My Lords, in moving Amendment 93B I will also speak to linked Amendment 107 and Amendments 105C to 105G standing in my name. These amendments offer a range of proposals to enhance the protection of leaseholders from the costs of remedying fire protection or other structural defects.
I make no apology for returning, once again, to this matter of basic consumer protection for leaseholders and for going over some old ground. My mailbox tells me that the issues are far from resolved. Too many leaseholders remain seriously encumbered by the defects in the original construction of flats that they occupy or own. The plain truth is that the Building Safety Act—I shall refer to it as the BSA—is not delivering the protection that leaseholders ought to expect as a basic right, and this Bill serves to undermine it further in certain material respects.
There is cross-party consensus that the BSA needs amendment. I pay tribute to colleagues who, with me, continue to press the Government to make changes. I support the other amendments in this group for reasons that will become apparent. The BSA is convoluted. It complicates, excludes, creates uncertainty and risk, and delays remediation. It leaves some leaseholders—and their lenders—with permanently impaired assets. Where before there was one market, the BSA creates three tiers of flat ownership, with such complex rules that conveyancers frequently decline instructions and, increasingly, insurers are unwilling to offer professional indemnity cover to practitioners.
The Government have placed substantial remediation obligations on landlords. The courts should be the last resort, yet the BSA and the Bill force landlords to take legal action as a first resort on initial unfunded remediation and, thereafter, to recover the costs of defects that they did not cause from the developers. Where the developer no longer exists, they must fund it themselves. There is no automatic developer liability to meet any of the costs in the 85% of buildings not covered by the developer contract. There is no legal obligation on any contracting developer to cover non-life-critical fire defects and structural defects. Landlords are the backstop if public funding for cladding costs happens to prove insufficient. Construction inflation, moreover, has risen by a quarter since the announcement of the building safety fund in March 2020, so my first question is: what assurance exists that all eligible claims on the building safety fund and the cladding safety scheme will be met even if they exceed those historic cost budgets?
More broadly, this model seems to be based on little more than political bias and destined to fail, and fail in a way that will ultimately harm leaseholders and the leasehold market. I have questioned previously whether the major landlord groups can afford to fulfil their remediation obligations as demanded. I was therefore surprised to learn that under the Bill, and despite relying on landlords to fund non-cladding remediation works or related legal action, the Government proposed to eliminate or reduce the ground rent income. I was
further surprised to learn from the noble Baroness, Lady Swinburne, in a letter last week, that the Government have no estimates of the risk of freeholder insolvency.
The main asset of many landlord groups is ground rent income, as we have heard before in discussions on the Bill. It is used to repay the long-term bonds or loans over many decades. If the income is removed, some will likely declare insolvency: the Government acknowledge this risk in their own impact assessment. I mention this again because it is critical to the remediation obligation. So that leaseholders are not left completely exposed if their landlords are insolvent, I trust that the Minister will regard as an essential lifeline my amendments, which are the only ones providing for alternative remediation funding sources. I would like to know what contingency plans the Government have in place apart from this, should buildings with remediation obligations escheat to the Crown, an eventuality the Minister alluded to on Monday.
Valuers are already marking down portfolio valuations because of material uncertainty. Permanent impairment of leaseholder and lender assets is also risked under the Government’s model. Basel III pillar 1 standards come into force next year. Lenders will have to revalue a loan if an
“event occurs resulting in a permanent reduction of the property value”.
Leaseholders will also be hit by these provisions; specifically the unprotected and partially protected—that is, the capped liability leaseholders—and those leaseholds covered by the developer contract. The contract allows combustible materials, now banned, to remain on buildings so long as they do not cause that “life-critical fire safety risk”. I put that in quotes: it is a non-statutory definition and my Question for Written Answer on this still awaits a response. But leaving these in place gives rise to a B1 category of building risk rather than the fully remediated A1 classification. At the same time, these flaws are evident to the market, which values an asset not according to life safety but according to the risk of material loss. The result is permanently higher insurance premiums. Ministers may wag the finger at the FCA in relation to its insurer members but, in truth, the market has spoken on the BSA and on building and professional indemnity cover risks, and no amount of political manipulation is going to alter that.
There is one group that faces a very bleak outcome, unless the Government change course, and that is in enfranchised leaseholders. Theirs are, in the terms of the BSA, “not relevant buildings”, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Young, makes in his amendments. The limit of any new protection afforded to resident management companies is the cost of obtaining a remediation contribution order, so can the Minister explain how enfranchised leaseholders will deal with non-cladding defects or effectively force the original developer to make a contribution, especially if it happens not to exist any longer?
Better policy is clearly needed. Simply, the BSA should be amended to protect all leaseholders, regardless of circumstances, in buildings of all heights. A separate, dedicated funding stream is needed so that leaseholders are not left in limbo, particularly when their landlord becomes insolvent.
The Committee will be familiar with Amendments 93B and 107 from the debates on the levelling-up Bill and the then Building Safety Bill, so I will try not to labour the point too much. Amendment 107 requires the Government to establish a building safety remediation scheme and Amendment 93B proposes a new schedule setting out the scheme’s key features. The scheme would serve to protect all leaseholders, without exclusion, from building safety remediation and interim safety costs. As drafted, it is fully funded.
Joint and several liability for remediating building safety defects is placed on the developer and principal contractor where a building did not comply with regulations at the time of construction. If neither can pay, or if the regulations have moved on and a building is retrospectively deemed unsafe, remediation funding comes from a levy across the wider building and materials industry. That approach has been extensively scrutinised by a range of legal and other professionals. In particular, I thank David Sawtell KC, of 39 Essex Chambers, for making himself available when I recently met with the Minister, whom I thank for facilitating the meeting.
I have added a second option for good measure. Amendments 105C to 105G amend certain arrangements already in the BSA. The developer contract limits developer responsibility to undefined “life-critical fire safety defects”. That means that all other defects are excluded. Amendment 105C closes that loophole by requiring developers to remedy all defects defined in the BSA. That brings all fire and structural defects within the scope of the developer contract—and, therefore, the responsible actors scheme—and puts that in line with primary legislation. It ends the arrangement whereby Parliament set in legislation one definition of defects requiring remediation while the Secretary of State entered into some side agreement with the industry for something rather different. At present, the government scheme requires developers only to remediate their own buildings. The Secretary of State has not given effect to Section 126(4)(b) of the BSA on the costs of remediating other buildings. Amendment 105D would put that right by amending the responsible actors scheme regulations.
Amendments 105E and 105F set out to end the three- tier system of leaseholder exclusions from remediation cost protection. Amendment 105E removes the exclusions according to building height and type of lease set out in the BSA. Amendment 105F removes the conditions and exclusions around remediation cost protection in Schedule 8 to the BSA.
The risk of major landlord insolvency is real. Amendment 105G reinstates and expands the original BSA provisions on insolvent landlords. It obliges insolvency practitioners and Law of Property Act receivers to commence or continue remediation work. Remediation costs are to be considered part of their expenses and therefore paid ahead of other creditors. It also reinstates their power to apply for a remediation contribution order, which the Government seek to remove through the Bill. But—this is a very big “but”—insolvency practitioners need secure funding if that is to work.
In closing, I draw attention to the great gulf between the Government’s self-praise about what they are doing—although, to a great degree, there is a lot of good in the
Bill—and the reality. That reality is measured in the anguish and distress of hundreds of thousands of leaseholders who bought properties in good faith and now cannot sell them, get mortgages or move on with their lives. It is measured in the 15,000 people evacuated from their homes, as reported three days ago in the Sunday Times and referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, on Monday. It is measured in the 37% defect rate found in developer-contract buildings; in the glacial progress of remediation revealed in the Government’s most recent progress statistics; and in the FCA’s frank warning that insurers price risk not according to the loss of life, as the Government may wish, but according to the stronger test of total loss of asset. It is measured by the fact that this debate continues to play out seven years after the Grenfell fire.
This inequitable scattering of liability across innocent parties begs the question: why do the Government not make the wider construction industry, which designed, built, sold and banked the profits from these defective properties, the primary backstop for the damage done? We do not have an answer to that.
I have provided in these amendments two possible routes to effective protection of leaseholders, the most vulnerable group in this sorry tale of shame. I ask the Minister and noble Lords: if not by these proposals, how? When will the Government act to protect all innocent, home-owning consumers from market failure, and are they content to risk their reputation and legacy on simply making this a problem for the next Government? I beg to move.
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