CLADDING campaigners have vowed to fight on after MPs rejected attempts to shield leaseholders from fire safety costs.
It follows a long-running parliamentary battle over who should pay to fix defects and faults following the Grenfell blaze four years ago.
Peers had repeatedly tried to stop the owners of blocks of flats from passing the costs on to leaseholders.
Critics say the ‘rug’ has been pulled out from homeowners.
On Wednesday, MPs voted to remove changes to the Fire Safety Bill, despite a rebellion by 32 Conservatives.
When the Bill then returned to the House of Lords, attempts to reinsert the changes were defeated by 242 votes to 153.
It became law yesterday.
Thousands of leaseholders are currently facing large bills to pay for safety measures, including fire breaks, new balconies, safer doors and sprinkler systems.
Ministers suffered several House of Lords defeats in attempting to pass the legislation as the issue of who should pay for additional safety works became a sticking point.
The campaigning group End Our Cladding Scandal said the legislation had passed unchanged ‘much to the horror of hundreds of thousands of innocent people across the country whose lives are being ruined by the buildings safety crisis’.
It said the government had ‘fought hard’ against changes that would have saved leaseholders from ‘widespread bankruptcy and financial ruin caused by bad regulations, corporate malfeasance and shoddy building work’.
‘This Bill pulls the rug out from under a generation of homeowners,’ it added, saying their lives were still at risk from unsafe buildings.
The group has vowed to continue opposing the reforms, tweeting: ‘We have the right to be angry. But the fight isn’t over yet.’
Meanwhile, a new report by the Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Select Committee has called on the government to scrap a controversial loan scheme that would see affected leaseholders paying up to £50 per month for remediation works.
MPs said the loan scheme ‘fails to satisfy the principle that leaseholders should not have to pay for fire safety remediation work’, which ministers have repeated on a number of occasions.
‘The loan scheme should be abolished. Instead, costs should be fully met by a comprehensive Building Safety Fund, paid for by the government and the industry,’ the report said.
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