My Lords, I genuinely thank all Members of this House for their positive engagement. The Cross Benches, the Liberal Democrats, the Opposition —at the end of the day everybody wants to see a better Bill, and I certainly understand that. I thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. I learned a lot from his contribution on behalf of the Cross Benches. It was incredibly thoughtful and practical, understanding that this requires a firm hand from the Government and that we need to have a coherent programme as we move forward.
I am well aware that the building safety Bill, which already has around 120 clauses, will be considerably longer, in its passage through Parliament, than this three-clause Bill. But I want to make the point that we have seen constructive and more opportunistic contributions, and I want to put them into three buckets. The very constructive contributions, as this returns to the other place, are around the competence and capacity of the professionals who will have to work with the system day to day. We not only want to have nice documents and a good fire risk assessment, we need to ensure that fire safety management works and that the people in the buildings know how to prevent these things from happening in the first place. The identification of a responsible person is also important. Accountability underpins all this, so that was very helpful, as was the discussion about the recording of fire risk assessments and their availability to occupants. Some of those points were incredibly constructive—there were more, but I put them in the “constructive and relevant” bucket.
Then we have the “constructive, but this is not the right legislative hook” bucket. Electrical safety is incredibly important, since its lack is the cause of many fires in dwellings. We recognise that we need to find the right vehicle, but this is not it and I think noble Lords accept that.
Then we had the more opportunistic comments. There is a real commitment to implement the phase 1 inquiry findings from this Government, from the Opposition Benches and from the Liberal Democrats, but we had to consult, and the fire safety consultation had more than 200 responses. We need to use that as the vehicle, through regulation, to ensure that the crisis that happened three and a half years ago never happens again. Although you can never say “never”, that is the purpose of these packages of reform and we stand by that commitment. We just want to find the most practical and proportionate ways of achieving that end point, by talking to the people who have to manage that system day to day.
Also more opportunistic were the comments around decades-long poor construction and poor quality. We are talking about decades of problems and, unfortunately, they are going to take a long time to resolve. The question of who pays for this remediation requires careful balance. We want building owners to be responsible for this. We want developers to build high-quality buildings, so that we do not have to remediate in the future to the extent that we do today, and that we face today with our future buildings. We want developers to pay, and they have paid. We have seen this with the ACM fund. However, the extent of how bad this is, beyond cladding, has not really been calculated. It has just been guesstimated, but it runs into many billions of pounds. Therefore, in wanting to have personal accountability but also appropriate action by the state, we have options.
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How much does the taxpayer front up? We have already fronted up £1.6 billion; we will probably have to look at more in due course, but at the moment we are spending the first billion. The taxpayer should stump up, because sometimes the warranty claims are not there. The warranty system is, frankly, not fit for purpose, as I have said before at the Dispatch Box. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, has also made that point: often, a 10-year period is not enough when you are buying a home for life, and two years for defects is not enough to cover substantial structural issues, as we are finding out.
Beyond the taxpayer, we can then look at levies, as have been raised in Australia; but levies do not raise very much, and you have to balance that with the need to build more homes. So, levies can be looked at by government, but they are no silver bullet. Lastly, we can look at loans. Loans are a vehicle to make something that is unaffordable affordable, but at this stage we have not announced policy, and this is not the legislation to announce policy around how we deal with the cost of historic remediation. So, I consider this a little opportunistic, yet I do think it is constructive, because it is a serious issue that the Government have to grapple with.
I finish by thanking noble Lords, and I beg to move that the Bill do now pass.
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