Consumer Protection for flats needed in 2024

Former parliamentary counsel Daniel Greenberg CB drafted the Polluter Pays clauses of the Earl of Lytton’s consumer protection legislation, before he took on his new role as current Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. The scheme is also backed by Grenfell inquiry construction lawyer David Sawtell as well as many other experts and organisations.

In 2021, Daniel describes at a conference in parliament, how effective the scheme will be at making builders and lead developers pay for Building Safety defects without the need of taking them to court.

The scheme clauses referred to in the video below are available here: https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/52302/documents/3823

The scheme delivers the following badly needed remedies to the flawed Building Safety Act and is urgently needed in 2024:

1. Protects the 1.7 million excluded leaseholders with remediation costs funded by the construction industry.

2. Removes the 3 tiers of ‘protection’ status (needlessly introduced by the Building Safety Act) blighting the UK flat market and causing conveyancers to reject this work due to lack of insurance cover.

3. Ensures the construction industry is the backstop for remediation costs, as many of the landlords are thinly capitalised so making them the backstop could result in many qualifying leaseholders being left in legal limbo due to freeholder insolvency. Freeholder insolvency is increasingly likely in 2024 as indicated in the government’s own impact assessment on ground rent caps.

4. Ensures that the rotten culture in construction ends with permanent joint and several liability on the developer or lead contractor or their parent companies. True consumer protection for blocks of flats. No need to take a party to court to get justice.

5. Removes the risk of more expensive mortgages due to extra capital being required under the new Basel 3.1 standards for dealing with permanently impaired mortgage securities blighted by building safety defects with no complete route to funding.