Our statement on Michael Gove’s interview with the Sunday Times
We thank Mr Gove for his acknowledgement of the direct part the state played in enabling the building safety crisis that has ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent leaseholders across the country.
Michael Gove: We are to blame on Grenfell (Sunday Times, 29 January 2023)
We also welcome the announcement that the Government has now set a hard deadline to hold the major developers to account for their misconduct. Mr Gove’s commitment to abolish the outdated feudal leasehold system is long overdue and we look forward to seeing this legislation this calendar year. These are positive steps forward but there is still much more to do.
Over the last five and a half years, leaseholders have endured an unrelenting scandal that has not only risked their safety, but cost thousands their mental health, harmed their relationships, damaged their livelihoods and, in some cases, cost them their homes.
Any progress towards fixing this crisis has been painfully slow and plagued by unfulfilled promises while the cost-of-living crisis has intensified.
Since day one, we have campaigned for those who are responsible for causing this crisis to be the ones to pay to fix it. The Government must back up its warm words with decisive action by robustly enforcing the terms of the developer contract.
As we have repeatedly told the Government, all leaseholders are innocent victims of this crisis and any ‘solution’ cannot be offered piecemeal – all leaseholders need to be guaranteed that they will not have to bear the costs of a building safety crisis that they did not cause.
The only fair and morally decent way to do this, and provide long overdue certainty to both ordinary people trapped in unsafe buildings and the housing market, is for the Government to take one step further and replace leaseholders in the waterfall approach to building safety. Only then will this national scandal be brought to an end.
The End Our Cladding Scandal campaign calls on the Government to lead an urgent, national effort to fix the building safety crisis.
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