Parallels between unfairness in bad building practice and Horizon scandal – MP

The housing minister has insisted developers do not feel they’re “getting away with” bad practice, as an MP suggested parallels with the Post Office Horizon IT scandal where “unfairness is just totally hardwired into policy”.

Lee Rowley, minister for housing, planning and building safety, told MPs there has been progress on building safety remediation regarding unsafe cladding.

But members of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) committee put it to him that some developers who have acted badly in the industry have been getting away “scot-free”.

During Wednesday’s session, Conservative MP Tom Hunt said in his Ipswich constituency there were multiple cases where existing regulations had not been followed and some buildings which “frankly, should never have been signed off”.

He said there were “big players who seem to have got away with poor work that has put my constituents in the cruellest form of limbo for a number of years”.

Suggesting some developers appear to be able to “get away scot-free”, he said: “A lot of my constituents think there’s a great sense of unfairness that so many people who’ve been behind this seem to have gotten away with it, whereas the people paying the price are the people who are innocent, who did everything in good faith.”

He added there had been “significant movement on the cladding support scheme”.

He acknowledged: “There is still a residual number of organisations and actors that we need to continue to pursue.”

He added: “It just strikes you all the time, doesn’t it? Where it seems that unfairness is just totally hardwired into policy, where it’s always the person on the receiving end, and these big corporations just get away with it completely all the time.”

He said he was making a plea that this is addressed when the committee makes its report and recommendations to Government “so people can actually say that this place (Parliament) is on the side of the people who are actually being affected, and the people who are doing so much wrongdoing ie bad construction or whatever they’ve done, they actually pay the penalty for it”.

He said currently “what we’re seeing in society is they’re just all getting away with it scot-free”.

“I mean, when I go and talk to the developers, they’re not happy with the Government because we have spent an enormous amount of time making sure that those who caused the problem are paying for the problem and that’s why there’s the best part of £2 billion that’s been committed from the developers.

“So you can see the down payment. You can see the progress, you can see the pressure that the Secretary of State has put on is yielding results”.

He said while there has been “significant improvement”, there “is more to do in this space”.