Amendments to the Building Safety Bill would ensure that all leaseholders are treated equally when it comes to cladding remediation.
An amendment tabled last week is proposing to remove prior amendment 64, which states that leaseholders should not have to pay for cladding remediation if the property is the leaseholders’ principal home, the leaseholder doesn’t own any another dwelling in the UK or leaseholders only owned one other property in the UK. Removing these would effectively mean that all leaseholders are treated equally including landlords of buy to let properties.
Lord Naseby, responsible for tabling the amendment, said:
“The more I look it, the more I think we now seem to be in slight danger of differentiating one type of leaseholder from another. In a Bill as comprehensive as this, that would not be a sensible move.
Fundamentally, all leaseholders—whether owner-occupiers or individual landlords—should be treated equally. Not to do so is not only unfair but, I suspect, unnecessary. Buy-to-let landlords and owner-occupier leaseholders face the same problems with developers, through no fault of their own.
We also find certain developments where there is a mixture, so in my judgment it would be invidious to deal with just one category rather than another.”
The news follows reports of the hard line that Gove continues to take against developers that refuse to pay for remediation.
Ben Beadle, National Residential Landlords Association’s chief executive, commented:
“It makes no sense for the government to treat landlord leaseholders so differently to owner-occupiers. Both groups have faced the same problems at the hands of developers, and therefore both should be treated equally. This amendment would go a long way to rectifying this unfairness.”
The Bill passed to committee stage on Monday, a process that could take up to eight days.
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Has there been an update on this?