildings taller than 11 metres in England, containing 1.2 million leasehold homes. The Government have said that there are currently just 212 chartered fire engineers across the UK registered with the Institution of Fire Engineers. This means that getting an EWS1 form is nigh on impossible, and, in the meantime, leaseholders are left in economic limbo, unable to sell or to move on with their lives. My constituent, at the age 94, simply wants to live out her life in peace and safety in the flat that she bought more than a decade ago. The Government’s refusal—