Building safety crisis has ‘parallels with Post Office scandal’, MP suggests

An MP suggested there are similarities between the unsafe cladding crisis and the Post Office scandal during a select committee session on fire safety.

“Don’t you think there are parallels of what we’re seeing with the Post Office scandal?”, Labour MP Ian Byrne asked housing minister Lee Rowley, who was giving evidence at the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee session on Wednesday (17 January), referring to the cases of unsafe cladding across the country.

“It seems that unfairness is just totally hardwired into policy where these big corporations get away with it completely all the time,” added Byrne.

Rowley disputed this, saying that “developers don’t think they’re getting away with it” and mentioned the £2bn that housebuilders are committed to spend on repairs to buildings in England of 11m and above that they have developed or refurbished over the past 30 years.

Last January, the government wrote to housebuilders and mixed-use developers asking them to sign a remediation contract by 13 March 2023. Although some missed the deadline, all developers asked to sign have done so.

“When I go and talk to the developers, they are not happy with the government because we have spent an enormous amount of time making sure that those who caused the problem are paying for it,” Rowley said.

“You can see the pressure that the secretary of state [Michael Gove] has put is yielding results, that is a significant change.”

Byrne, however, pointed out that no prosecutions have taken place so far, and that many residents in his constituency of Liverpool West Derby are still affected by the situation.

The select committee also asked Rowley for an update on the government’s long-anticipated response to Paul Morrell and Anneliese Day’s Review of the Construction Product Testing Regime published last April.

The 174-page document criticised the current product testing system and said that “many standards are outdated, inconsistent or non-existent”.

The government has not published its response yet. During a different select committee session with Morrell and Day in November, the former said that there had not been government engagement with the review at the time.

“There hasn’t been any engagement with government until last week,” Morrell told the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee on 27 November.

Rowley told yesterday’s committee that the government’s response will come “soon”, but did not provide a specific timeline. He added that his team is currently working on a public statement, but rather than a single document with a full response, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities might publish the response in multiple stages.

“I can’t give you a date today,” said Rowley. “The reason I’m hedging is because there’s probably going to be elements of this report which we want to understand in more detail.”