Sir Mike Penning urges MPs to back the Bill as it stands to avoid it falling at the dissolution of Parliament and calls on the Government to do more to get professional bodies’ insurance companies to contribute to restitution for fire safety defects in blocks of flats.
Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)
What an awful long way we have come with this Bill. On the previous Bill, the Fire Safety Bill, we were told categorically that that was not the right vehicle for the sorts of remedial help people needed in all our constituencies and that this was the Bill. To be fair to the Minister and his civil servants, there has been huge movement—huge movement—compared with where we were when there was considerable unrest on the Conservative side of the House as well as around the House. One of the reasons this Bill has been changed so much is that there was general unrest across the Floor of the House as to what the Bill was actually saying and doing. Can I pay tribute to my colleagues on this side of the House? With a majority of this size, the Government could have ignored us, but they could not because there was too much unrest on this side of the House and the campaigning went on. I want to pay tribute to my colleagues on that point.
Is the Bill perfect? No, it is not going to be perfect. But do we need this Bill on the statute book in this Session? Yes, we do. That is why I will personally be supporting all the measures, and not voting for any of the amendments to send it back to the other place. I think a lot of the work can be done through secondary legislation. The Minister has indicated that. More work could be done, particularly in my opinion—I have said this on Report and Third Reading, and the Father of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), has touched on it, as have all of my colleagues here—with the insurance companies. The Father of the House cited how all the professional bodies that were responsible for building these properties—all of them—were insured, yet the insurance companies have got off scot-free.
I know that those in the Department will say—I have said this before, but let me just repeat it—that it would be very difficult to get the insurance companies to retrospectively pay for this work. That is what they said about mesothelioma, where companies had gone bust and people were dying and suffering from that horrible asbestos disease, but the Government actually brought the legislation forward so that we took a levy from the insurance companies to cover those missing employers, and we could do it with the missing companies. We could do it if we wanted to really do it, and I hope—I am going to go on and on to everyone in this House—that this can be done. Look at the way the Department for Work and Pensions did that Bill. I know a lot about it because I took it through the House, so I am slightly biased. It can be done.
I want to pause for a second, and I declare an interest as a former firefighter. I have nothing but admiration for our firefighters and emergency services who went into Grenfell, when others were quite understandably coming in the other direction. They saw things they never dreamed they would see in their careers. We do not want to see that again, but fires do recur, and our emergency services do a fantastic job. I hope that they are getting the psychiatric support for what some of those sights will have created in their lives. That will affect their lives going forward, and I have asked this question before of several Ministers.
However, the key to this Bill today is that we get it on the statute book. We can do more work through secondary legislation. I think it is absolutely imperative for our constituents that we get it on the book today, so that the other House listens to us and we get this on the statute book before the Queen’s Speech.
Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)
I welcome the Minister to his position on this very interesting Bill that is going back and forth. The one group of people who took the money right at the start for the developers and builders was the insurance companies. The developers could not have built those properties without having the legal protection of insurance. Sadly, the Minister has not mentioned the insurance companies once in this situation, but that is where the burden should fall, instead of on the leaseholders. Does he agree?
Stuart Andrew
Actually, the responsibility lies with those who built the building defectively in the first place. They are the ones we are chasing. I pay tribute— I should have said this right at the beginning—to officials in the Department, who have worked incredibly hard to get this new package of measures from the developers in place. It has not been an easy task, but they have done it with great passion and have been incredibly successful. As I say, it is the developers who should be paying, and we expect a minimal number of leaseholders to pay.