Flat owners should not bear the additional costs of the cladding scandal

Today MPs will vote on whether leaseholders will be lumped with the bill for urgent fire safety works in the wake of Grenfell

A view of Grenfell Tower, where a severe fire killed 72 people in June 2017. (Getty Images)

The 72 lives lost at Grenfell Tower was a tragedy. The inaction and ineptitude displayed in the following three and a half years has been a scandal.

Thousands of families still can’t rest easy in their homes, knowing that the cladding surrounding them poses a constant risk. At the time of the Grenfell Tower fire, the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, rightly promised that “we cannot and will not ask people to live in unsafe homes”, but that is exactly what’s happened in the years since. The bill for fixing systemic fire safety problems unearthed in the wake of Grenfell could fall on many flat owners, and further exposes the fundamental injustice of the situation.

Today MPs have a chance to fix this. The Fire Safety Bill, due to be voted on in Parliament, includes amendments to stop leaseholders bearing the cost of fire safety works. This would enable us to start drawing a line under the nightmare so many have been living.

Stopping flat owners having to pick up the bill for making their homes safe must be the first step in a new plan to fix the building safety crisis that Grenfell exposed, and to finally give thousands of leaseholders hope that they can move on with their lives.

It is welcome that after years of campaigning Ministers have finally agreed to fund the replacement of unsafe cladding on all high-rise blocks over 18m, even though it’s astonishing that this simple step took so long. But the government’s plan still has gaping holes, including the most obvious one: the plight of flat owners in buildings under 18m who face having to take out loans to pay to fix problems they didn’t cause and those in buildings under 11m who have been offered no support at all.

It’s no good Ministers saying monthly costs will be capped as this wouldn’t stop flat owners paying the full amount, either spread out over years or knocked off the value of their home when they try to sell.

Even for those living in blocks over 18m, the threat of hefty bills falling on residents has not been entirely removed. The government’s Building Safety Fund only covers the cost of cladding remediation, not other building safety work. If defects are discovered when the cladding is removed, leaseholders will be required to put their hands in their own pockets to fix them.

No one is pretending the solutions to these problems will come cheap. Billions of pounds have already been earmarked for remediation. But the government has been far too reluctant to tap into one source of funds – the developers responsible for building these blocks in the first place. This would be the target of my proposal for a £3bn windfall levy, however, Ministers are yet to take this idea forward.

Today, MPs have the chance to herald a new start in this building safety saga. With a simple vote, they could start to put the minds of hundreds of thousands of people at ease, undo years of dithering, and be the ones responsible for eventually ending this cladding scandal. I urge them to do the right thing – it’s the least their constituents deserve.