• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Before Header

  • Home
  • What is LKP
  • Find everything …
  • Contact
Donate

Leasehold Knowledge Management Logo

Secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold reform

Mobile Menu

  • Home
  • What is LKP
  • Find everything …
  • Contact
  • Advice
  • News
    • Find everything …
    • About Peverel group
    • APPG
    • ARMA
    • Bellway
    • Benjamin Mire
    • Brixton Hill Court
    • Canary Riverside
    • Charter Quay
    • Chelsea Bridge Wharf
    • Cladding scandal
    • Competition and Markets Authority / OFT
    • Commonhold
    • Communities Select Committee
    • Conveyancing Association
    • Countrywide
    • MHCLG
    • E&J Capital Partners
    • Exit fees
    • FirstPort
    • Fleecehold
    • Forfeiture
    • FPRA
    • Gleeson Homes
    • Ground rent scandal
    • Hanover
    • House managers flat
    • House of Lords
    • Housing associations
    • Informal lease extension
    • Insurance
    • IRPM
    • Jim Fitzpatrick MP
    • John Christodoulou
    • Justin Bates
    • Justin Madders MP
    • Law Commission
    • LEASE
    • Liam Spender
    • Local authority leasehold
    • London Assembly
    • Louie Burns
    • Martin Paine
    • McCarthy and Stone
    • Moskovitz / Gurvits
    • Mulberry Mews
    • National Leasehold Campaign
    • Oakland Court
    • Park Homes
    • Parliament
    • Persimmon
    • Peverel
    • Philip Rainey QC
    • Plantation Wharf
    • Press
    • Property tribunal
    • Prostitutes
    • Quadrangle House
    • Redrow
    • Retirement
    • Richard Davidoff
    • RICS
    • Right To Manage Federation
    • Roger Southam
    • Rooftop development
    • RTM
    • Sean Powell
    • SFO
    • Shared ownership
    • Sinclair Gardens Investments
    • Sir Ed Davey
    • Sir Peter Bottomley
    • St George’s Wharf
    • Subletting
    • Taylor Wimpey
    • Tchenguiz
    • Warwick Estates
    • West India Quay
    • William Waldorf Astor
    • Windrush Court
  • Parliament
  • Accreditation
  • [Custom]
Menu
  • Advice
  • News
      • Find everything …
      • About Peverel group
      • APPG
      • ARMA
      • Bellway
      • Benjamin Mire
      • Brixton Hill Court
      • Canary Riverside
      • Charter Quay
      • Chelsea Bridge Wharf
      • Cladding scandal
      • Competition and Markets Authority / OFT
      • Commonhold
      • Communities Select Committee
      • Conveyancing Association
      • Countrywide
      • MHCLG
      • E&J Capital Partners
      • Exit fees
      • FirstPort
      • Fleecehold
      • Forfeiture
      • FPRA
      • Gleeson Homes
      • Ground rent scandal
      • Hanover
      • House managers flat
      • House of Lords
      • Housing associations
      • Informal lease extension
      • Insurance
      • IRPM
      • Jim Fitzpatrick MP
      • John Christodoulou
      • Justin Bates
      • Justin Madders MP
      • Law Commission
      • LEASE
      • Liam Spender
      • Local authority leasehold
      • London Assembly
      • Louie Burns
      • Martin Paine
      • McCarthy and Stone
      • Moskovitz / Gurvits
      • Mulberry Mews
      • National Leasehold Campaign
      • Oakland Court
      • Park Homes
      • Parliament
      • Persimmon
      • Peverel
      • Philip Rainey QC
      • Plantation Wharf
      • Press
      • Property tribunal
      • Prostitutes
      • Quadrangle House
      • Redrow
      • Retirement
      • Richard Davidoff
      • RICS
      • Right To Manage Federation
      • Roger Southam
      • Rooftop development
      • RTM
      • Sean Powell
      • SFO
      • Shared ownership
      • Sinclair Gardens Investments
      • Sir Ed Davey
      • Sir Peter Bottomley
      • St George’s Wharf
      • Subletting
      • Taylor Wimpey
      • Tchenguiz
      • Warwick Estates
      • West India Quay
      • William Waldorf Astor
      • Windrush Court
  • Parliament
  • Accreditation
You are here: Home / Latest News / Greenhalgh to Communities Select Committee: 1,700 non-ACM cladding blocks at high risk and some waking watch costs are ‘usurious’

Greenhalgh to Communities Select Committee: 1,700 non-ACM cladding blocks at high risk and some waking watch costs are ‘usurious’

May 19, 2020 //  by Sebastian O'Kelly

Minister – again – expects freeholders to “do the decent thing” and pay waking watch costs. (But why on earth would they?)

And freeholders who do not co-operate should be named, shamed and made ‘pariahs’. (How, when beneficial ownership is hidden?)

Strong words, though, and better still, for the first time, minister talks of compulsory purchase orders for freehold at cladding sites, which LKP has been urging for years

Stephen (Lord) Greenhalgh is tasked with sorting out the cladding crisis by Boris Johnson, for whom he worked when London’s mayor

Stephen Greenhalgh, the new housing minister tasked with sorting the cladding crisis, gave a robust and encouraging performance before the Communities Select Committee yesterday.

https://twitter.com/suejbright/status/1263369580002586625?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″>But the minister – who has been ill with Covid-19 and has lost his mother to the virus – asked for some indulgence and appeared with the assistance of the senior fire safety civil servant.

Early start catching up on select comm on cladding remediation. Strong words from @team_greenhalgh: beneficial owners of offshore investors who enjoy the fruits but don’t fix the problem = unacceptable, pariahs /1

— Sue Bright (@suejbright) May 21, 2020

Nonetheless, leaseholders at cladding sites should be encouraged that there is a minister who is sympathetic to their plight and strongly feels that they should not be dumped with the costs of cladding remediation.

Both Ritu Saha, founder of the UK Cladding Action Group, and Alex Di Giuseppe, of Manchester Cladiators, also gave evidence. Owing to it being a video conference with time constraints, LKP agreed it would give its evidence in writing, which we will publish later this week.

Although Lord Greenhalgh said some cladding related costs such as waking watch had been “usurious”, it is very unlikely that government funding allocated to the cladding crisis will cover this cost.

The funding scheme allocated to deal with non-ACM sites will be unveiled next week.

The committee was sympathetic to the minister, although it was clear that some – such as the Communities Select Committee’s chair Clive Betts (Labour) and long-term member Bob Blackman (Conservative) – were more fully informed about the issues facing leaseholders in cladding sites.

Veteran chair of the Communities Select Committee Clive Betts held his session by video conference yesterday

For the first time the scale of the cladding crisis was made clear, going way beyond the 457 ACM sites – 144 of which have been remediated with work started on 137 more.

Lord Greenhalgh said that 11,300 buildings had non-ACM combustible cladding, with “high-risk building being around the 1,700 mark”.

The committee did not disguise its disappointment with government, which had said that by June 2020 all ACM sites would be remediated. Lord Greenhalgh did not disagree.

In fact, only £1.4 million of the £200 million fund to remediate private blocks with ACM cladding has been spent.

In response to Paul Holmes, Conservative MP for MP Eastleigh, Lord Greenhalgh said that he was eager to publish data on waking watch and other associated costs dumped on leaseholders at cladding sites.

“I really feel we at the centre can shine a spotlight of transparency on costs … Some of the charges are usurious. Shining a spotlight of transparency may provide leaseholders with the ammunition they need to challenge their building owners and paying these amounts for a particular service.”

Lord Greenhalgh told Mr Holmes:

“We are seeing a huge disparity in costs and that is something that we need to address. Transparency could be a good way of doing that.”

However, Clive Betts reasoned that there would be no government money for interim measures such as waking watch, “which just have to be paid by the leaseholders”.

Lord Greenhalgh replied: “No I am not saying that. With the money that we have available that money needs to go on the end mission which is to remediate unsafe cladding. The best use of the money is to get the cladding off.”

Ritu Saha, founder of UK Cladding Action Group, gave her evidence of life with cladding at the Northpoint site, in Bromley south east London. It has witnessed huge waking watch costs. But should the freeholder, Vincent Tchenguiz, pay for them? He makes very little cash from the site. For the first time a minister raised the issue of compulsory purchase orders for freeholds at cladding sites. Taxpayers bailing out leaseholders is one thing. But speculators in ground rents as well?

The minister then declared that freeholder owners should pay up – even though the law will almost certainly say that this is not their liability and, to date, no single speculator in ground rents – whose investments are to be secured by vast sums of public money – has paid a thing.

Lord Greenhalgh said: “Currently there is no money from central government [to pay for interim measures].

“The building owners should do the right thing for this. People have made a profit on these buildings. The freeholders and the developers should not be passing these costs on.

Nor would the funding apply to other fire safety measures, said the minister.

“The focus of this fund is the removal of cladding alone not dealing with additional fire safety defects.

“There will be remediation costs that go beyond cladding. It will not be government funding all of this. Again it will be building owners that have a duty to do this. The fund is there to help those people living where, without these funds, this work would not go ahead. There will be clear eligibility criteria published next week

“It is the responsibility of the building owner to make their building safe. And we believe that those costs should not fall on the leaseholders … I stand full square behind the leaseholders. This is not something that should be burdening them. This is the responsibility of the building owner.”

Lord Greenhalgh was blunt in dealing with freeholders.

“Where works have not begun it is often the case that the building owner is a shell company where the beneficial owner is hidden. Naming and shaming a shell company is not particularly effective …

“We should go after the beneficial owner. These people should be should be named and shamed for what they have done [perhaps, not done].

“We do need naming and shaming to mean something.

“If people are living in unsafe buildings and there is no plan to do anything then the state does need to do something about that, in my view.

But he acknowledged that there would be enormous challenges in unmasking rogue freeholders.

Suggesting the legal structure has created an investment asset class in people’s homes, Lord Greenhalgh’s intervention puts question marks over the future of leasehold:

“… if necessary, we’re going to have to be more radical. I’m not sure how easy and practical it will be to go after beneficial owners to get the money back.

“I think what we need to recognise is that these people should be pariahs in terms of future business in the country. We cannot allow these people to have a good name if they are the beneficial owner of a building three years on from Grenfell that still has unsafe cladding. It’s an absolute outrage.”

“There may be options there, like CPO [compulsory purchase order] and so forth.”

For three years, LKP has been declaring the utter pointlessness of third party freeholders in the cladding crisis and this is the first time compulsory purchase orders have been mentioned.

Let’s hope it is not the last.

In the main, these are private equity speculators – such as those in the Long Harbour fund, all of whom are hidden and many offshore.

Taxpayer grants to cladding sites is a massive gift to shore up their currently valueless speculations – for if the leases are valueless in a site, then so is the freehold.

Urging them to “do the decent thing” and pay for waking watch etc is, sadly, hot air and won’t happen.

At some sites, it cannot happen.

Take Ritu Saha’s site, Northpoint in Bromley, south east London.

Vincent Tchenguiz is the freeholder, but the ground rents of his residential freehold portfolio are in hock to Rothesay Life (the deregulated Goldman Sach’s founded pension investor). Furthermore, at Northpoint they amount to only £7,000pa.

Alex di Giuseppe, of Manchester Cladiators, seemed to accept that taxpayers paying for interim costs on top of cladding removal might be asking slightly too much. The minister made it clear that government funds are for cladding removal only, and full details of the non-ACM scheme will be published next week

The site is run by a residents’ management company, which will handle the insurance contract, so at best Mr Tchenguiz will be making a few hundred pounds on permission fees at Northpoint. On that basis, is it rational to expect him to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for waking watch?

Freeholders won’t be paying for waking watch: some won’t; some can’t; and no court is likely to make them.

On the other hand, it is absolutely outrageous that these parasitical punters in resi freeholds are subsidised by a taxpayer’s bung.

If taxpayers are stumping up all this money, the least they should get in return is the sites’ freehold.

Tchenguiz group dismisses government ‘hollow threat’ to make freeholders pay for Grenfell cladding removal
Blenheim Centre flat owners to be spared £20,000-30,000 each on Grenfell cladding bill, Legal & General tells LKP
Legal Notices to Owners of London High-Rise cladding sitesDownload

Related posts:

Government may help over waking watch bills Communities Select CommitteeCommunities Select Committee: cladding blocks still doing nothing by December should have their freehold removed Communties Select Committee cladding inquiryMarch 23: Cladding showdown begins, with Communities Select Committee questioning Tchenguiz group … and LKP LKP cladding scandal surveyResults of LKP survey of 148 cladding scandal sites … as Communities Select Committee launches its own Jeremy Pocklington cladding scandalMHCLG officials tell MPs: Don’t know costs of waking watch. No idea that at least three cladding sites are uninsured. We are not to blame but ‘30 years of developer failures’

Category: Cladding scandal, Communities Select Committee, Latest News, News, ParliamentTag: Bob Blackman MP, Building safety reform, Cladding scandal, Clive Betts MP, Communities Select Committee, Covid-19, Dame Judith Hackitt, Lord Greenhalgh, Manchester Cladiators, Paul Holmes MP, Ritu Saha, Waking watch contracts

Latest Tweets

Tweets by @LKPleasehold

Mentions

Anthony Essien (34) APPG (37) ARMA (87) Bellway (30) Benjamin Mire (32) Cladding scandal (71) Clive Betts MP (31) CMA (44) Commonhold (52) Competition and Markets Authority (39) Countryside Properties plc (33) FirstPort (39) Grenfell cladding (56) Ground rents (54) Harry Scoffin (150) James Brokenshire MP (31) Jim Fitzpatrick (35) Jim Fitzpatrick MP (30) Justin Bates (40) Justin Madders MP (64) Katie Kendrick (37) Law Commission (60) LEASE (66) Leasehold Advisory Service (62) Leasehold houses (32) Long Harbour (47) Martin Boyd (80) McCarthy and Stone (39) National Leasehold Campaign (38) Persimmon (49) Peverel (61) Property tribunal (49) Redrow (30) Retirement (37) Robert Jenrick (33) Roger Southam (47) Sajid Javid (38) Sebastian O’Kelly (55) Sir Peter Bottomley (200) Taylor Wimpey (106) Tchenguiz (33) The Guardian (33) The Times (31) Vincent Tchenguiz (42) Waking watch contracts (40)
Previous Post: « Academic bars Oxford City Council from entering his flat to finish major works
Next Post: Sir Bob Neill becomes cladding chair at APPG Sir Bob Neill Grenfeel cladding»

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Chris

    May 19, 2020 at 10:28 pm

    Create an investment asset class? You gotta be joking – it`s already been the for 800 years!

    I think the Grenfell inquiry will have an impact legally, especially over the ongoing
    “Class 0 debate”.
    Government officials believed Approved Document B – the official guidance on fire safety – banned the use of flammable ACM through a clause stipulating that ‘insulation materials/products’ should be of limited combustibility. Approved Document B sets limited combustibility as the standard for ‘insulation materials/products’ in paragraph 12.7. It sets Class 0 or Euroclass B as the standard for ‘external surfaces’ in paragraph 12.6. Paragraph 12.7 says that “insulation product, filler material etc” must be of limited combustibility.
    It may well have been the intention that that the clause prohibited those materials, but the simple fact is that’s not was written in the guidance – and that is the big problem experts have disputed this view, pointing out that the cladding itself does not have an insulation function.

    We keep being told about the freeholders human rights protection as regard to ownership by government but will a CPO affect those rights? We will find freeholders have money to sue government but no money for remediation!

  2. Brian Ashworth

    May 21, 2020 at 9:18 am

    Surely this cladding issue should go back to the Architect that specified the cladding? The Developer buys the site,contracts surveyors, architects etc to design and build the flats.Drawings get passed by local councils were they have to pass all the known regulations regarding fire safety etc you would think? In my opinion it is the cladding companies that are at fault.The way the cladding is fixed to the external walls is the problem. How could a freeholder possibly know this? The cladding companies should be making good their faulty product.If a car is recalled for a safety issue the cost is not put on the owner but on the manufacturer of the car.The owner pays nothing.How can cladding be different? It is not fit for purpose! Leaseholders, freeholders are not responsible. Why is there no mention of these cladding companies being responsible?

  3. W. Blower

    June 13, 2020 at 1:56 pm

    Brian … my opinion…

    Leaseholders are not responsible but the Freeholder/owner is as they put it …’The long term custodians of the property’ … what does this custodianship mean? surely at least it means that although (as you say) ‘it is not the Freeholder/owners fault’ but they should be the ones to take action to make whoever is culpable pay up.

    In your example of a safety issue with a car, the manufacturer should be the one to make amends but if the car manufacturer disputes the matter then it is left to the owner to take action through the courts if necessary, with Freeholders/owners of properties it seems that the first thing to do is to dump the costs on to the Leaseholders, and then if that doesn’t work dump the issue on the taxpayer.

    Considering then that Freeholders will take no responsibility and make certain that the Leases contain clauses to make sure that any situation will not make them responsible for basically anything that may occur, what I ask is the function of the Freeholder?

    Well it seems to me it is simple… their task is to take money for what purpose and to whom we shall never know!

Above Footer

Advising leaseholders. Avoiding disasters.
Stopping forfeiture. Exposing abuses. Urging reform.

We depend on individuals for the majority of our funding.

Support Us and Donate

LKP Managing Agents

Become an LKP Managing Agent

Common Ground
Adam Church
Blocnet property management2

Stay in Touch

To achieve victory in the leasehold game where you are playing against professionals and with rules that they know all too well - stay informed with the LKP newsletter.
Sign Up for Newsletter

Professional Directory

The following advertisements are from firms that seek business from leaseholders.
Click on the logos for company profiles.

Footer

About LKP

  • What is LKP
  • Privacy and data

Categories

  • News
  • Cladding scandal
  • Commonhold
  • Law Commission
  • Fleecehold
  • Parliament
  • Press
  • APPG

Contact

Leasehold Knowledge Partnership
Open Data Institute
5th Floor
Kings Place
London N1 9AG

sok@leaseholdknowledge.com

Copyright © 2023 Leasehold Knowledge Partnership | All rights reserved
Leasehold Knowledge Partnership Limited (company number: 08999652) is a company limited by guarantee that is a registered charity (number: 1162584) with the Charities Commission.
LKP website is hosted at www.34sp.com
Website by Callia Web