UK Parliament / Open data

Social Housing and Building Safety

Proceeding contribution from Hilary Benn (Labour) in the House of Commons on Thursday, 9 June 2022. It occurred during Debate on Social Housing and Building Safety.

I begin by joining others in expressing my condolences to the families who are here—and others who are not—whose loved ones died in the Grenfell fire. Their pain is never, ever going to go away. The very least we can do, and the essential first step, is to apologise for the failures. We heard that from the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), who spoke for the Opposition.

Looking back, it is incredible that combinations of materials were allowed on the outside of buildings as cladding and were declared safe when no one had ever set fire to them to see what would happen. It is extraordinary that that transpired, and it is incredible that so many buildings were not constructed in accordance with the building regulations in force at the time. As the Secretary of State will know, as cladding has been inspected, people have peeled stuff off, peered inside and said, “Uh-oh—where are the fire breaks?” It is also shameful that the people responsible for this generation of jerry-built blocks thought that they could get away with it. That is what we are confronting.

There is no doubt at all—I join hon. Members on both sides of the House in saying this—that the Secretary of State has applied great determination and energy to the task that confronted him when he came into the post. However, he will be acutely conscious that thousands of leaseholders still do not know what will happen to their block. With each passing day, they remain trapped: trapped in their life, trapped in their building, which they are told is a fire risk, and paying additional costs. They do not know when it will all be brought to an end.

I have raised with the Secretary of State the particular case of the Gateway building in the centre of Leeds. Three types of cladding were submitted to the building safety fund. The fund said that it would pay for the render, but that the two types of zinc cladding—zinc is applied to battens with various other materials—were not eligible for funding, even though the specialist fire safety adviser to the managing agents and the freeholder has said that in their professional opinion such cladding does not comply. The leaseholders are currently debating whether to spend £70,000 or £80,000 and another eight months on it. There is a great waiting list—after a generation or two of failure to set fire to materials to see whether they were safe, there is now a long queue for the

small number of institutions that can make up a particular combination made up at height and set fire to it to see what happens.

I raise the case because one of the considerations that my constituents and the managing agents are weighing up is that if the material is not found to burn in a way that breaches the regulations, a fire safety adviser will be able to issue an EWS1 certificate in respect of the building. But what if the material does burn in a dangerous way? Is it all worth doing unless they are sure that if they provide incontrovertible evidence, the building safety fund will say, “Okay, we will now cough up for a replacement”? That is a very important question. It may relate to a relatively small number of blocks, but they deserve reassurance that if they provide the evidence, they will get a change in the building safety fund’s decision.

The problem is immensely complex, as the Secretary of State and his officials, who have been working so hard, know better than anybody. Also complex is the liability waterfall that he has created to deal with it, but leaseholders are still not sure how the waterfall will work. To extend the analogy, I suppose they hope and pray that the water will never fall on them because others higher up the chain will have taken on the work and the liability.

I have great sympathy for the managing agents, some of which are quite small. They have dealt with lift contracts and ground maintenance. They never thought that the task of being a managing agent would mean being asked to manage a multimillion-pound contract to, in effect, pick off the outside of a building and rebuild it to be safe. They are sitting with leaseholders and trying to work out where the funding will come from, out of multiple sources. It is a very difficult process.

The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) raised a point about buy-to-let landlords. Apart from the unfairness of saying to people who have bought flats in good faith that somehow they are not entitled to the same protection as leaseholders, there is a practical problem. I can think of blocks in my constituency in which a goodly proportion of the flats are owned by buy-to-let landlords. If they cannot come up with the money to contribute to fixing the problem, that will affect all the leaseholders living in flats that they have bought in the same block, because the work will never get done. There is a pragmatic reason for ensuring that that does not come to pass.

This debate has not touched on the alternative approach of having a building works agency, rather like what has happened in Australia, where a central body has taken on this complex task but then gone after the people who should pay. With hindsight, that would have been a better approach. Of course, costs are rising all the time.

Before I come on to social housing, I want to make one other point to the Secretary of State. I do not know whether he has taken this up—I apologise if he has—but I wrote to one of his predecessors to propose convening a standing roundtable, if that is not a contradiction in terms, made up of representatives of leaseholders, managing agents, fire services, fire surveyors, insurance companies and mortgage lenders. The Minister and his team and officials may be having conversations with each of those bodies individually, but such a roundtable would be a place where individual problems that may be happening elsewhere could be worked through in aid of a speedier outcome.

The real test, as with the debt of obligation that we owe to the Grenfell families who are here today, will be how soon the day will arrive when all my constituents and every other hon. Member’s constituents can finally breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that the problem has been sorted, and can get on with the rest of their lives.

I have a brief point to make about the social housing crisis. I listened with great interest to what my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) said. In the 1980s, Leeds City Council had about 94,000 council properties; today, it has 54,000. The big fall in the numbers of new council houses being built across the country, along with the sale of council houses, means that the stock available to let to people in need is falling at a rate of about 600 a year. Many other councils around the country will see the same picture. What is more, turnover is falling because people are thinking, “I think I’ll hang on to the council property I’ve got at the moment,” and demand is ever rising. In Leeds, 26,500 people are on the housing register, 6,500 of whom are in band A.

The maths is really terribly simple. There is growing demand, with people living in overcrowded accommodation —increasing numbers of people are coming to me and telling me, as their Member of Parliament, about the difficulties that they are experiencing in overcrowded, unsuitable accommodation with medical and other needs. They are chasing a diminishing number of properties. In one case, when new council houses were advertised—Leeds is doing its best to build them and has a choice-based lettings system—more than 1,000 people applied for one new council property. Anyone who is not absolutely at the top of the priority banding does not have a hope in hell of getting a property.

I listened with interest to the recent announcement about the right to buy. In all honesty, I have to say to the Secretary of State that we have heard about one-for-one replacement time and again, but it has never happened. That is why Leeds City Council’s housing stock has gone from more than 90,000 to just over 50,000. We have ended up in the absurd position that in an effort to increase the number of council houses for rent, councils including Leeds are buying back council houses that they originally built but which were sold. So they are paying twice over for one property, and that does not make sense.

I do not know whether the Government would ever consider this, but one approach would be to say, “I support the right to buy, but if the person who has bought the house then wants to sell it on to someone else, shouldn’t the council have the right of first refusal to take the property back?” We know what has happened: as has already been pointed out, many of those houses, as they have been sold down the chain, have ended up in the hands of private landlords charging—as we heard a moment ago from my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury)—rents that are way in excess of those that applied when they were council houses. It is an absurd system, at a time when we know that there is such basic housing need.

It is not as if new homes had not been built; loads of new homes have been built in the centre of Leeds. However, they are mainly one or two-bedroom flats—some of them in the blocks that are currently affected by the cladding crisis—whereas, in Leeds as in many other places, as families grow the need is for three and four-bedroom housing. There has been a terrible mismatch.

It is not as if there were no space in which to build, and it is not as if there had been no resources with which to build. The problem is that the wrong types of properties are being built, and the people in the greatest need are unable to get their hands on the properties that would enable them and their families to look forward to a better future.

The time has come for this acute housing crisis, which is causing great suffering to people, to be addressed by the Government.

2.1 pm

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

715 cc997-1001 

Session

2022-23

Chamber / Committee

House of Commons chamber
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