PRIVATE HOUSE OWNERS (PROTECTION) (Hansard, 26 February 1963)

§ Mr. Robert Edwards (Bilston)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to protect private house owners from the consequences of sub-standard building; to make compulsory the registration of all building firms; and to provide that such firms shall take out insurance policies to compensate private house owners for work not completed owing to bankruptcy. I hope that the House will agree to this Motion so that the Bill may go forward to a Second Reading and into Committee. It deals with the problem of jerry building, which in recent years has become a national scandal.

When last I had the privilege of addressing the House on this subject, I was able to give evidence, covering wide areas of the country, concerning large estates where many hundreds of houses had as many as 20 or 30 sub-standard jobs in each house of them. I was able to give an example from my constituency of a house which had broken in half whose builder had gone bankrupt and the purchaser, tied with a mortgage for twenty years, had no house in which to live. I was able to give examples from Yorkshire of large estates where scores of houses had doors which would not close and windows which would not open and the purchasers had been compelled to spend hundreds of pounds to make their houses waterproof. I was able to give examples of estates in Lancashire where similar conditions prevailed.

I could now give the House, if I had time, evidence of estate after estate in the south of England where this sort of thing has happened. I could refer to an estate in Surrey where the whole plumbing system had to be taken out and rebuilt because it was defective through the low water pressure. The house owner had to meet this additional expense. I could give examples of quite expensive houses in the south of England whose outside bricks had been plastered over with cheap cement to cover up inferior bricks.

1092 I could give examples of young married couples in recent months occupying their houses and finding that the water system was completely frozen up and unusable and the house uninhabitable. A widow living just outside London had to spend as much as £700 to deal with a leaking roof. She spent £100 during the first month of her occupation, and over £800 over a period of six years. She had no redress because the builder had gone bankrupt.

The proposed Bill does not deal with a trivial matter; it is not a frivolous Bill. It deals with a very important series of complaints from large sections of the community. It deals particularly with the heartbreaking problems of young married couples about to occupy their own house for the first time who have spent all their savings on the down payment, have gone through the largest monetary transaction they will go through in their lives and find themselves involved in very heavy extra expense that they cannot really meet. A period which should be a period of joy, happiness and fulfilment far too often becomes a period of disappointment, disillusionment and frustration.

Something needs to be done to deal with this urgent problem. In my modest Bill, I suggest that the problem of jerrybuilding can be checked by simple legislation. In my opinion, what is required is compulsory registration of all house building firms. They should be registered with the local authority. If a number of complaints of jerry-building and substandard work are made against them, the local authority would have power to withdraw the registration. The very fact that they were registered with the local authority would give the authority the power to check the building of a house at every stage.

Local authorities do not have this power today. If building firms were registered, the building surveyor employed by the local council could check the design, the drains, the quality of the timber which goes into the building, the bricks and the plaster. It could make all the checks which were needed so that a house buyer would get the kind of house which he thought he was purchasing when he first looked at the design and received the report from his building society, bank, insurance company, or from whoever he dealt with in the purchase of the house.

1093 The proposed Bill would compel house-builders to apply as a minimum the standards of the National House-builders Registration Council. These are decent minimum standards which, if applied, would, to a large extent, deal with the problem of sub-standard building. The Bill would also compel house builders to take out insurance against bankruptcy.

Every year, over 300 house builders go bankrupt. Many of the houses which they build are sub-standard, some are only half built, but the purchasers have no redress in law. There are many thou-stands of cases of this character. There is a real gap in our law which needs to be filled and I hope that the House will give sympathetic consideration to this reasonable Measure.

The problem is an important one. Thousands of people are requesting that their Members of Parliament should do something to check the exploitation that goes on. Mainly, it is a problem of the small builders, many of whom are ignorant of building standards. There are, however, other difficulties created by the new private estate developers who are in the housing business to make cheap profits and to exploit the community.

The reputable building firms support the principles embodied in this simple Measure and so, also, do the trade unions operating in the building industry. It is an all-party Bill which has the support of all parties in the House of Commons and I hope that hon. Members will give it sympathetic support.