London Assembly calls for tenants and leaseholders to be protected from fire safety costs
Sadiq Khan is set to call on the government to “urgently” review construction safety laws to provide more financial protection for tenants and leaseholders after the Grenfell tragedy.
It follows a motion that was unanimously passed in the London Assembly last week that called for tenants and leaseholders “in buildings of all sizes” to be protected from the costs of fixing fire safety defects such as the removal of dangerous cladding.
The motion was proposed by Labour’s Anne Clarke, who was elected to represent Barnet and Camden in the Assembly in May’s elections.
Clarke said: “It shouldn’t be up to leaseholders to fix the cladding scandal or to foot the bill for it by having to cover the costs of soaring insurance premiums and waking watches.
“We also shouldn’t be seeing the responsibility for handling this crisis being laid at the feet of the London Fire Brigade. And yet in the face of funding cuts, our already overstretched firefighters are having to deal with the pressures of carrying out thousands of additional hours of fire safety inspections each month.
“We need to see an urgent amendment made to the Building Safety Bill to take away the financial burden being faced by leaseholders, alongside giving our firefighters the resources, they need to deal with the crisis at hand.”
The Mayor of London will now write to Housing Minister Robert Jenrick to call for tenants and leaseholders to be exempted from covering the cost of remedial works, as well as mitigations such as waking watches and common fire alarm systems.
Currently, the Government’s £5 billion building safety fund only covers the cost of carrying out remediation work on buildings above 18 metres in height.
But during the previous mayoral term, the London Assembly’s fire, resilience and emergency planning committee found that fire safety defects were “widespread” in buildings below 18 metres in height, meaning thousands of Londoners were left bearing the cost of making them safe.
Earlier this month, hundreds of protestors in London joined demonstrators across the country in calling for developers to cover the cost of repairing fire safety defects following a fire at the New Providence Wharf development in East London that a report found had “serious safety failings”.
The Citizen reported in April on a group of Homerton residents who say the cladding scandal is taking away their choice to grow their families, and other local leaseholders have previously warned of the “harrowing impact” on their mental health.
Hackney Mayor Philip Glanville accused the government in February of “spectacularly failing” to address the crisis.
Its clear after Grenfell and the subsequent revelation at the inquiry that there have been failures by developers, builders, architects and local council building control over numerous elements of fire safety, both in respect of internal and external parts of buildings.
But the failures are not the fault of the end purchaser. The Government should take the hit initially and then recover as much money as they can from all those involved in contributing to this crisis. Granted the recoveries will be limited because firms will go bust rather than cough up in full, but anything will be better than nothing.
The Government has raked in billions from taxes on property purchase over the years and when all is said and done regulation has failed in that the regulations have proved to be insufficient, and even rules that did e4xist have not been followed. Not all purchasers are affected and those that are not can count themselves lucky. But it shouldn’t be a matter of luck should it? All those purchasers affected should be indemnified against losses due to rectification work that in essence should never have been required, because the buildings should have been constructed properly.