On Sept 16th several hundred leaseholders staged a rally in Parliament Square to ask the government to resolve a growing crisis over unsafe buildings and who should pay to fix them. The rally was a response to several overlapping crises that reached a literal flashpoint when Grenfell tower’s external cladding went up in flames in June 2017.
The tower’s external cladding, which was supposed to be fireproof, was then found to be wrapped around hundreds of tall buildings in the UK. The suppliers have conveniently gone out of business while developers, freeholders, and even insurers, all duck responsibility for making the buildings safe.
Then bills for six figure sums began to arrive on the mats of leaseholders who had bought their flats in good faith, believing them to built and tested by regulators. Justin Madders, Labour MP said when the first case came to his attention, he thought it was a technical error, a mistake, but as thousands more leaseholders received similar bills, he realised it was systemic.
Speakers included MPs from all the major parties – Sir Peter Bottomley, Stephen McPartland, Iain Duncan-Smith from the Tories, Justin Madders and Hilary Benn from Labour, and Rosie Cooper from the LibDems. Grenfell was remembered by a speaker from Grenfell Together, as well as by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.
The Mayor pulled the various threads together when he said “This isn’t just an issue about Grenfell, it isn’t just an issue about ACM, this isn’t just an issue about cladding, this isn’t just an issue about ground rents & service charges, this is an issue about the leasehold system being broken.”
With these multiple issues, designing a snappy banner was always going to be a challenge but ‘Leaseholders lives matter’ summed it up well. ‘Help to die’ was a reference to the Help to Buy scheme, where the government lent money to the buyers of flats now found to be fire safety hazards, and unsellable.
One banner represented a cheque made payable to the Tories signed D.Veloper & friends. A reminder that property developers donated £891,000 to the Tory party in the first quarter of 2021, according to a Guardian reported in June.
Several referred to the polluter pays bill which draws on existing laws that allow the government to pursue firms who contaminate land to force them to cover the costs of fixing it. This bill is an amendment to the Building Safety Bill which is in Committee stage until 26 October at the latest.
The Committee is considering a set of amendments (the McPartland-Smith amendments) which include the creation of an indemnity scheme similar to the Motor Insurers’ Bureau that all developers, building insurers and mortgage lenders must pay into, to fund future remediation works, as well as an extension of the time within which residents can claim for defects, from the current six years to 25 years.