Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:41 pm on 14 October 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:41, 14 October 2020

Well, unfortunately, Delyth, we don't have all the powers necessary to change the basic law in order to be able to do that. Would that we could; I would very much like to be able to do that. There are some things we can do going forward that will protect people from being in that situation with new buildings, but that won't help the people who are currently in very difficult situations in buildings around the place—a large number of them have been mentioned previously in Plenary. 

We are currently investigating ways of being able to assist people to do the works without them losing all of their equity, but if I was—. It's a really difficult thing to do, let's just be clear. The relationship between the leaseholder, the freeholder, and the contractual obligations between the leaseholder, the freeholder and the original builder, the management company and so on are different in every single building. So, it's actually extremely difficult to unpick on a global basis the particular circumstances of each building. And I have a range of meetings coming forward to meet with the residents of particular blocks who've asked to meet with me. And I should say at this point, Llywydd, that I have one of these in my own constituency, in the middle, so colleagues in the Government are dealing with that particular issue for me, because I wish to represent them as their constituency representative.

And what we would like to be able to do—. So, there is a way for the local council to do the works necessary to make the building fire safe. And we're very keen—. We've been working with the fire services—my colleague Hannah Blythyn has been working hard with the fire services as well—to ensure that we've had all the right inspections done and that people are as safe as is humanly possible for them to be without the works that are required to be done to make it 100 per cent. But, of course, if the local council does do works in default for those buildings, then what they do is they land charge the properties in the building to recover the cost of those works, and those poor people lose the whole of their investment in their property. Now, if it was a life and death scenario, of course we would do that because we don't want anybody to be in that situation. But it is a balance between trying to make sure that people do maintain some equity in their leases and that we get the fire safety arrangements in place that we want. And I'm afraid that's just really complicated, and it does require the UK Government to do some things. We're currently working with the UK Government to try and put some of those provisions in place, but it's just not possible to put a blanket kind of court arrangement in place that allows them to sue the builders in the first place. If it was, we would have been able to do so.

I'm not often charitable to the UK Government, but, in this instance, I will say that it's quite a complicated thing to try and unpick. So, we are working very hard to try and put in place a scheme that would allow leaseholders to come forward and claim money off us without losing all of their equity, but it's going to be impossible to do without them losing some of their equity, and it's just a question of how we get that very complicated set of circumstances sorted out. So, it's not possible to talk about it on a global basis. Each individual building, the way the lease is arranged, the way the obligations are arranged, who owns it, where the management company is, and so on, all make a huge difference to what's possible. So, I'm afraid it's just hugely complicated.