Absolutely. As I will come on to say, the Government’s handling of the crisis has been characterised by delay, a lack of clarity and uncertainty.
I also want to put on the record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith for his campaigning on fire safety in social housing blocks. He has campaigned tirelessly for many years—before the tragedy at Grenfell Tower and following the fire at Shepherd’s Court. I hope that the Minister and the wider housing sector will take on board many of his proposals for the inspection of electrical goods by social landlords and will look further at the regulatory regime. I will come on to some of his wider questions about the impact on the social housing sector.
What began as a cladding scandal after Grenfell, as we have heard, has now led to a total breakdown in confidence in most tall and multi-storey buildings in this country. The building safety crisis, as it has now become, affects hundreds of thousands of people. Buyers and tenants who dreamt of a safe, stable home to live in, who often spent their lives working towards that, are now living in a waking nightmare.
I am sorry to say that the Government’s approach has been characterised by dither and delay. They are leaving it to the market, which caused the mess in the first place,
rather than intervening strongly to get a grip of the crisis and resolve it. They have managed to get a £5 billion fund from the Treasury, which I applaud them for because that is not a small amount of money by any means, but they are not giving effect to the money as they stand back and watch costs soar while the remediation works required get out of control. They limit the scope and the timetables, and they are not doing anything to ensure certification and assurance. Leaving it to the market and those that created the crisis in the first place will not resolve anything. As we have heard, social landlords are inexplicably excluded from the fund.
We now face a total breakdown in the approach to risk. What are reasonable risks? Who decides that? Who will certify risk proportionately, and who can ensure that insurers will insure reasonably and that lenders lend? Nobody is standing by to do that at the moment. What are the appropriate policies to mitigate the risks, such as evacuation plans, sprinklers, and the capacity of fire services and so on? Is waking watch worth the costs that people pay for it?