As others have reminded us, next week will mark five years since the Grenfell fire which claimed 72 lives. I want to add to the tributes to the residents and campaigners for the work they have been doing to keep the issue alive and call all of us involved to account.
Despite progress to some extent since the Secretary of State has been in post, we should not be under any illusion that the building safety crisis has somehow been fixed. Years before the Grenfell fire, the coroner’s recommendations relating to the Lakanal fire were not acted on by the Government, regulators or the building industry. The Lakanal inquiry report was one of many, many warnings that went unheeded. The building safety crisis triggered by the Grenfell fire has had a huge impact, not least on so many of my constituents living in buildings that would be safe and secure had those warnings been acted on. Instead, they are living in fear.
The worst incident in my constituency relating to the building safety crisis is that experienced by the shared owner leaseholders and students of the Paragon building
in Brentford. They had to be evacuated, with a week’s notice, in October 2020. The cladding had already been removed but the inspections revealed fundamental flaws in the system-built housing blocks. Hard-working leaseholders and students just starting university were cast out. As shared owners, the hard-working leaseholders struggled to get back on the housing ladder, as the Notting Hill housing partnership could not afford to give them the current value for something they would be buying now. They were given only the deemed value of their property at the time, and it was too low to buy another property as a shared owner in west London. Their salaries had not increased significantly, but the values of alternative properties had. Meanwhile, all the costs of the compensation, the legal and organisational costs, had to be covered by Notting Hill housing partnership from its building and maintenance budget.
That was the most severe example, but I have had hundreds of emails in the past five years from other constituents. Leaseholders have had to pay for replacement cladding and waking watch and they may not get recompensed, depending on the situation. Residents were told that they needed a completed EWS1 form to sell their home, yet only about 300 trained professionals across the country could do those checks, so constituents had to put their lives on hold while they waited for a survey. Once the surveys took place, many residents in blocks across my constituency—in Hounslow, Isleworth, Brentford and Chiswick, and indeed, across the country—found that other major problems were apparent in their flats, such as inadequate fire breaks, incorrect insulation and more. In Richmond House in south London, a fire ripped through a small four-storey block of 32 flats. There was no flammable cladding but it was built wholly inadequately. Luckily, no lives were lost. That fire took hold in 11 minutes.
The consequences of all that mean that my constituents face life-changing bills, which can ruin them, and the uncertainty of having to put their lives on hold. The former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), refused to act. At least this Secretary of State acknowledges that the Government have some responsibility and that the response of Government since Grenfell has—I think his words were—“occasionally been insensitive”. I thank him for being honest enough to acknowledge that at the Dispatch Box today.
After months, we finally saw the Government taking action, but it is still too little, too late; and, as Members have said, what support there is applies only to certain defects and not to many others, including structural defects, fire breaks and non-fire defects. We have seen only the tip of the iceberg in regard to defects, thanks to systematic failures across the construction and regulatory sector. Meanwhile, my constituents still face bills for non-cladding defects. There is no help for those mired in the mortgage crisis and unable to sell their homes, and building insurance charges are skyrocketing. One of my constituents saw a 500% increase this year.
Furthermore, social rent landlords were not recompensed for the cost of the building safety crisis imposed on them in places where they house social rent tenants. They have had to dip into their capital budgets, further undoing any growth in the number of social rent homes that we need and adding to the irrelevance of the Prime Minister’s announcement today.
To me, the announcement that personal emergency evacuation plans will not be mandatory in buildings at risk was particularly shocking. The plans are crucial for residents with disabilities and their families to ensure that they can escape buildings during a fire. That was a recommendation from the first report of the Grenfell inquiry. I recently spoke to a constituent whose husband needs a PEEP. In this case, he needs a special chair to ensure that they can get him out of their flat and down the stairs. My constituent rightly said that the Government’s position is “woeful and discriminatory”. It is outrageous that the Government refuse to ensure that residents with disabilities are given the support that they need to escape during a fire. As we know from the past decade, if this is left to the invisible hand of the market and private companies in the sector are relied on to do the right thing, they will not do so.
I will finish by touching on social housing, particularly after the Prime Minister’s announcement. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) for her graphic and emotional descriptions of the plight of her constituents in housing need in band A. I have many similar stories—I wish they were just stories, but they are lives.
After 12 years of Conservative Government failure to fix the housing market, Ministers are recycling and reheating old pilot programmes, with no new funding and no real plan. The Government know what they need to do: support councils such as Hounslow that are building more council homes and homes for social rent. The Government need to do far more. Hounslow is doing what it can with the resources that it has available. In the past three or four years, it has built more than 1,000 new council homes. It has also bought 500 homes, brought them into council ownership and allocated 20 of those to local care leavers. That was done with the help of the Mayor of London. Labour-led councils and Mayor Sadiq Khan are doing the right thing. If only we had a Government with the same commitment, they could do so much more.
With those 1,500 new homes, Hounslow Council is finally, after 10 years, achieving only level pegging on social rent and council housing numbers. Since the Conservative Government reinstated the 70% price discount for right to buy more than 10 years ago, Hounslow has steadily lost far more social rent homes than have been delivered. Nationally, as the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), said, only 2,500 new social rent homes were built and 11,000 were sold. The gap is massive and growing. Most of the homes that have been sold through right to buy are now owned by private landlords, who are charging tenants three times the rent paid by the council tenant living next door. With many of those tenants on housing benefit to meet the gap between their salary and rent levels, that is a massive bonanza for private landlords, at a cost to the taxpayer.
Although I welcome proposals to give more of a voice and more rights to social rent tenants, in my view that only covers one set of people. Council tenants often feel frustrated. They are not always happy, but at least they have elected councillors who can support them with management and maintenance issues. Also, management, maintenance and investment decisions
are taken by the council in public, but that is not true for housing association tenants. Many of my constituents are tenants of the larger registered social landlords. They are distant and opaque and often do not even respond to me and my caseworkers, let alone to their tenants. Legislating is therefore the right thing to do, but it has to be done properly. And what about private tenants? Too often, they are bullied and even evicted by rogue landlords, rather than listened to and supported. There is very little to actually improve the voice of leaseholders in private blocks. And there is, of course, the other subset: shared owners.
After 12 long years in power, it is clear that the Government still have no real plan to fix the housing crisis, no plan to end the injustice facing leaseholders and no plan to ensure that we build the good, high-quality, truly affordable homes that families in my constituency want and need.
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