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Minister tells peers that amendment to protect cladding leaseholders does not go far enough

The building safety minister urged peers to vote against an amendment to fire safety legislation because it did not provide enough protection to leaseholders being pursued for costs, a letter seen by Inside Housing revealed.

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Building safety minister Lord Greenhalgh spoke via video link (picture: Parliament TV)
Building safety minister Lord Greenhalgh spoke via video link (picture: Parliament TV)
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The building safety minister urged peers to vote against an amendment to fire safety legislation because it did not provide enough protection to leaseholders being pursued for costs, a letter seen by Inside Housing shows #UKhousing

Lord Greenhalgh wrote to peers yesterday ahead of a crunch vote – which the government lost – calling on them not to support an amendment that seeks to prevent remediation costs being passed on to leaseholders.

He said the amendment, tabled by Bishop of St Albans Alan Smith, “does not protect the leaseholder from remediation costs that occur outside of the fire risk assessment process, so for example remediation needed to correct damage occurring from a fire or building works”.

The bishop was presenting an amendment originally tabled by Conservative backbenchers Stephen McPartland and Royston Smith which would prevent the costs of cladding remediation being met by leaseholders.


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Lord Greenhalgh argued that “the correct legislative approach” would be to use the forthcoming Building Safety Bill to deal with this issue.

However, a draft version of this bill consolidates the existing legal position that leaseholders should pay for historic defects and will impose a new category of service charges, dubbed “building safety charges”, into existing leases to ensure they also foot the bill for new obligations the act creates.

A committee of MPs scrutinising the bill called this “an abdication of responsibility” in November.

The Fire Safety Bill will now return to the House of Commons where MPs will once more have a chance to vote on the amendment.

In his speech yesterday, Lord Greenhalgh also committed to deliver the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report “in full” and to lay regulations to achieve this before the second anniversary of its publication in October.

However, a consultation, also published yesterday, showed that the government is still yet to commit to several key recommendations from the report.

The report included an unambiguous recommendation that all high rises should be fitted with manual fire alarms to allow the fire brigade to send an evacuation signal to all or part of a building if a fire got out of hand.

But rather than implement this, the government has only committed to being “informed by the outcome of the programme of research and testing” on this point.

Manual alarms are not generally being installed in high rises, except in specific instances where dangerous cladding is found. Inside Housing has seen minutes of a “special interest group” meeting where industry lobbyists pushed against the adoption of this measure – which was branded “not cheap”.

The government is also yet committed to adopting a recommendation for personal emergency evacuation plans for residents with disabilities, something which the same group branded “completely impracticable not doable”.

After legal action from a bereaved family it agreed to rerun a separate consultation on this point, but has made no announcements about its implementation.

There also remains no commitment to following the recommendation for three-monthly fire door checks in all blocks with multiple flats. Its consultation response, published yesterday, noted concerns about the cost and practicality of this recommendation.

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