As a retired structural engineer, I know that modern buildings are designed by highly qualified architects and engineers, working within a framework of planning law and building control regulations. These professionals pay a substantial amount for professional indemnity insurance to cover the rare cases of failure through design error.
In turn, it is expected that competent contractors, covered by their own insurers, will construct in accordance with those designs to achieve safe, good-quality buildings.
A prospective purchaser is not competent to assess the quality of construction or take responsibility for potential safety defects. Would you buy a car on the basis that the buyer accepts the risk for all construction defects?
The failure of the government during the recent Commons debate on cladding (MPs vote for fifth time not to protect leaseholders from fire safety bills, 28 April) to accept that the construction industry must be responsible for the safety of its output, and to protect its citizens faced with the prospect of crippling debt through no fault of their own, was lamentable. With building insurance becoming prohibitively expensive, the potential result of the government’s action would appear to be the collapse of the housing market, and the decimation of the construction industry.
Stuart White
Plymouth
What puzzles me is why leaseholders should be expected to bear the costs of remedying fire hazards. The responsibility for structural defects should lie with a building’s owner. Leaseholders do not own their building, they merely have a secure and transferable licence to occupy it until it reverts back to the freeholder, the owner, at the end of the lease.
The removal of unsafe cladding from a building increases or restores its value. Under the present system, that value is paid for by the leaseholder but belongs to the freeholder, who free-rides on the tenant’s expenditure. That is clearly unjust. The problem is that English property law long ago developed the fiction that a lease is property and not a mere contractual right. But that was when house leases were usually for 999 years, ie virtually permanent. That is not so nowadays. Reform of property law would help remove this injustice.
Neville March Hunnings
Leicester
I’ve long advocated that one way to stop MPs’ expenses scandals is to house them in government flats in London. The flats would be furnished (from John Lewis?), so no need for expenses. With the government refusing to deal with unsafe cladding, I suggest that London flats with unsafe cladding should be compulsory purchased and MPs moved in. Then we can see how long it takes for the cladding problem to be resolved.
Rev David Gray
Chippenham, Wiltshire
How many of the 322 Conservative MPs who voted against the amendment to the fire safety bill are landlords or shareholders in property development firms and have an interest in forcing remedial costs on to leaseholders?
John Buckley
Scarborough, North Yorkshire
If there is no hope of cladding manufacturers footing part of the cost and if the government is unwilling to contribute, how about a GoFundMe type of approach? I would like to think that a lot of us would make a contribution.
Jason Spencer-Cooke
Saint-Saturnin, France
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