Westminster Hall

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

Thursday 23 October 2025

[Wera Hobhouse in the Chair]

Work of the County Court: Government Response

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

Justice Committee

Select Committee statement

13:34

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

We begin with a Select Committee statement. Andy Slaughter will speak on the publication of the second special report of the Justice Committee, “Work of the County Court: Government Response”, HC 1387, for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of his statement, I will call Members to put questions on the subject of the statement and call Andy Slaughter to respond in turn. Questions should be brief, and Members may ask only one question each. I call the Chair of the Justice Committee.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for me to make a statement on the Government’s response to the fourth report of the Justice Committee, “Work of the County Court”.

Two independent reviews into the criminal justice system, those of David Gauke on sentencing and Sir Brian Leveson on the criminal courts, identified the crises in our prisons and criminal courts, and suggested solutions for the Government to address, including in legislation. The Committee welcomes the reviews, but there is an absence of an equivalent review into civil justice.

Our report called for a root-and-branch review of the county court, including a sustainable plan for reducing the systemic delays and inefficiencies we found. We are disappointed that the Government have rejected that recommendation, although pleased that they have adopted almost all the other recommendations in the report and that their rationale for rejecting an independent review is that our report sets out a detailed blueprint for action. The 17 recommendations that the Government have accepted focus on the most pressing issues facing the court.

The county court is the principal forum for delivering civil justice in England and Wales. It is where millions of our constituents, and businesses large and small, encounter the justice system, but, as our inquiry found, it is a system in crisis. I echo the Minister’s thanks to all who contributed to our inquiry and report; the many people and organisations that submitted written evidence and gave oral evidence; and those who contributed to our roundtable and welcomed us on our visits.

I also pay tribute to my predecessor as Chair, Sir Bob Neill KC, the former Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, under whose leadership the inquiry began in October 2023. Following the Dissolution of Parliament and the general election, the current Committee agreed to continue this important piece of work and press the Department on the performance of the county court.

The county court hears a vast array of cases, from the recovery of personal and corporate debt to landlords’ recovery of property and personal injury claims. In 2024, it heard more than 1.7 million claims. However, the average time for a small claims case to reach trial now exceeds 50 weeks, and for more complex claims the delay is even longer—more than 79 weeks. The evidence we received was deeply concerning. The length of delays is resulting in cases being settled at an undervalue.

Despite the county court being a single unified court, the length of delay depends on a court user’s postcode. We found that such regional differences are severe and result in a postcode lottery. Courts in London and the south-east are some of the worst affected, with examples of cases being delayed by more than two years. The Civil Justice Council told us that when all courts were ranked by their average delay, four fifths of the worst performers were in London and the south-east. In its response, His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service notes that it publishes regional data that can be analysed by court, but we did not find any evidence of HMCTS sharing areas of good practice based on this data or of curiosity as to why any differences across England and Wales are occurring.

Our overarching conclusion was stark: the county court is a dysfunctional operation that fails to adequately deliver civil justice across England and Wales. The issues in London and the south-east typify issues faced across the county court. Behind the weeks of delays is a picture of insufficient judicial capacity, high staff turnover and inadequate training to support court users effectively. We found that the civil judiciary is no longer an attractive profession, and we were told of the poor working conditions and administrative burdens that the role now requires. Both the Lady Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls agreed that there was an overdependence on fee-paid judiciary to plug the gaps of insufficient judicial recruitment.

We also heard that court staff are overstretched and poorly paid, with high turnover and use of agency staff undermining the efficiency of an already strained system. Court users felt unsupported by staff who could not provide updates on cases, while the centralised phone lines and inboxes were often left unanswered. That is simply not good enough. Those issues are symptoms of a wider delay. We put it to the Department that such symptoms must be addressed urgently if meaningful change was to be achieved. We recommended that any future review must include an in-depth assessment of staff recruitment and retention, including workload, capacity and regional disparities. We also recommended that the review look at the judicial offer. We are pleased the Government have accepted those recommendations.

As part of our inquiry, we visited Northampton county court, the Civil National Business Centre and the central London county court. What was particularly shocking was the poor condition of all those buildings. Our report highlighted the deteriorating physical state of the county court premises, with reports of asbestos, broken heating, leaking roofs and rat and insect infestations. The significant disrepair of the estate impacts staff morale and disrupts court operations, causing yet further delays. There are also problems with accessibility for those with disabilities. I take this opportunity to thank the court staff across England and Wales for their commendable efforts to operate an already crumbling system in such conditions.

In August 2023, £220 million of capital investment was announced, to be spent solely on the court estate across both criminal and civil jurisdictions. We are pleased that the Government have agreed to provide the Committee with a breakdown of how that funding was spent and how much, if any, was directed to the county court estate. We are also pleased to hear of recent capital projects at Taunton, Barnet and Norwich. It remains clear, however, that these projects and previous funding fall well short of what is needed to address years of chronic under-investment across the court estate.

I turn to other areas of funding. Legal aid was originally introduced to ensure access to justice. Through successive reforms, its scope has been reduced, leading to an increase in litigants in person. Self-represented parties usually do not have a legal background and struggle with procedural rules and court practice. In 2019, the Ministry of Justice recognised that litigants in person continued to require greater support in navigating court procedure, but little has changed. The Committee has embarked on a major review of access to justice, but in the absence of more funding for representation, more must be done to help litigants in person navigate the system.

In 2016, HMCTS launched a £1 billion project called the reform programme. It aimed to modernise the court and tribunal systems and transform them through digitisation. However, the project was continually modified and reduced by HMCTS and its timetable extended four times. It finally concluded in March this year. The reform programme was meant to bring end-to-end digitisation to the county court. By March 2025, it had achieved that in only 23% of cases. In practice, the reform programme delivered only two services solely for use in the county court: the damages claims portal and the online civil money claims service, both of which have faced heavy criticism. We heard of the dual running between new and old systems, a failure to take on feedback from practitioners and the continued and successive reliance on paper, adding unnecessary costs to the taxpayer and leaving an analogue system in a digital age.

We concluded that the reform programme was ultimately over-ambitious and under-delivered. The majority of the civil justice projects were de-scoped, culminating in a fragmented digital system. We recommended that HMCTS review all de-scoped work and prioritise its digitisation to bring a true end-to-end digital service to the county court. We are pleased that, in their response, the Government confirmed that such a review has taken place. A digital county court would offer the opportunity to integrate artificial intelligence early on. We welcome the Government’s AI action plan for justice and commitment to AI in encouraging mediation, which aligns with our own conclusions and recommendations.

Our report concludes that the county court is the Cinderella of the justice system, beset by delays, a crumbling estate and a failed attempt at digital reform. The Government response fails to reassure us that the MOJ has a concrete plan to improve civil justice comparable to Sir Brian Leveson’s and David Gauke’s reviews into the prisons and the criminal courts. In the absence of an equivalent independent review, we hope our report can provide a blueprint to reduce the systemic delays and inefficiencies that plague the system. The county court is where justice is most often sought by our constituents. It must not be allowed to fail them.

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

I remind Members that we have to finish the statement at 1.50 pm. Anyone who wishes to speak, please bob—including the Minister, if she wishes to ask a question. Please keep comments short, and Members can only ask one question.

[Tessa Munt (Wells and Mendip Hills) (LD)]

The report to which the Government are responding outlines that the county court is in complete crisis. As the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) said, the county court is where the majority of our constituents will encounter the justice system, and it is the Cinderella service of the justice system. Does he agree that it is under pressure and experiencing significant operational problems, that the state of disrepair of the buildings is absolutely emblematic of a system that is completely in crisis, and that more must be done to repair and reinstate these buildings? It is totally unfair that we should ask court staff, be that the judiciary or the staff who back up the judges, to work in those circumstances. It is appalling.

[Andy Slaughter]

As I think I set out in the statement, there are problems all along the line. There are problems with representation. There are problems with access. There are problems with systems remaining on paper when they should have been put online long ago. It might therefore be thought that the physical state of the buildings is a lower priority. In reality, it is not, because it affects recruitment and the efficiency of the court, and it means that, over a period of time, courts become toxic places to work. That is why I went out of my way to praise the court staff, because they are doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances. None of us wants to work in a sick building.

I hope that the Government will address this, and that we will find out how much capital money is going to the county court. The Minister may be able to tell us that to today. Certainly, the problem has to be tackled. That is true in the magistrates and Crown courts as well, but particularly in the county courts.

[Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)]

I previously worked in the county court system, and the problem that my hon. Friend has highlighted is a long-standing one. The Government have accepted that the county court is where most of our constituents access the justice system. Does he agree that the county court cannot carry on as it is at the moment and that we need a fundamental reform of the system, which must involve a systematic and comprehensive review of its operations, because it is crucial that our constituents have access to swift and fair justice?

[Andy Slaughter]

A fundamental review was attempted under the last Government, which involved closing many county courts around the country. We were told that the money released from the sale of those courts would go either into the maintenance of the rest of the estate or, more probably, into the reform programme, and so lead to digitalisation of the system. We have seen all the court closures but not the improvement in service that was supposed to result, so unfortunately here we are.

I used the Master of the Rolls figure of 23% for the amount of digitalisation that has occurred. It is key to a 21st-century system of civil justice, and that is why I am glad that the Government have looked at the future for digitalisation. I hope they will tell us that there is a clear and realistic path to achieving that, because it is where we need to go. It is ridiculous to be running a paper-based system in the 21st century. It is inefficient, it is costly and it is not providing justice.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman and his Select Committee for all they have done. I understand that the recommendations in the report are specific to England and Wales, but the issues, difficulties, problems and shortcomings the hon. Gentleman has referred to are the same in Northern Ireland. Ever mindful that this is a devolved matter, is it the intention of the Chair and the Select Committee, and perhaps the Minister as well, to share the report’s recommendations? They were not all accepted, but the ones that were accepted are good. I am a great believer, as is everyone in this Great United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that we are always better together, so can we share the recommendations and ensure that we can make the advances in Northern Ireland the same as in England and Wales?

[Andy Slaughter]

First, I am delighted to see the hon. Gentleman in his place. I thank him for his interest in the subject and for his question, to which my response is yes. I hope our work is useful—the Government have said it is—within the jurisdiction of England and Wales, but, equally, many of the same points apply to Northern Ireland and, indeed, to Scotland. I do not know whether the Minister is going to intervene on the two points we have heard from my colleagues or on the point from the hon. Gentleman, but I am sure she has heard his point and will make sure that the work is shared. In any event, I undertake to ask my secretariat to ensure it is communicated.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Sarah Sackman)]

I understand that am allowed to ask a question, so I will frame this as one. As the Minister with responsibility for the courts, I am tremendously grateful to the work of the Justice Committee. The report on the county court and the lens that the Committee has placed on our civil jurisdiction is incredibly welcome because, as the Committee says, the focus that the Department places on criminal justice cannot be allowed to divert from the important reform programme that we need in the county court, for all the reasons the Committee has stated.

With the helpful lens that the report places on the county court and the recommendations that the Government have taken on board in mind, and although I would be first to acknowledge that we have a long journey to travel, does my hon. Friend agree that the latest civil justice statistics—on delays in small claims coming down; on delays in fast, intermediate and multi-track coming down by almost seven weeks; on the greater use of mediation in small claims; and on a new electronic document-processing mechanism, moving away from the frustrating paper-based process—are all steps in the right direction that take on board the thrust of his report? Does he agree that that represents some progress towards where we need to get to?

[Andy Slaughter]

I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Minister for the fact that the Government have accepted the vast majority of the recommendations, as I have already put on the record. Without making this too cosy, it gives me confidence that my hon. and learned Friend, as the Courts Minister, is seized of this issue and understands its seriousness. That came across in the evidence she gave to the Committee, and she has the background and skills to ensure that change happens. That gives us a lot of confidence.

On my hon. and learned Friend’s specific point, yes, I concede that there are some early indicators of improvements. We would like to see that continue over the years to come. We are very conscious of and aware that—this is obviously no fault of this Minister or this Government—there has been a very long process of decline, which means the climb out will be quite slow. We want steady progress along the way. As the Minister says, the report identifies many problems, but the digitalisation one is crucial. I hope we can soon see the new programme for that, because that is how the courts will become efficient, usable and customer friendly. I know it was tried in good faith under the reform programme, but we have to be honest and say that that has largely failed. The ball is now in the Minister’s court to try to succeed.

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

Thank you. That ends the statement.

Backbench Business

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

NHS Workforce Levels: Impact on Cancer Patients

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

13:50

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of NHS workforce levels on cancer patients.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Hobhouse. I declare an interest as a governor of the Royal Berkshire hospital. Also, a family member has shares in a medical company.

Being a cancer survivor, cancer diagnosis, treatment and outcomes are important to me. I thank the 136 people who responded to my survey ahead of this debate, and the Chamber engagement team for helping to highlight the real experiences of cancer patients across the country. I also thank all the organisations that have helped me and my office to prepare for the debate.

Shortfalls in the NHS workforce are no secret. Consultants, nurses, radiologists and oncologists are all working flat out to deliver care but are being held back by staff shortages, limited equipment, outdated buildings and a lack of training. This is a legacy of the last Conservative Government. The new Labour Government must act swiftly to support our NHS workforce and deliver world-class cancer care.

I welcome the commitment to a new national cancer plan that was confirmed on 4 February 2025—World Cancer Day—after I called for a national cancer plan on 31 October last year. That plan must prioritise early diagnosis and improved treatment. Perhaps it could even be launched on World Cancer Day 2026, which is 4 February.

According to Lilly UK, only one third of NHS staff believe there are enough people for them to perform their roles effectively. The Royal College of Radiologists reports a 29% shortfall in radiologists, or 1,670 consultants, which is set to rise to 39%, or 3,112 consultants, in five years. An extra 346 radiologists are now needed to clear the diagnostic backlog—equivalent to 9% of the current workforce. The Royal College of Pathologists found that 60% of consultants said their departments lack adequate resources, including staff.

Clinical oncology faces a 15% shortfall, forecast to reach 19% by 2029, with smaller cancer centres suffering vacancy rates six times higher than larger ones. In genomics, only 60% of tests are delivered on time, mainly due to a shortage of pathologists. In 2022, NHS England reported a 12% mammographer vacancy rate, rising to 15% in the midlands and south-east, and 36% of the workforce are due to retire within the next 10 to 15 years. Mike Richards’ 2020 review found that histopathology activity had increased by 30% between 2018 and 2019, while consultant numbers rose by just 8%. The gap continues to widen.

The UK also has among the lowest numbers of MRI, CT and PET scanners per million of the population among comparable nations, with just 10 CT scanners, 8.6 MRI units and 0.5 PET scanners per million. Even when equipment exists, staff shortages mean it is often not used. One survey respondent arrived for a CT scan to find no staff available to operate the machine.

In August 2025, only 69% of patients began treatment within 62 days of urgent referral—far below the 85% target, which has not been met since December 2015. That is the fault not of this Government but of the last one, but this Government need to make some improvements.

Early diagnosis is key to survival, yet 73% of hospitals are failing to meet the 62-day target. Between January and July 2025, only 66.7% of breast cancer patients began treatment within 62 days of referral. According to data from Breast Cancer Now, if the 85% target had been met each month, 2,931 more people would have started treatment on time. Even under Labour we are continuing to struggle. The Government are not making enough of a difference yet. But I must say again that the problems in the NHS are down to 14 years of Conservative Governments.

Best practice recommends a triple assessment, a clinical exam, imaging and biopsy in a single appointment, yet between 2020 and 2022 only 68% of people received that, due to staff shortages. The failure to streamline diagnosis creates delays and backlogs. Nearly everyone who is diagnosed with bowel cancer early survives for five years, but only one in 10 survive if they are diagnosed late. Still, just 38% of patients in England are diagnosed at stages 1 or 2. One respondent shared how her daughter, who was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer, waited months to start treatment due to delays caused by workforce issues.

In July 2025, only 50% of lower gastrointestinal cancer patients were treated within 62 days of referral, although 93% began treatment within 31 days of a decision to treat. That shows that the delays occur early in the diagnostic process. At the same time, 91,400 people were waiting for a colonoscopy or a sigmoidoscopy. Around 28% waited for more than six weeks and 13% for more than 13 weeks. The Government must increase endoscopy and pathology capacity, and that requires the improvement of staffing levels.

Less survivable cancers—lung, liver, brain, oesophageal, pancreatic and stomach—are most affected by workforce shortages. Only 35% of pancreatic cancer patients receive treatment within 62 days. Less survivable cancers account for 20% of cases but cause 42% of cancer deaths, with a five-year survival rate of just 16%, compared with 55% in more survivable cancers. A new national cancer plan must include a strategy specifically for less-survivable cancers.

Between 2015 and 2023, one in four leukaemia patients faced avoidable diagnostic delays. A Leukaemia UK survey found that insufficient phlebotomy capacity was the top reason for delays in basic full-blood-count tests—a simple, inexpensive diagnostic tool. Acute myeloid leukaemia patients who faced avoidable delays were 22% more likely to die within a year of diagnosis. The Government should audit and invest in phlebotomy services, as called for by Leukaemia UK and the Royal College of General Practitioners. The Government also need to establish a national register of available phlebotomy sites.

Cancer remains a leading cause of death from disease among teenagers and young adults, but it is too often missed. Around 46.3% of 16 to 24-year-olds saw a GP three or more times before diagnosis, according to the Teenage Cancer Trust. That diagnosis delay is exacerbated by a nationwide decline in GPs, meaning longer waits and reduced access to diagnostic services. The national cancer plan and workforce plan must ensure that all frontline healthcare professionals—from GPs to A&E staff and opticians—are trained to recognise cancer symptoms in young people. Services in deprived areas also need support. Those communities face heavier workloads, greater pressure and less funding. The Government must provide targeted support for those areas.

Forty-three per cent of brain tumour patients saw a healthcare professional three or more times before diagnosis, and 55% of parents said their child’s tumour was misdiagnosed. In 2020, 45% of brain tumours were diagnosed in emergency settings—double the 22.5% for all cancers.

According to the Brain Tumour Charity, shortages of neuroradiologists and limited imaging access, alongside GP training gaps, have caused these delays. GPs should be allowed to request neuroimaging directly for concerning symptoms. For prostate cancer, in July 2025, only 55% of men began treatment within 62 days—a 5% drop since January. Even this year, we are still heading in the wrong direction. Men are waiting weeks or months for MRI and biopsy results due to staff shortages. England also has one of the lowest numbers of radiologists per head of population in Europe, a situation that must be rectified.

Clinical nurse specialists are essential to patient support, yet in 2024, 31% of blood cancer patients did not know who their clinical nurse specialist was, and 22% did not know how to contact them. That information is from Blood Cancer UK. Among secondary breast cancer patients in 2019, 25% had not seen a CNS since diagnosis, and only 65% said their CNS had sufficient time for them. For leukaemia, just 9% were offered a holistic needs assessment, which CNSs help to deliver. The national cancer plan must ensure that every patient has access to a CNS, but instability is worsening.

The Royal College of Radiologists’ 2024 census found that colorectal oncology has the highest locum reliance, at 13%. One in five colorectal consultants will retire within the next five years. How are we going to replace those healthcare professionals? The British Association of Urological Surgeons reports that 12% of consultant roles are unfilled, with a growing reliance on costly locums.

In haematology, the east midlands has twice as many vacancies as filled clinical scientist roles, with 32% of haematology clinicians planning to reduce their working hours. Again, the Royal College of Radiologists reports that the median age of radiologists leaving fell from 56 in 2021 to 49 in 2024, and for clinical oncologists from 59 to 54 in one year. Around 20% of clinical oncology consultants will retire in the next five years.

The NHS is losing staff faster than it can replace them. What will the Government do to replace those doctors before they retire? People with less survivable cancers often have rapid disease progression and experience severe symptoms. Around 70% of pancreatic cancer patients receive no active treatment; many are too unwell or diagnosed too late.

Specialist symptom management and supportive care must be expanded to reduce emergency admissions and improve quality of life, yet the NHS cannot currently deliver this. Less survivable cancers must have their own section in the national cancer plan. Advanced treatments such as CAR T-cell therapy for leukaemia are not available everywhere due to a lack of trained staff and infrastructure, resulting in a postcode lottery for lifesaving treatment. The Government must invest in training, especially in primary care, and increase specialist training places in radiology and oncology, as called for by the Royal College of Radiologists. The Government must also end recruitment freezes. On research, only 12% of brain tumour patients have taken part in a clinical trial, and 42% say they were never informed about opportunities to be part of a trial. Investment is needed in research, nurses, radiographers and infrastructure, as well as in embedding research into routine care and protecting staff time to deliver trials.

The Royal College of Radiologists is clear that delays caused by staffing gaps are endangering patients. Without investment, waiting times will lengthen, treatment delays will worsen and costs will rise. I hope it is clear to all of us that workforce shortfalls are a massive barrier to early diagnosis and effective, timely treatment across all cancers. The Government must increase recruitment, training and retention, support primary care referrals, invest in diagnostic infrastructure and education, guarantee access to clinical nurse specialists and prioritise support for patients with less-survivable cancers. Those steps must underpin the national cancer plan and the 10-year workforce plan. Lives depend upon it.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

I remind all Members that they should bob if they wish to speak. The debate will run until 3.10 pm, and I intend to call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson at 2.38 pm.

14:06

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

You will not be surprised to hear, Mrs Hobhouse, that it is a pleasure to serve under you. I thank the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for securing this important debate. I declare an interest: my lovely wife has worked as part of the NHS workforce in Scotland for around 30 years, and on Monday she is due to start a one-year secondment to the Marie Curie hospice in Edinburgh, so I take this opportunity to wish her well. As I have more time to speak debate than expected, let me also take this opportunity to thank all the people in Edinburgh South West who raise money for that hospice, including BobCat Alpacas, which recently raised around £10,000 at its open day.

This morning I met with MacMillan Cancer support, as I am sure other Members did too. I want to recognise its efforts across the UK in supporting people facing a diagnosis, as well as recognising groups in my constituency such as The House of Hope, which supports people with a breast cancer diagnosis. We have to recognise the pressure that NHS staff are under—not just my lovely wife, but staff right across the NHS in the UK, although I will start by talking about England.

The pressure on the staff who are supporting cancer patients in the NHS is why I absolutely welcome the forthcoming workforce plan and the national cancer strategy. I hope they can make a real difference to staff and cancer patients in England. I am proud that it is a Labour Government that are showing real ambition—the word ambition is important here—but I support Cancer Research UK’s ask for a dedicated cancer workforce planning strategy. I also agree with Leukaemia UK that the 10-year workforce plan must enable and support the delivery of the national cancer plan. I am sure that is not a controversial view—it makes absolute sense.

I have been lucky to table a private Member’s Bill on rare cancers, and through that I have met many cancer charities. I have to say that all of them respect the work of the hon. Member for Wokingham—I am trying to find one that does not, but they all do. I recently met with Blood Cancer UK to talk about its work, and it informed me about this debate. I was asked to raise the situation in haematology in England, which is particularly concerning.

Blood cancer accounts for a third of cancer deaths in the UK, but Blood Cancer UK says that treatment is continuously impacted by staffing shortages. It told me about how one patient shared that they had had seven different consultants in the past five years, and they were terrified about not knowing who to contact if their symptoms got worse—not a great situation. Figures from Blood Cancer UK show that in south-east England the vacancies for advanced haematologist nurse practitioner roles are 111% greater than the numbers in post, so there are more vacancies than people in post. That impacts both patients and the staff in post, for whom it must be incredibly stressful.

I hope that in the upcoming workforce plan the Government recognise the central role that haematologists play in cancer care. We have to recognise that having a haematology workforce that is staffed to the correct level has benefits well beyond cancer care. I hope the Government will put measures in place to address the shortfalls. As the hon. Member for Wokingham said, steps to drive up the recruitment and retention of clinical nurses will be crucial.

Let me turn to Scotland, where of course health is devolved. Back in August, I welcomed the news that the risk of dying from cancer in Scotland had reached a record low, which is a fantastic landmark. However, the data only covered the period up to 2022. In 2025, cancer waiting times in Scotland have never been worse. The Royal College of Radiologists has indicated that, without addressing staffing, the situation will only get even worse. Right now, that seems unthinkable. Data shows that there is a 25% shortage of radiologists—again, a discipline that has benefits well beyond cancer care—and a 19% shortage of oncologists. One in five consultant haematologists are near retirement, and there is low recruitment into the sector, so patient groups are very concerned about what that means for the future.

The Scottish Government say that they are investing in cancer treatment, yet patients have been failed and left without effective care—that is the reality when we look beyond the press releases. Hon. Members do not have to take my word for it: Dr Iain Kennedy, who chairs the Scottish council of the British Medical Association, said that Scotland is now divided between people who can afford to go private and those forced to “languish” on NHS waiting lists. We often think about people going private for cosmetic work, or perhaps even hip surgery, but if people in Scotland, or anywhere, are going private for cancer care, that is a real inequality.

Cancer mortality rates for the poorest in Scotland are 78% higher than those for the richest. That shames me as a Scot, and I want change. The Scottish Government are failing to address the very low staffing levels that feed these issues. There is no workforce plan. The UK Government are currently looking at one, but there is none in Scotland. They actually had one, which expired in March this year. I checked it this morning, and it did not even mention cancer care. Perhaps that is why we have the worst cancer waiting times on record.

While the UK Government are taking action through the workforce plan, which I look forward to hearing more about from the Minister, the situation in Scotland looks like it can only get worse. We will have an election for the Holyrood Parliament next year. I hope that cancer care is a key part of the discussion, because it is in real crisis in Scotland. The country needs change. Our NHS needs change.

14:13

[Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) on securing this important debate. It is unusual to be called so quickly; we are often oversubscribed, so it is a pleasure to be able to say something a little more substantive than what I had initially prepared.

I want to talk about the impact on the workforce in my area, Harrogate and Knaresborough, and across the Yorkshire and Humber region. We need a strong and sustainable NHS workforce, which is critical to improving cancer outcomes. There is rising demand: the number of people in Yorkshire receiving urgent checks for cancer has doubled in the past 10 years and is projected to keep rising. Cancer services in our region are consistently failing to meet national targets.

Action is desperately needed to make the NHS a more attractive and sustainable career choice. That includes investing in training, improving retention and prioritising staff wellbeing. One of the biggest frustrations I hear from local staff at our hospital is the inability to even find a place to park at work and the impact that that has on the surrounding area.

I welcome the forthcoming workforce plan. I know that a number of organisations, including Yorkshire Cancer Research, will be keen to submit evidence to ensure that the needs of cancer patients in our region are fully addressed. We need to make sure that staffing levels are delivered and that the support for growing demand is not left behind.

There are a number of gaps in the workforce across my patch. Yorkshire has the lowest rate of clinical and medical oncology consultants of any region in the country, at 5.1 per 100,000 people aged 50 and above, compared with 6.6 nationally and 11.3 in London. The regional shortfall in clinical oncology consultants is 18%, higher than the national average of 15%.

As has been mentioned, we are also experiencing shortfalls and shortages in services and support staff, such as clinical radiologists. There is considerable concern, with 79% of clinical directors across Yorkshire and the Humber—the highest proportion in England—saying there are insufficient radiologists to deliver safe and effective care. The current shortfall is 33%, and the figure is projected to rise to 41% by 2029, placing Yorkshire among the worst-affected regions.

We are also experiencing the complexity of an ageing workforce. Yorkshire and the Humber has the joint highest proportion of clinical radiologist consultants expected to retire over the next five years—22%, compared with 20% in the rest of England—and a lower than average forecast of growth in that role.

I hear from local people that some of the barriers they face to accessing cancer pathways are at the point of general practice. Difficult conversations often occur at the GP. Timely access is crucial, yet we have significant variation in GP availability across the country and even across Yorkshire. For example, in Kingston upon Hull East, each GP services 3,664 patients, which is more than double the number in Sheffield South East. With one in two cancers diagnosed late, improving access to GPs is vital for early detection and therefore better outcomes. I have received a number of emails from people completing their training in the NHS as GPs and doctors on their concerns about their ability to find work. I hope the Minister—and, going forward, the workforce plan—can address that.

Research-active hospitals deliver better survival outcomes, even for patients who are not directly involved in trials. For example, bowel cancer patients treated in NHS hospital trusts with high levels of research participation had improved survival outcomes in the first year after diagnosis. What worries me is that across Yorkshire we saw a 25% decline in clinical academic posts between 2012 and 2022, which was four times higher than the national decline.

When we talk about the NHS workforce and its impact on cancer, it is important to acknowledge that the charity sector often supplements the work our NHS does. In my constituency, we have Harrogate Hospital and Community Charity, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. I was pleased to run the Paris and London marathons to raise money for it earlier this year. It is a fantastic organisation that does amazing work on the ground, going above and beyond what the NHS can provide for people with a range of health issues. Last year, I was able to attend a Macmillan coffee morning at the Sir Robert Ogden Macmillan Centre, and today I attended the Macmillan coffee morning here in Parliament.

Broadly speaking, the feedback I hear from anyone accessing cancer facilities and services in my patch is that our local provision is fantastic. One constituent, John Fox, who has recently gone through those services, described an amazing team that was supportive, caring and helpful. It is important, while we talk about the issues that we are facing, to highlight some of the positives and the good experiences that people have.

In summary, what I would like to see going forward, and what I hope the Minister might be able to comment on, is how we will better invest in training, recruitment and retention of staff in the NHS and how we will address regional inequalities and support research capacity.

14:19

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a real pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for raising this matter, which affects constituents in every part of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I always admire the hon. Gentleman because of the personal experiences with cancer that he tells us about. I have heard about them from him personally, but also in this Chamber. His heart is for those with cancer, and those who suffer and need to find a cure. I congratulate him on all he does.

As the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) mentioned, the Macmillan coffee morning was this morning. Macmillan put forward some recommendations this morning, and I wonder whether the Minister has had an opportunity to have contact with the group. Macmillan is always helpful—it is not here to catch anybody out—and it was putting forward positive ideas on how to do things better. Perhaps the Minister can indicate whether that opportunity has come forward.

In this life, there are not many things that I say I hate—when I use that word, I mean it—but I do hate cancer. I hate the devastating effect it has on people and families. I hate that children suffer and that their parents can only stand by and watch, as happens on many occasions. I hate that children are left motherless or fatherless and that nothing can be done. I hate having to deal with that dreadful disease. But most of all I hate that we cannot cure it—at least, not yet.

One of my requests to the Minister, who is always incredibly helpful, is on research and development. Statistically, one in two people we meet—half the people in this room—will have cancer; 50% will survive, and 50% will not. The research and development is so important for getting to the day when we find a cure. I know the Minister is committed to that, and I hope she can give us some idea what is being done on that.

Each of us in this place will have been touched by cancer. I think of my own dad. My dad has been dead now for 10 years, but he was a cancer survivor on three occasions. He put that down—as I would as well—to the skill of the surgeon, the care of the nurses and the prayers of God’s people, which helped him get out the other side.

We can argue about microwaves, about preservatives in food and about genetic or carcinogenic factors, but this debate is about ensuring that NHS workforce levels enable every sufferer to have the best chance possible to fight cancer. As the hon. Member for Wokingham and others who have spoken have said, we are not there just yet. There are insufficient NHS workforce levels in Northern Ireland—I know that that is not the Minister’s responsibility, but I want to give a flavour. Things are not that different there; what happens in Northern Ireland happens in England, Wales and Scotland. If cancer patients have delayed diagnoses and treatments, that can lead to potentially life-threatening consequences and increased anxiety. First, people are anxious about their health, and then they are anxious about how to pay the bills: “Do I get benefits? Can I get some help to get me through? Can I get my mortgage extended?” People have to face up to really life-altering circumstances, and unmet support needs as well.

Then we have the shortages in key roles, such as specialist nurses, radiologists and surgeons. Unfortunately, that means that treatment targets are frequently missed and patients do not receive the full support they require during and after treatment. The situation is worsened by growing waiting lists, increased workloads for existing staff and a lack of resources for both acute and community-based care.

The hon. Member for Wokingham spoke about pancreatic cancer. Many cancers are devastating, but pancreatic cancer is one of the worst. In the last 10 days, a young lady from Greyabbey, a village close to where I live, died of pancreatic cancer. She was 31 years of age, with a five-year-old son and a partner. I remember others. When pancreatic cancer is diagnosed, it is too late, because it has already taken effect and the body is already succumbing to that terrible cancer. That is why I go back to research and development. Will we find the cure for pancreatic cancer someday? Will we be able to diagnose it at an earlier stage so that we can give the treatment and help that are needed?

[Dr Arthur]

I know that this subject is important to the hon. Gentleman. Pancreatic Cancer UK is a fantastic charity. Unfortunately, he could not make this year’s Labour party conference in Liverpool, although he is always welcome to attend—Labour MPs go free, so he is welcome to join up. However, Pancreatic Cancer UK was there with scientists who are looking at a new diagnostic tool that, believe it or not, is based on a breath test. They can analyse a small particle in our breath to give an indication of whether there could be something that needs further investigation. That is a great example of how investment can help to save lives while bringing jobs to the UK. I am sure the hon. Gentleman will congratulate Pancreatic Cancer UK on all its work in this field, and on that little piece of progress.

[Jim Shannon]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s encouraging intervention. That is what it is all about. Of course, I attend my own party’s conference—I am not sure I would attend anyone else’s. Party conferences are a great opportunity to meet groups that are working hard, and they come to our conference too. That breath test is encouraging, and perhaps it will be part of the next stage of curing cancer, and particularly pancreatic cancer.

The target of starting treatment within 62 days of an urgent GP referral is not being met, with only 37% of patients receiving treatment within the critical window—those figures are from 2023. As of September 2023, some 545,000 people in Northern Ireland, which has a population of 1.95 million, were waiting for elective care. My goodness, is that not a scary figure? That issue is not the Minister’s responsibility, but it worries me when I consider it. It is the highest number on record. Waiting times for in-patient admissions and out-patient appointments, including for cancer patients, have increased dramatically since 2020.

There are shortages across multiple disciplines, including paediatricians, administrative support, pathologists, radiologists, chemotherapy nurses and palliative care staff. For example, while the number of clinical radiologists has increased, which is good news, the Royal College of Radiologists estimates that the workforce is still 50% smaller than is needed to meet demand. Yes, there have been advances, but we are not there quite yet. Current staff face extreme workload pressures, leading to a fear of missing early diagnoses, and also burnout for those whose commitment to help their patients is above and beyond what their wage packet might indicate.

We are not coping well. A constituent came to my office to ask why her first smear test results took 16 weeks to come back, and why she had to ring her GP on three occasions to get them. On her behalf, I had to email the doctor’s surgery and the health trust so that the biopsies were taken. It is easy to understand why her anxiety levels were through the roof. She now has to wait a further six to eight weeks to see whether she needs treatment. My goodness, it is little wonder that people are so worried, anxious and stressed.

The fact is that waiting times affect the mental health of even the young and the fit. If we are to give people the tools they need to win their health battle, as we need to, it begins with efficient diagnosis and treatment. We are not getting it right, and that is a fact. We can do better. Our constituents believe they are losing the battle before it truly begins, so what do we need to do? We need to bring our workforce up to par by ensuring that money in the NHS is spent appropriately and is not, to use an Ulster Scots word, frittered away.

I make a plea to the Minister for more research. I really believe that what we spend on research will be for the future and finding all the cures. If we go back a few years, only one in three people survived cancer; now it is one in two. That is an advance, and perhaps the day is coming when everyone can be in that place. I think of Queen’s University Belfast as one example. Its partnerships with medical companies to find cures are incredible, and those that it has found through its research are some of the best in the United Kingdom, if not the world.

To conclude, our NHS staff are second to none, but at times they seem to be working with one hand tied behind their backs, and that must cease. We must ensure we have sufficient funding to free them up to do the job and to fight cancer throughout this great United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—always better together.

14:30

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for securing this important debate highlighting the issue of staff shortages and the impact on cancer patients and the outcomes that they achieve.

Cancer should be a top priority for any Government, and the UK—with its historically thriving life sciences sector—could and should be a global leader in cancer research and outcomes. Sadly, at the moment, that is not necessarily the case. The last Conservative Government broke their promise on a 10-year cancer plan that would have made a real difference to patients. We must put an end to the tragedy of people losing their lives because cancer treatment takes too long to start. No one should be unable to receive treatment because there is not enough equipment or sufficient staff to properly support them. It is a scandal that so many people live in treatment deserts and are forced to take incredibly long journeys for treatment, often after weeks of waiting for that treatment to begin.

In that context, the introduction of a national cancer strategy is incredibly welcome. It should help to boost cancer survival rates. I am very proud that my hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham—who, as we have heard, is a widely respected cancer campaigner—has helped to secure a commitment from the Government to introduce such a plan. It is really important that when this plan comes, it is meaningful. The Government should take bold action: ensuring that every patient starts treatment for cancer within 62 days of their urgent referral, recruiting the cancer specialists we need, and replacing ancient machines and delivering new ones.

The situation on the ground at the moment is not very good. My constituents in North Shropshire have had to deal with some of the worst backlogs and performance in England for years. One told me that they waited almost a year before their treatment began—that is simply not okay. Look at the target of treatment starting within 62 days of urgent referral: Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust only achieved 68.8% for the month of August this year, compared with a target of 85%. That, however, is a significant improvement on its previous situation, with performance against that target improving by more than 15.4% over the past year. That progress is welcome, obviously. I am optimistic that it will be sustained and I commend and thank the tireless work of staff across the trust in driving those improvements.

Staffing levels, especially for radiologists doing diagnostic scans, have been a large part of the problem in Shrewsbury and Telford. Outsourcing the interpretation of those scans has led to a dramatic improvement in the speed at which the results come back and demonstrates the importance of having enough skilled staff and the speedy diagnostics that can help with early treatment commencing. That issue is particularly severe in rural areas. I hope that the workforce plan, which will go with the cancer strategy, will address that. BMJ Group research found that every four-week delay to starting cancer treatment is associated with a 10% decrease in cancer survival. Constituents such as mine, who have had horrendous waits for treatment, are bearing the lethal brunt of delays.

NHS workforce statistics show that between June 2020 and June 2025, the number of full-time-equivalent cancer specialists has risen: by 32% for clinical oncologists, 48% for medical oncologists and 27% for the clinical radiology workforce. Clearly, those statistics are welcome. However, analysis from the Royal College of Radiologists argues that the increase in workforce capacity has not kept pace with the ever-growing demand for cancer services, which is inevitable in an ageing population with poor health.

In 2024, the Royal College of Radiologists estimated that the clinical oncology workforce was about 15% smaller than required to meet demand, and projected that that shortfall would rise to 19% by 2029. It also reported that, among the 50 cancer centres surveyed in England in 2024, 76% of heads expressed concerns about patient safety due to workforce shortages.

We also cannot ignore the reality of working conditions in our NHS and their impacts on staff retention. The previous Conservative Government left our NHS under unbearable strain, with professionals working under intense pressure in crumbling hospitals and often without the resources they needed, rather than in safe clinical settings. That does not help the retention of a highly skilled and experienced workforce.

There are also woeful shortages of specialist training places, meaning that we do not have the cancer specialists we need. At the same time, there is rising doctor unemployment despite growing need for their services. It is a damning indictment of the Conservatives’ mismanagement and failure to plan the workforce. A workforce plan for the NHS—including a workforce plan to support the cancer strategy—is imperative, and must address the issues of retention and career progression for doctors, nurses and other skilled staff across all specialisms.

While routine NHS workforce statistics are not available for nurses working in cancer specialities, a nursing fill-rate dataset obtained by FactCheck for “Channel 4 News” showed that a third of acute trusts in England were missing at least 10% of their planned nurses across haematology and oncology wards, based on monthly average data between January 2023 and November 2024. That is why the Liberal Democrats are pressing for more cancer nurses—so that every patient has a dedicated specialist nurse supporting them throughout their treatment—and for expanded community nursing.

We have also been campaigning for the UK to lead the world in cancer research through new funding and the waiving of burdensome fees and bureaucracy for international researchers. We would set up a dedicated fellowship scheme for US cancer scientists, who have seen their funding gutted by President Trump.

Without, for example, sufficient radiographers, specialist nurses and diagnostic equipment, even the most promising screening initiatives introduced here risk being delayed or underutilised. The Government need to commit to the funding of early screening programmes, and to training and retaining the workforce required to deliver them. A comprehensive, well-supported roll-out would allow thousands of people at risk to be diagnosed at a much earlier stage, when treatment is far more effective and survival rates are significantly higher.

The national cancer plan provides a huge opportunity for the Government to turn cancer care around in this country and deliver world-class care for every community. I look forward to seeing them deliver that plan, and ensure that it is deliverable through an associated workforce plan, at the soonest opportunity.

14:37

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mrs Hobhouse. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) on securing this debate.

Across the United Kingdom, an estimated 3.5 million people are living with cancer. We all know a friend, family member or co-worker who has battled the disease, and, sadly, we also all know of somebody whose life was cut short by it. Our country faces an ageing population, which will mean more cancer cases in the years to come; the longer we live, the greater the risk.

Troublingly, cancer rates are also rising among those in their 20s, 30s and 40s, so getting cancer care right today will mean the difference between lives saved and lives lost tomorrow. We know that the NHS cannot deliver timely, effective cancer care without the workforce trained to provide it. We owe it to patients fighting cancer today—and the 50% of us who will face cancer tomorrow—to fix the situation.

NHS staff are carrying out more cancer checks than ever before: more than 3 million a year in 2024, compared with less than half that a decade ago. In the last five years, we have also benefited from an increase in the number of clinical and medical oncologists in the NHS as well as of clinical radiology staff. Sadly, however, demand for services is fast outpacing the supply of staff, putting teams under immense pressure. Last year, more than 74,000 people in England were not treated on time for cancer, increasing their risk from the disease.

Formal training for medical staff begins at university. The previous Government increased the number of places at medical school, and increased the number of medical schools by building five new ones. This Government have said that they will increase the number of medical school places. Could the Minister confirm the places that they will fund for next September, bearing in mind that the application date has now passed?

The next step, postgraduate training, faces challenges too. The previous Government, as I said, increased medical school places. They also removed the resident labour market test because of the shortage of doctors. The Secretary of State appeared to understand back in Easter the effect that that was going to start to have, as the newly trained doctors came through their postgraduate training.

Over the last two years, the number of international medical graduates applying for training posts has also increased dramatically. The application ratio for postgraduate training posts has gone up substantially and there is a risk that some junior doctors will not get a job. There is also a risk that international medical graduates who get more of the places will return to their country of origin after they have completed training, so we will have unemployed British trainees and doctors who return after training, leaving us with a shortage of consultants in a few years’ time. That issue has been highlighted by the British Medical Association, of which I am a member. Sadly, it has announced that doctors will go on strike from 14 to 19 November this year, partly as a result of pay and partly as a result of job shortages.

The Secretary of State was vociferous in his criticisms of the previous Government when doctors went on strike. What will he and the Minister do to get the doctors back to work? Cancer treatment requires surgery, oncology, haematology, radiology, pathology and geneticists—every specialty across the NHS, including, sadly, paediatrics and sometimes even neonatologists.

There are also challenges across the nursing sector. We saw nurses this year coming out of nursing college with qualifications, but without the posts to go to. There is also a need for other allied health professionals—pharmacists, radiologists, laboratory staff, mammographers and research assistants. Will the workforce plan reflect this? When will it be published? Will it make projections about the population with cancer and will the Government publish those, too? The Government committed to more MRIs and CT scanners. How many new ones have they got in place? How well are they progressing with their targets?

We have heard about the importance of research today. Scientists are a key part of our cancer workforce. We heard yesterday in the Chamber about the challenges that the life sciences sector is facing. The £1 billion investment from Merck for King’s Cross has been shelved. The more than £200 million investment from AstraZeneca in Speke, near Liverpool, has also been shelved, and other investments are paused or mothballed. The industry is talking about poor Government engagement, employment regulations, increased employment taxes such as national insurance, and how they are increasing the voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing and access payment rate.

What are the Government going to do to ensure that we have research in this country? Research is a real success. We have the best scientists in the world. We have cutting-edge treatment, trial drugs and novel approaches. Those are all more accessible earlier if they are done in the UK. They also provide good jobs for the British workforce. What work is the Minister doing with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology team? What representation is she making to the Treasury to ensure that supporting research is part of the Government’s actions as well as messaging? Will the supporting research be part of the cancer plan? What support is the Minister giving to rare cancers, particularly those that are particularly lethal such as pancreatic cancer? What about brain tumours, where survival has shown little or no improvement? What focus will the cancer plan have on those?

I sat on the Rare Cancers Bill Committee. The rare diseases framework points out that one in 17 of us will get a rare disease during our lifetime. The current framework initiated by the last Government runs out in around three months’ time. Do the Government plan to replace it? If so, what with and when?

Sadly, as I said earlier, children and teenagers—young people—also get cancer, and they have particular needs as they go through puberty and young adulthood. The workforce therefore has to have particular strengths because of the work involved. I commend the work of the Teenage Cancer Trust and the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) is doing. Can the Minister confirm that young people’s and children’s cancer will form an important part of the cancer plan?

Computer scientists will also be key to the cancer workforce. We have heard about the importance of AI. Computers can already identify skin cancer from benign lesions in many cases. The Health and Social Care Select Committee, which I was part of in the last Parliament, visited Stanford in California. We saw how AI was being used to look at mammograms and how, rather than using two doctors, they used one doctor and an AI computer. That was better than either two computers or two clinicians. What is the Minister doing to ensure that, from early education in schools, we are teaching the right skills to develop the right workforce for the AI of the future?

We are getting better at treating cancer, so thankfully there is life after cancer, but post-cancer care is important too. Some people live with things such as lymphoedema, amputations and stomas as a result of their cancer treatment. What focus does the Minister expect there to be in the workforce plan and cancer plan on those issues?

Palliative care is important for those who cannot be treated successfully and whose cancer cannot be cured, but hospices are in crisis across the country. The Government have given extra money for capital, and some for children, which is of course welcome, but hospices across the country are facing huge costs, particularly from the national insurance measures in the last Budget, and neither fund will cover that for adult hospices. Right across the country, we hear about adult hospices that are closing beds. What will the Minister do about that in her plan? How does she expect us to decide on the assisted suicide Bill when palliative care is facing such difficulty? What about the mental health workforce? It is important that people are supported through their cancer journey.

We had the 10-year health plan, with which came the promise of a workforce plan and a national cancer plan, but across the country the British people are waiting. They watch the Labour Government crafting glossy catalogues of intent but failing to deliver for our NHS. The time for planning and prevarication is over. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

14:46

[The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for securing the debate, and for getting through it—I hope he is well. I thank other hon. Members for their contributions. As others have noted, I am aware of the work that the hon. Gentleman has done, using his experience for good, on access to primary care, radiotherapy and cancer. He has campaigned on behalf of his constituents in Wokingham and people across the country, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said. He has been a keen advocate for the NHS workforce’s importance to delivering the health services we need.

I thank the wife of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) for her service and wish her well in her new role at the hospice. It is really good to have a voice from Scotland in these debates. My hon. Friend spoke about the shocking and deeply concerning waiting times that our friends and families in Scotland are experiencing. The Scottish people will have a chance to start reversing the situation next May. I hope they take that opportunity, and I look forward to joining my hon. Friend to try to make that happen.

I have my green jacket on, but I am sorry that I could not join today’s Macmillan coffee morning, which the hon. Member for Strangford mentioned. The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton), is working very closely with Macmillan and many other cancer charities as she develops the cancer plan. She is in good contact with them; they do great work, and we will ensure that we continue to talk through their many asks of the Government as she develops the workforce plan.

As many hon. Members said, half of us will have a cancer diagnosis in our lifetime. The health team has certainly taken our full part in that, as 50% of us have had a cancer diagnosis. Some of us are still undergoing treatment. Although more than three quarters of all people diagnosed with cancer in the UK are 60 and over—as hon. Members said, the population is ageing—I decided to get mine at 59. My hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire is also younger than 60, and the Secretary of State would not forgive me for not reminding everybody that he is only in his early 40s. We make the point well: as other Members said, that although incidence will increase as a result of our ageing population, cancer can strike anybody at any age.

Diagnosing and treating cancer is a growing part of NHS elective activity, and responding to demand in a way that best suits patients is crucial. That includes the issues that the hon. Members for Wokingham and for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) raised about the variability we often see even in a small geographical patch, and certainly between different cancers. The hon. Member for Wokingham talked about clinical nurse specialists. Mine were absolutely fantastic, and I did know who they were. The statistics he outlined are deeply concerning, so those points were very well made. Our mission to tackle cancer and the other biggest killers is underpinned by the 10-year health plan published earlier this year, focusing on those three shifts: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention.

On the workforce plan, we know that we need an effective and sustainable workforce to deliver better outcomes for everyone, including those with cancer. In the 10-year health plan, we set out that, to deliver a workforce fit for the future, we need a new, sustainable approach to workforce planning. Our 10-year workforce plan will be different. It will set out how we will create a workforce ready to deliver a transformed service for patients when and where they need it, with more empowered, flexible and fulfilled staff.

Since we launched our call for evidence on 26 September, we have been struck by the huge enthusiasm of staff, the sector, stakeholders and colleagues in sharing their thoughts and ideas with us. Many have said that they would like more time to have those conversations, to test ideas and to work together to deliver a truly reformed service. I am grateful to them for raising that, and it is why we have made the decision to give more time to that process. We will now publish the plan in the spring of 2026. A spring publication will allow us to have more detailed discussions with partners, hon. Members and other stakeholders, not just to listen but to work in a truly joined-up way to deliver for staff and patients.

The shadow Minister helpfully outlined all the decisions that were made by her Government over the last few years—decisions that essentially led to many of the workforce problems we now have. We are trying to resolve those problems, and we will. She informed the House that the resident doctors committee has now decided to go on strike again, which is, of course, deeply disappointing. It will be damaging for the work we want to do, and we urge it not to go ahead. However, we will continue to commit to ensuring that the workforce is fit for purpose, including to diagnose and treat cancer. We will progress with the work that we have already started.

In July 2025, there were over 5% more staff in the key cancer professions of clinical oncology, gastroenterology, medical oncology, histopathology, clinical radiology and diagnostic and therapeutic radiography than in July 2024. There were also more doctors working in clinical oncology and more radiology doctors, compared with last year.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West asked particularly about haematology. NHS England has invested in expanding specialty training posts in high-demand disciplines, including haematology, and is supporting local systems to retain and develop multidisciplinary teams. That includes increased medical training posts in haematology, and enhancing the scientific workforce supply through other initiatives.

We have also ensured that the cancer-facing workforce are put on a more stable footing to ensure they have the stability they need to continue to provide the care that patients need. In 2025, we provided grant funding to the Royal College of Radiologists to encourage foundation and internal medicine trainees to specialise in clinical oncology. That work is currently under way and involves a series of webinars as well as targeted engagement. In 2024-25, around 8,000 people received training either to enter the cancer and diagnostic workforce or to develop in their roles. As part of that, more than 1,600 people were on apprenticeship courses, with more than 270 additional medical specialty training places funded. More than 1,000 clinical nurse specialist grants were made available to new and aspiring CNS workers, and it is a really valuable service.

[Tom Gordon]

I thank the Minister for giving way. As ever, she is most generous with her time. She has outlined the positive steps that the Government are taking to address the workforce challenge. Could she elaborate on the points I made about the inequalities between the north and the south in the NHS and the cancer workforce?

[Karin Smyth]

I do not have those numbers to hand but, as we outlined in the 10-year health plan, we are particularly committed to people in rural and coastal communities with regard to workforce and access to many other services. If there is anything specific the hon. Gentleman is not aware of, I am happy to furnish him with more information. We are, however, minded to rectify the variability across the country, even within towns and cities, let alone rural and coastal communities, whether that be in the north, south, east or west.

We will ensure that ongoing investment in practice education continues to enhance clinical supervision, education and training across cancer and diagnostic workforces. That will increase placement capacity, support staff retention and contribute to high-quality patient care.

We will not only ensure that the cancer workforce have the numbers to succeed, but also the skillset. Training academies in imaging, endoscopy and genomics are all being delivered across regions to provide intensive skills development and to support new models of care. We will also ensure that staff have the skills to adopt the treatments needed by cancer patients. Adoption of innovative cancer treatments is often clinician-led and self-identified, with doctors seeking out specialist training opportunities themselves. This may include overseas fellowships or short courses, after which skills are cascaded locally through continued professional development, multidisciplinary teams and peer-to-peer learning.

The complex challenge of tackling the cancer and workforce issues we face will not be solved with a single solution, which is why the Department will be publishing a national cancer plan in the new year. The plan will have patients at its heart and will cover the entirety of the cancer pathway from referral and diagnosis to treatment and ongoing care, as well as prevention, research and innovation. The national cancer plan will build on the progress of the 10-year health plan to improve survival rates and reduce the number of lives lost to the biggest killers.

On 4 February, we launched a call for evidence on the national cancer plan, which closed on 29 April. We received over 11,000 responses from individuals, professionals and organisations who shared their views on how we can do more to achieve our ambition. We have worked with crucial industry figures in the development of the national cancer plan, including the Royal College of Radiologists. The submissions are being used to inform our plan to improve cancer care. As I said, the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire, is working hard on that issue.

I thank the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) for her recognition of the improvements being made at Shrewsbury and Telford and for her contribution, and that of other local MPs, in supporting that trust. Those are very welcome improvements.

On research, the life sciences sector is critical to this Government’s growth mission and we want to make this country the best place to do life sciences. Of course, the Department is working closely with colleagues in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Department for Business and Trade, and His Majesty’s Treasury to make that happen.

Finally, through this Government’s action on workforce and cancer capacity, we will ensure the NHS has the staff it needs to treat cancer patients safely across the country. I thank the hon. Member for Wokingham for securing this debate.

14:57

[Clive Jones]

I thank you, Mrs Hobhouse, and the Minister for leaving me time to sum up the debate. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) for her contribution and her kind remarks, and I thank other Members for their kind remarks as well. I thank all hon. Members who have contributed so much to today’s debate, each having special stories to tell about the areas they represent. All of them are fantastic campaigners for the cancer community.

We can all agree with the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon): we all hate cancer. In fact, I am sure everybody in this room today hates cancer.

[Dr Caroline Johnson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Clive Jones]

I will make some progress.

I must also say a big thank you to all the cancer charities and life sciences companies that have provided valuable insight into the state of the NHS workforce and its effect on cancer patients. The impact of NHS workforce levels on cancer patients is a serious topic that needs to be discussed, and the experience of patients needs to be highlighted. Today has raised key demands for the Government to address.

The Government must increase endoscopy and pathology capacity. They should audit and invest in phlebotomy services, as called for by Leukaemia UK and the Royal College of General Practitioners. They also need to establish a national register of phlebotomy sites. The Government need to provide targeted support for the most deprived areas of the country, which are under immense pressure, and they need to replace doctors who they know are likely to retire in the next few years.

The Government must up their game on cancer. They have been left a very difficult legacy, with no money and no enthusiasm to change the way we deal with cancer, which is a really sad indictment of the previous Conservative Government. Finally, the Government must increase recruitment, training and retention; support primary care referrals; invest in diagnostic infrastructure and education; guarantee access to clinical nurse specialists; and prioritise support for patients with less survivable cancers.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the impact of NHS workforce levels on cancer patients.

15:00

Sitting suspended.

Building Safety Regulator

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir Desmond Swayne in the Chair]

15:09

[Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the performance of the Building Safety Regulator.

It is an unrivalled pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate and colleagues from four different parties for adding their names to the application. Since being elected last year, I have been searching for something that the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) and I can agree on, and I am thankful that we finally managed to find it. The breadth of support demonstrates the shared determination across the House to make the system work better. I also thank those from across the industry for their tireless campaigning on the issue, as well as for the constructive way they have worked to ensure that we can get safer buildings across the housing system and provide the supply that is so desperately needed.

Across the construction and development sectors, there is rightly a growing frustration about how the new building safety regime operates in practice. Everybody supports the principle of safer buildings, but there is increasing concern that the system as it stands is holding back progress on building the new homes that are so desperately needed. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and I sought this debate because of the growing concern across industry that the Building Safety Regulator, while well intentioned, is becoming a real barrier to hitting the 1.5 million homes target that we promised at the general election and that it is so important we achieve.

We should be absolutely clear that this debate is not an attack on the principle of building safety—very far from it. Seventy-two people lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017—72 lives needlessly and tragically lost. It remains a stain on our national conscience that it took such a disaster to ensure that we have proper accountability and testing in the building industry.

The Building Safety Regulator is a vital part of ensuring that nothing like Grenfell ever happens again, but it has to work. Time and again, developers and councils tell me exactly the same story: that schemes are stuck in the system and that, although the regulator is supposed to process applications within 12 weeks, tens of thousands of homes are still stuck to this day. The latest figures suggest that 22,000 homes are waiting for a remediation decision and that 33,000 new homes are waiting for approval. The cost of that is severe: according to the Centre for Policy Studies, there has been a 73% drop in housing starts in London over the past year, with the regulator one of the biggest causes. It is good to see today’s Government announcement on the ways we are going further to get the London housing market moving again, but the industry will still say the Building Safety Regulator is one of the biggest obstacles.

Perhaps the biggest travesty is that if we do not build new safer homes, more people in this city and across the rest of the country are stuck in more dangerous and older properties. That is before we even start to consider the thousands who are stuck in temporary accommodation —one child in every classroom—or those who are paying extortionate rents because this country has failed for decades to build the homes that are needed.

We now see a growing backlog in the BSR because telecoms infrastructure is being caught up in the new regulations for high-risk buildings—I say this in a building where I still cannot seem to get good phone signal, because we are not building the mobile phone infrastructure that is required across the city. That is causing real practical problems. It threatens to seriously impact the delivery of new buildings, particularly when rooftop installations are involved. If that is not addressed quickly, it could slow down construction and digital roll-out at exactly the point when this country needs to be improving both.

The delays affect not just developers but people: the families living in buildings that are still awaiting remediation and the people who know that their homes are not yet deemed fully safe. The stress that causes day after day is unimaginable. When we talk today about process, paper- work and delays, we must remember the human beings at the heart of this issue.

The economic impact is also huge: rising insurance costs, development finance drying up and higher up-front fees—all before a single brick gets laid. It has a real effect on the viability of building, particularly in our bigger cities. Peter John, the former head of Southwark council put it bluntly:

“The greatest single burden developers have faced over the last five years has been the introduction of the Building Safety Regulator. The unintended consequence of improving building safety cannot be to cut off the supply of new homes.”

He is right.

Melanie Leech of the British Property Federation told the Select Committee that BSR delays are holding back two thirds of the build-to-rent pipeline. As we are rightly reforming the Renters’ Rights Bill, which was considered in the Commons again yesterday, we need to ensure that new build-to-rent properties are built, in order to keep the system unclogged. Fewer new rental properties obviously means higher rental prices for everyone else. The Home Builders Federation says exactly the same: the delivery of high-rise developments has “ground to a halt”.

Earlier this week, the Government held their regional investment summit, and the message could not have been clearer: the UK is open for business, full of opportunity and led by a Government determined to drive growth. But investors also reminded us about the hard truth that investment is global, and if it takes too long or if it is too difficult to see a return here, capital will simply go elsewhere. We must pull down the barriers to investment and make it easier for growth to happen right here in the UK. If we are serious about growth, we need to back the builders, not the blockers.

The good news is that fixing this does not require a huge amount of money from the Treasury—given how difficult it is to get money out of the Treasury—and it is not primarily about huge amounts of new spending. But it does mean investing in the right people: the experts who can process complex applications quickly and accurately. Will the Minister confirm whether the BSR will have the flexibility to offer market rates to attract those people, rather than being constrained by standard civil service pay bands?

Secondly, it is about culture. Too many developers tell me they face a “computer says no” approach—an invalid application is simply rejected, forcing the whole process to restart. That would be frustrating enough over 12 weeks, but over nine months or more it is a killer for confidence. One of the most frustrating stories I have heard in all this is from a developer who was asked by someone at the Building Safety Regulator to slow down the speed at which they were making applications, to stop the BSR from becoming overwhelmed. At a time when this Government are rightly determined to speed up house building, it is frustrating to see an arm of government trying to slow the process down.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and the Backbench Business Committee on this debate. My hon. Friend talks about the frustration of a nine-month delay, but the BSR is supposed to work to a 12-week turnaround. Is he aware that 338 council homes at the Bermondsey biscuit factory have already been held up for 54 weeks? When approached, the BSR asked for another 12 weeks to complete the application decision.

[Chris Curtis]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments, which show exactly the kind of consequences we are facing because of what has been happening to the Building Safety Regulator. If we are not building new social homes, we have to ask where they are going to be instead. Quite often, children aged one or two are stuck in temporary accommodation, not learning to walk or crawl properly and having their life chances curtailed because this city and this country have failed to build the homes to give them a proper life chance. It is important that we stand up to the blockers who stand in the way of that.

Could we move to a more collaborative approach, in which BSR staff can work iteratively with applications to resolve issues as they arise, rather than starting from scratch each time? I have heard worrying reports of inconsistency, with different teams taking different decisions on similar cases. What is being done to ensure greater transparency and consistency? Has the Department assessed whether further guidance is needed for both applications and the regulator itself?

The BSR has said that it hopes to clear the gateway 2 backlog before Christmas. I welcome that level of ambition, but will the Minister confirm what support the Government are providing to make it happen and whether new applications submitted after that point will be turned around within 12 weeks? Once gateway 2 approvals start to come through, we will start hitting the gateway 3 process, which is the sign-off after construction and before occupation. What preparation is being made to ensure that that process does not simply become the new bottleneck?

I will finish with a slightly wider point. Grenfell was a national tragedy caused by unforgiveable negligence, and it was right that the state responded, but when we design new regulations or regulators, we must remember the cost of getting it wrong. In this case, the cost is stalled projects, families waiting longer in unsafe homes, tens of thousands of children waking up this morning in temporary accommodation, and families paying unaffordable rents. The intent was sound; the implementation has been a catastrophic failure.

The lesson is clear: future systems must be built with feedback loops from day one, clear service standards, real-time data on performance, and consistent guidance. If the first version falls short, as it will from time to time, we need rapid reform, not months of drift while the consequences stack up. That is not about weakening safety; it is how we deliver better and faster. It is how we honour the lives of the 72 people we lost at Grenfell—not only by saying, “Never again,” but by building more of the safe, modern homes that this country needs, with a regulator worthy of the trust we place in it.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Order. I suggest a time limit of five minutes. Mr Tice, do you wish to speak?

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

In due time.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Oh, I see. That is very gracious of you. We will have Mr Mike Reader then.

15:21

[Mike Reader (Northampton South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) for doing tireless work to co-ordinate it on behalf of us both. I thank his team as well.

I want to start by echoing my hon. Friend’s comments on the disaster that was Grenfell. Waking up on my birthday, 14 June, to see the disaster unfolding in front of my eyes is something that will stick with me for the rest of my life; I am reminded every single time I celebrate a birthday. As we move away from the disaster, I am always very much reminded of the impact not only on the families who lost loved ones, but on the hundreds of other families and the community that was devastated by Grenfell.

To complement what my hon. Friend said, I have heard from the industry that the principles on how the Building Safety Regulator should work are very sound. We should work in a way that puts safety up front. There is a golden thread of data. When I joined the industry 20 years ago, one of my jobs as a graduate was to go and hunt O&M—operation and maintenance—manuals to find out exactly what had been built on site and how on earth we could improve it. There is a thread of information so that we can make decisions in relation to maintenance and operation, and there are very clear duty-holder liabilities and requirements, which were missing at Grenfell and in the industry.

In practice, we are seeing poor performance, which is why this debate was called. We see a regulator that is risk-averse and adversarial and that has an outdated approach, despite being a very new regulator. It prevents the delivery of safe, affordable homes, which is critical given the housing crisis and the homelessness crisis we inherited from the Conservative party.

I am perhaps a glutton for punishment. I give up my time as a Back Bencher to go to quite a number of breakfast events, dinner events and roundtables to talk about the sector that I am passionate about—the construction and built environment sector—as someone who built a 20-year career working in that great industry. It used to be about growth and change, when Opposition Members were in power as Ministers, but now the Building Safety Regulator comes up time and again as a real industry frustration. The BSR is widely regarded as actively hindering the construction of new homes—as a key blocker of the Government delivering 1.5 million homes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North said, 22,000 homes are awaiting approval for remediation and 33,000 new homes are waiting for approval.

Sometimes, it is not even homes that are stuck in this process. A small to medium-sized contractor from Northampton, Briggs and Forrester, spoke to me about doing the Guildhall in the centre of London. One might not think that that scheme would be caught up, but there are two grace and favour flats in the Guildhall, so the whole thing got stuck in the BSR and was delayed by over six months—all they were doing was replacing chillers on the roof and some mechanical and electrical equipment. Had those two flats not been there, the scheme would have been rushed through and we would have seen one of the great feats of engineering in our city renewed and improved.

I am hearing some worrying things, which I have raised with the Minister, about a trend in London for developers to seek to develop hotels that, once built, are flipped into long-term rents, avoiding the BSR. There is now a grey market of people finding ways of avoiding going through the BSR, including by building alleged hotels that then become rental accommodation under long-term leases.

I do not want my contribution to be only negative. I welcome the reforms, and particularly today’s announcements: the recruitment drive, the new BSR innovation unit and the new leadership, which I think will make a big difference. However, I have to ask the Minister why the industry does not feel like it is seeing the benefits. Is it because that is not enough, or because the Government have been poor at communicating what we are doing to fix this mess? I encourage the Minister to do more to talk about the things that we are changing, because we also need to change the industry culture of talking ourselves down and talking only about the issues that we face.

I started my career 20 years ago in the construction sector as a civil engineer. I am fortunate to chair the all-party parliamentary groups for excellence in the built environment and on infrastructure and to be Labour’s construction champion. On Monday, I put out a LinkedIn post saying that my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North had secured this debate and that we would like views from industry. Generally, people have welcomed what has happened. There are lots of different proposals for how we could fix this: improving the way that fast-track lanes work; a ratings system for developers; digitising the process; competitive pay, as my hon. Friend said; and even a pre-application process so that developers can engage early to address the issues, as we do in the planning process. I encourage the BSR to consider private sector partnerships to build capacity, because I do not believe that we can recruit quickly enough to deal with the problem.

From what I have heard, the fundamental thing that makes a difference to delivery—whether it is in projects or something like the BSR—is culture. We have heard about a “computer says no” approach and a binary blame culture. The BSR does not believe that developers are trying to do the right thing and is bureaucratic and combative. I have heard that 70% of submissions are returned to developers on their first submission. The majority of those returns are not because of safety concerns, but because of documentation errors. That is not what we want the regulator to do. We want it to focus on safety, not ticking boxes. The regulator should be a problem solver, it should be collaborative, and it should help us to deliver brilliant, affordable, safe homes.

When I joined the industry 20 years ago, people talked about Latham and Egan, and about trust, teamwork and collaboration being central to how we deliver things in the sector. Twenty-five years later, that should still be the case. The Construction Leadership Council, co-chaired by my former boss Mark Reynolds of Mace, has done some brilliant work on that, for which I commend it thoroughly.

I end by encouraging the Minister to challenge her officials on the culture that they are creating. It has to be a culture that says, “Yes, let’s do it together,” rather than, “No, come back and try again.” I have a number of questions for the Minister. The BSR has said that it will clear the backlog by 26 January. Does she feel confident that it can achieve that? The Construction Leadership Council co-chair said in front of a Committee that he believes it will be able to get down to a five-week approval process. How achievable is that? Can the Minister commit to making sure that there are more proactive communications on the issue from her Department so that we can start to deal with the negative sentiment in the market, encourage investors to invest in high-rise and mid-rise schemes, and start building the homes that we need in urban areas?

Can the Minister challenge her officials to make sure they are ready for gateway 3? About three weeks ago, I attended a breakfast where the director of one of the UK’s biggest commercial firms told a room of 50 people, to some quite shocked faces, that she had been considering having a year in their programme to deal with gateway 3 beyond gateway 2, as we see projects now come through. That is a real risk, because we will have buildings finished, but the capital that is tied up in them will not be able to be released through sale or rental. It could really collapse the market.

Finally, there is a suggestion that the new construction regulator could envelop the Building Safety Regulator within its remit. That will need primary legislation. It may well come through in the next couple of years, but knowing now how long things take to get through Parliament, we could be waiting until 2028 or 2029. Can the Minister assure us that if the scope expands and we see a construction regulator whose remit includes construction products and other things, we will not lose the focus on building safety and getting that process going?

I have one more ask of the Minister. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for excellence in the built environment, our next inquiry will be into the Building Safety Regulator, so I hope that she will help us with evidence and support us in engaging with industry and helping the Government to fix the problem.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Can we try harder to stick to five minutes?

15:31

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

I will do my very best, Sir Desmond, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) on securing this important debate. The Building Safety Regulator has the potential to hinder dramatically the Government’s laudable regime of building more homes and more affordable homes. We all remember the horror of Grenfell, and having this entity is probably the right way forward, but there are certain key lessons that are rapidly being learned.

Hon. Members have spoken about some of the specific details, but I fear that the consequences of this issue are even greater than we may imagine. I have been listening to businesses from the property industry, which is my core industry—I started digging trenches in 1983, so I have been in the industry a long time. House builders and investors are now telling me that they are done. They are just not going to bother. We have heard experiences of people allocating a year from completion to occupation. Investors are saying, “We’re not going to bother. We’re going elsewhere.” We have to act faster on this.

There are a couple of key things that we need to consider, including the application of a strange thing called common sense, which, too often among regulators, is sadly not very common. When we have traditional building materials that have stood the test of time for hundreds of years, be it brick or concrete, we could apply common sense to say, “Well, if using those materials, there should be a fast fast-track process.” I question also whether the whole concept of gateway 1 is necessary at all. If a project gets to gateway 2, that covers gateway 1. A developer is not going to spend hundreds of thousands or several millions on a planning application and get on site if they know they are not going to pass gateway 2, so why bother with gateway 1 at all? Numerous other examples have been talked about.

Although there have been changes, we need to monitor those changes very quickly. It may well be that what we need is either an outsourcing or—dare I mention the word—competition. A competitive process or regulator could operate alongside the existing process, so that it does not act as too great a block. If it does, we will suffer the worst of all worlds, one in which those who most need new homes in our cities, particularly affordable homes, suffer the most. As a consequence of well-intentioned—but badly implemented and organised—caution and prevention, they will miss out. The numbers are as bad or worse than people fear, particularly in city centres.

The issue also means that people are just not bothering to develop on brownfield sites—I have a number of them in my constituency—because the costs are too great, and because of the fear of the Building Safety Regulator and of ever-more regulation that may make the situation even worse. There is an enthusiastic pressure on the Minister and the Department to listen to these concerns and respond to them with constructive answers and keep everybody updated. As other hon. Members have said, the Minister should communicate that rapidly to industry participants. She needs to give the industry confidence that it is worth bothering to seek planning and start on site on important new housing projects here in the United Kingdom and help us all to create growth, wealth and more homes.

15:35

[Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) for securing this important debate.

The housing crisis is one of the defining challenges of our generation. We clearly face a series of overlapping problems: a crisis of poor quality and unsafe homes, affordability and now also housing delivery. I hear about the impact of that in Uxbridge and South Ruislip every day at my surgeries and via my inbox. It is clear that this problem is chipping away at our growth potential, health and educational outcomes, and even public confidence in our political system. The Government have rightly set an ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes over the course of this Parliament to address those issues. We must do everything we can and leave no stone unturned in meeting that challenge.

I am concerned that the BSR, in its current form, is now acting as a barrier to delivering new homes at the pace required, particularly taller buildings, which disproportionately affects house building in urban areas such as my west London constituency. As hon. Members have expertly set out already, the BSR requires all prospective high-rise buildings to pass through three stages of approval, and at each stage, developers are seeing significant delays and setbacks.

Applications are routinely spending 25 to 40 weeks at gateway 2, and some developers I have spoken to have even seen applications take over a year, compared with a 12-week target. Approximately 70% of gateway 2 applications were rejected or invalidated, and only seven out of 40 applications at gateway 3—which is supposed to be a post-construction formality—were approved last year.

Some rejections will always be necessary and may be critical to ensure the safety of developments. The Grenfell inquiry revealed systematic safety failures in the construction industry, but we have to get the balance right and the system has to be effective and fair. As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North said, we have to look at safety holistically. Safety is one form of risk and impact, but if we are not remediating homes or building homes, we are not moving people out of damp or mould, homelessness or temporary accommodation, which has immense safety implications for our population.

Over the summer, I wrote to the BSR to raise my concerns about its efficiency. In reply it highlighted a high volume of non-compliant applications. My response is to ask, what is it doing to ensure compliance? The BSR should work collaboratively with the sector. Major developers have cited contradictory communications from the BSR about safety standards, which have been exacerbated by a high turnover of staff and have led to unnecessary delays in projects.

A large developer hoping to build 6,000 homes near my constituency in west London described the issues with the BSR as an “existential” threat to its business, and said that in one current application, the BSR team were not even appointed to work on the application until week 15 of what should be a 12-week process. Those issues are having a significant impact on housing delivery, especially in urban and high-density areas, and we have seen massive falls in new housing starts in London in the first quarter of 2025.

Unpredictable and unreliable regulatory processes weaken the attractiveness of investment in British housing developments, leading to delays in projects progressing and causing costs to spiral. We all know that the construction sector is under serious strain—17% of all insolvencies in May 2025 being construction companies—and that this emergency requires an emergency response.

There are many reasons for the construction sector and housing delivery to be weakening, some of which—such as international issues and construction material costs—are out of the Government’s control, but this reason is not out of their control. It appears that an overly adversarial culture has been allowed to develop between industry and the Government over recent years. Although we must look seriously at who was to blame for the failures that led to the horrific scenes at Grenfell, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader), it is important to work collaboratively to solve those issues.

Markets work best when there is a genuine partnership between industry and the Government, and where builders and regulators work together to achieve shared goals. I am pleased, therefore, that the Government announced plans this summer to start moving forward on those issues with a more collaborative model of regulation, and that they have listened to and acted on industry concerns about the capacity of the BSR by hiring 100 new members of staff. I also welcome the new fast-track process being developed and a number of measures that the Government have taken.

We need up-front guidance about expectations, so that everyone understands what is required and expected. I was a cabinet member for planning in a London borough for seven years, and we would have clear planning guidance documents, a pre-application process to discuss applications, and dialogue about applications—not a yes/no, binary, approve-or-reject approach. The view was that the role of planners and regulators should be to resolve issues, approve sustainable development and ultimately support growth. We now need that approach at the BSR.

The BSR needs to focus on crucial safety issues and avoid mission creep. I have heard stories of prolonged discussions and disagreements over the colour of the paint in internal hallways—clearly, the system has not been working. The BSR can and should play a role in restoring the public’s confidence in construction post Grenfell. It should be a vital safety backstop, but it cannot be allowed to become a roadblock to all development. If the BSR loses the trust of industry, loses us investment as housing stalls, and loses the public’s confidence as they are unable to live in new, safe and affordable homes, that would be a regressive step.

I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North for securing the debate. I hope the Minister will agree that the BSR must be reformed further and faster if we are to meet our target of 1.5 million new homes.

15:41

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I commend the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) for introducing the debate. It is always great to be here to give a local perspective from Northern Ireland.

I commend the Government and the Minister in particular for their commitment to the 1.5 million homes. I hope they can achieve that, but some things have to be in place for it to happen. One of those relates to the Building Safety Regulator. Northern Ireland does not have a building safety regulator equivalent to the one in England, but we are strengthening building safety regulations, which are enforced by local councils across Northern Ireland.

Building regulations in my constituency of Strangford are carried out by Ards and North Down borough council and, to a lesser degree, by Lisburn and Castlereagh city council and by Newry, Mourne and Down district council. My relationship with them has always been positive and helpful. When we bring something to their attention, they do their best to contact the office right away. Local building control enforces health, fire safety, energy and safe accessibility—all the things that I hope the Building Safety Regulator here would do as well.

The safety of derelict buildings is an issue I have mentioned before. Some of the ones in my constituency raise deep concern, and there is a call for building safety officers to step in and do their bit. For example, in the past few years young people have been breaking into a number of derelict two-storey homes and businesses in Court Street in Newtownards, the main town in Strangford. They were using them for under-age drinking and antisocial behaviour—drug smoking and other things. The antisocial behaviour is one thing, but it has been noted that the buildings may not have been safe for people to be in, even prior to their dereliction. In such instances, there is a real need for further consideration to be given to having a building safety regulator, which could support what the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North and others have put forward as the key issue here on the mainland.

The safety of housing has been a key theme in this debate, and I wholeheartedly agree with what has been said, especially as we instinctively think of the likes of Grenfell. The devastation that that caused for so many people is imprinted on our minds forever.

We have a housing crisis across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We have homes that are not deemed safe or habitable for our constituents. Work can be completed through the Building Safety Regulator to enforce the maintenance of homes so that they are safe for people and their families, and in Northern Ireland the local building control will do the same.

Ever mindful of your request to be pithy, Sir Desmond, as you always are, I will conclude. We reflect on lessons learned from past tragedies, including Grenfell. Building safety is our moral responsibility. Everyone should have the right to feel safe and sleep soundly at night, knowing that the homes they are in, as well as their places of work, are safe. While England is the Minister’s jurisdiction, I respectfully request that she looks to commit to ensuring that Northern Ireland follows with similar rules and that building legislation be looked at and, more importantly, improved for everyone.

15:44

[Joe Powell (Kensington and Bayswater) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) on securing this debate.

I start by briefly reminding hon. Members why Britain’s building safety regime needed such radical reform after the Grenfell Tower fire, which took place eight and half years ago in my constituency of Kensington and Bayswater, with 72 people losing their lives in an entirely preventable and foreseeable tragedy. The bereaved, survivors and our community are still waiting for justice. We hope it will come soon.

As the Grenfell Tower inquiry revealed, there were a litany of systematic failures that led to the fire—a failure to learn lessons from previous fires, most notably the Lakanal House fire in 2009; a failure of Conservative Ministers to update approved building regulations; a failure of manufacturers to produce safe cladding; a failure of builders and architects to ensure safe design; and a failure to spot risks on the part of local building control, who signed off an unsafe building. There are many more.

As many Members will know from their own constituencies, this problem stretches far beyond Grenfell. Today, more than 5,500 residential buildings contain dangerous, flammable cladding and fewer than half of mid and high-rise buildings have even begun remedial work. That is up to 1 million people still stuck in unsafe buildings, victims of the building safety crisis that is ruining lives.

Many of those residents have themselves suffered due to the performance of the Building Safety Regulator. Other Members have not yet mentioned that there are almost double the number of major cladding remediation projects awaiting gateway 2 approval than there are new builds. The housing journalist Pete Apps wrote today of a housing association-owned block that has been waiting since November 2023 to install new fire doors.

I welcome the new chair of the Building Safety Regulator, Andy Roe, being so candid last month with the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, of which I was a member up until this week. Mr Roe said:

“if we have not shown very significant change by the end of the calendar year, we run the risk of losing the complete confidence of everyone in the regulatory regime.”

That is why it is so important.

It has been felt in recent months that there has been something of a campaign about the Building Safety Regulator, and some of that campaign is driven by a desire to roll back changes in building safety introduced post Grenfell. I totally reject the false choice between safety and house building. I believe we need a regulator that works. That means being specific about what changes will make the system more predictable and faster, to help deliver on the Government’s housing goals, while ensuring that we do not compromise on safety.

I can assure hon. Members that I have never met anyone involved in campaigning for truth, justice and change for Grenfell who does not want to see this Government tackling this country’s housing crisis, including by increasing the supply of social and affordable homes that would get children out of temporary accommodation in constituencies like mine, which has some of the worst housing inequality in the country.

The question for me is not whether the BSR should exist, but how it can improve. I welcome its improvement in transparency. We can now get a breakdown of the reasons behind the delays.

We have already heard some really constructive suggestions. They include: hiring more registered building inspectors centrally, given that 27% of the backlog is due to a lack of registered building inspectors being able to get on to projects; engaging in predictable pre-application dialogue; having clearer guidelines for submissions; moving away from a staffing project model that relies on ad hoc multidisciplinary teams that take too long to form, which were described to our Committee as “dysfunctional” by Mr Roe; and perhaps even considering whether more minor improvement works, which are the majority of projects in the BSR, could be dealt with outside the scope of the full gateway process, to keep the BSR focused on the higher risk projects.

I welcome the Government’s decision to unlock the building safety fund to social housing providers, as well as the £39 billion for the affordable homes programme, the remediation action plan to devolve responsibility down to local level, so that we get that building-by-building conversation on fixing the cladding crisis, and the construction products regulation process. Those are all positive steps.

In closing, like other colleagues, I ask the Minister how much she is able to keep track of the hiring process for the 100 new staff, including the 15 new inspectors, who Andy Roe told us would be in place by the end of September. How do we deal with the skills shortage? What conversations is she having with the Department for Education to co-ordinate the construction skills package announced several months ago? Will that include the types of skills that we need for the BSR? Will the BSR moving under the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government deliver the additional transparency and accountability that we need on performance? I hope this debate can contribute to a better BSR that can tackle the building safety crisis and the housing crisis together.

15:50

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

It is a pleasure as always to serve under you, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Members for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) on securing this important debate.

Eight years ago, London watched on in helpless horror as Grenfell Tower burned. Some 72 lives were lost, families were decimated and a community was changed forever. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that this was by no means a natural disaster; it was the direct result of a failed system that was allowed to prioritise cheap, flammable cladding over people’s lives.

Almost a decade on, that system is still failing. Other major fires have burned on and seared themselves into our memory. In 2019, Richmond House in Worcester Park in my constituency burned to the ground, and tomorrow I will visit the Hampton estate, where the rebuilt Richmond House stands. In August last year, a building on Freshwater Road in Dagenham caught alight just days before the final Grenfell report was published. In July this year, we watched on as a major fire ripped through a 17-storey complex in Walworth. Those are just a few examples, but there are many more.

Londoners are on edge every time they see a breaking news story about a building fire. They worry that another terrible tragedy is unfolding—another awful fire that will uproot lives and impose a terrible toll on communities. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners do not have confidence that they are safe and that they can sleep easy at night in their own homes. They live with cladding that hugs their home, keeping them warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but that threatens to become a towering inferno, leaving residents reliant on waking watches and, too often, faulty fire alarms. For too long, developers have been getting away with rolling the dice with people’s lives.

When the Building Safety Regulator was established through the Building Safety Act 2022, people living in these unsafe high rises were promised action by the previous Government, but instead of accelerating remediation the BSR has become one of the biggest barriers to removing dangerous cladding from buildings. Since the BSR came into force in 2023, construction projects have been delayed, costs have spiralled and thousands of residents remain trapped in unsafe homes. One of the reasons for that is that the BSR approval process is weighed down by complex bureaucracy.

Cladding remedial works to high-risk buildings cannot begin until the regulator has signed off the scope of the works. Officially, approval should take eight weeks for existing buildings and 12 weeks for new projects; in reality, cladding remediation applications are routinely taking more than 30 weeks and sometimes more than 40 weeks. We have heard even longer waits reported by Members in this Chamber.

The communication from the regulator has been equally inadequate. Developers and housing associations report one-way communication and applications disappearing into the void. When a response finally comes, a high proportion of applications are rejected at the validation stage. That cannot just be labelled as administrative lag; it means months of avoidable risk for thousands of people.

In many ways, the regulation is currently manifesting as the worst of both worlds, standing in the way of not just progress in remediating the existing properties, but building the next generation of safe, affordable homes that we need to end the housing crisis. The situation is not helped by the fact that there is a mismatch between the Building Safety Act’s definition of building safety risks and the approach to identifying defects under the PAS 9980 fire safety standard. That is quite clearly a lower standard that fails to take action on major fire safety risks and does little to nothing to bring down extortionate insurance premiums.

The Liberal Democrats are clear that the standards for remediation under PAS 9980 should match the statutory standards in the Building Safety Act, so that there is a clear rulebook for everyone. If the Government want applications to the BSR to be faster, they must ensure that those submitting them are equipped with all the facts and given clarity about what is required to meet the right standards, and that the process for approving those applications is as fast as it is rigorous.

Those two vital aspects of solving our housing and safety crisis—speed and accuracy—need not exist in tension; for the BSR to be effective, it must be more comprehensive. Limiting its scope to buildings over 11 metres tall is narrowing its ability to properly scrutinise and facilitate works on many other vulnerable apartment buildings. Indeed, Richmond House, which I mentioned earlier, would not have fallen under its remit, despite the fact that it housed 23 flats across four storeys. I invite the Minister to outline what plans—if any—exist to bring those standards together, facilitate faster processing of applications for works, and extend coverage and support to those in buildings less than 11 metres tall.

What compounds this crisis in perhaps the most nefarious way is the impact it is having on leaseholders, too many of whom are still paying out of their own pockets for dangerous construction and regulatory neglect. They are sent eye-watering bills, living in fear of the next service charge. They are treated as an afterthought in a housing system that increasingly seems rigged in favour of developers. The Liberal Democrats will not accept a housing market in which ordinary people are left powerless while corporations walk away scot-free, and we are concerned that the building safety levy that the Government have proposed will not provide sufficient funding for all required remediations. It makes no sense whatsoever for the BSL to exclude properties under 11 metres, but that is what the Government are pushing ahead with.

There must be a thorough and funded plan to assist leaseholders in properties under 11 metres to make their properties safe to live in. The Government should be taking swift and serious action to ensure that all leaseholders, including those currently excluded from the BSL, are protected from remediation costs in defective blocks with safety risks, as defined in the 2022 Act. I hope that the Minister can shed some light on whether the Government are considering taking those further steps, because leaseholders—not just in London, but across the country—are watching, and will be hoping not to be let down once again.

None of this should detract from the need to build the next generation of green, affordable and safe homes. I reject the implication we sometimes hear that there is some inherent tension between those objectives. If we want to truly solve the housing crisis in this country with a renaissance of sensible and community-driven house building, we have to recognise the defects in the existing system upon which we are layering new infrastructure. Two things can be true at once—that allowing safety standards to become a barrier to house building will damage our long-term economic security, and that accelerating new building without rigorous safety standards and proper accountability for developers will damage our physical security.

There are those who say that only a small fraction of new build units are defective, but I remind them that the fraction will account for a much larger overall number of units as we grow that stock. We can and must do both. A sensible, progressive, interventionist Government would recognise that their purpose is exactly that— not just to regulate the market, but to play an active role in it, discouraging cowboys and faceless, careless developers with rules, standards and real, comprehensive enforcement.

In fact, any Government worth their salt would see this issue in its wider context: a housing market that is fundamentally broken, not just by years of inaction on house building or by the great council housing sell-off, but by decades—maybe even centuries—of lopsided relationships between leaseholders and landowners. If we are really to put the power back into people’s hands and reconcile the two dreams of housing that have dominated in this country over the past century—the right-wing dream of democracy in which everyone has an ownership stake, and the left-wing dream of a nation in which everyone’s right to shelter is guaranteed, no matter their income—we need to end the broken leasehold system altogether, both for owners and for renters.

I invite the Minister to tell us why the Government have failed to commit, as the Liberal Democrats did at our recent conference, to ending that lopsided relationship by giving leaseholders new powers and rights to take collective ownership. Why have they not committed to removing dangerous cladding from all buildings, while ensuring that leaseholders do not have to pay a penny towards that removal—as is only right, because of the regulatory failure that enabled it? Why have they not committed to holding developers to the highest possible standards and introducing tougher oversight of building inspectors, and not just to capping unreasonable service and estate management charges, but to abolishing ground rents on all existing leases?

That is the radical but necessary action that we must take, and actions such as these, which actually fix issues that our constituents face, are how we defeat the new populists on the right and the left who offer nothing more than simple slogans and catchy TikToks. It is up to the Government to respond to our calls and deliver the necessary changes.

15:59

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond, and to take part in this debate on the building safety regulator. I thank the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) for securing this debate and for their opening speeches, both of which I thought were extremely reasonable and set the tone for what has been a largely reasonable debate in which there is much common ground.

It is a primary duty of any Government to ensure that everyone has a safe and high-quality home to live in. Progress has been made in recent years to ensure the nation’s housing stock, with the share of non-decent and unsafe homes witnessing a decline in the last decade. Official statistics from the National Centre for Social Research, funded by the Government, show that under the last Government the prevalence of non-decent homes fell from 17% in 2019 to 15% in 2023, with falls across every tenure. The focus of this debate is the building safety regulator and its performance since being established by the last Government.

Through the Building Safety Act, the BSR was created with the intention of regulating higher-risk buildings, raising the safety standards of all buildings, and helping professionals working in the sector. It was established in good faith, with sensible aims that any Government would agree were needed at the time; and, pertinently, as I think every speaker has referred to this afternoon, it was done in the light of the tragic loss of 72 lives in the appalling Grenfell Tower fire. As a former chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, I was taken to Grenfell Tower by the London Fire Brigade a week after the fire. I went to the top of the building and saw at first hand the devastation that had been wreaked there and the consequences of years of inadequate building safety control, so I believe the motivations behind the creation of the BSR were entirely understandable.

However, there is simply no point in denying that the BSR is not working today as it was originally intended. The truth is that it is proving to be a major additional contributor to a malaise that Britain has been suffering from pretty much since the turn of the millennium. Put simply, we struggle to build. Britain is now constrained within a self-imposed straitjacket of over-zealous red tape, which prevents much-needed development while at the same time causing absurd outcomes such as £100 million bat sanctuaries.

The context of this debate is worth noting. As we know, the Government have ambitious targets for housing delivery, having insisted that they will build 1.5 million new homes by the end of this Parliament; but with at least 25% of this Parliament now behind us, they are miles behind schedule, and barely a third of what should have been built by now is actually completed. The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed), has publicly said that his job should be on the line over whether or not he meets the target. Unfortunately for him, nobody believes that this Government will meet their housing target in just one Parliament: not the Office for Budget Responsibility, not Savills, not the Home Builders Federation, not Professor Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics and not the National Federation of Builders—the list goes on and on.

In London the situation is particularly dire, not least because of some of the policies in the Mayor of London’s London plan. A further problem coming down the line is the possibility of the Government’s making changes to the landfill tax. At present, potentially toxic landfill is taxed at £126.15 per tonne, whereas harmless inert waste such as soil or concrete is taxed at £4.05 per tonne, and nothing at all if it is used to fill up former quarries. However, there are strong rumours circulating that the Government are thinking of abolishing the quarry exemption and switching all landfill up to the higher rate. Building industry experts have estimated that that rise, which is in excess of 3,000%, will add up to £28,000 to the construction cost per home. That is especially an issue in London, where the high proportion of apartment buildings generates much more landfill than elsewhere.

The impact of such a change on the construction industry is obvious. As inflation sits stubbornly at nearly 4%, twice the target level, alongside anaemic growth and increased costs to the industry, including materials and fuel, additional costs to the building trade are stacking up.

It is in that context that we need to consider the performance of the building safety regulator. The BSR is not only moving too slowly to fulfil its purpose, but wielding the axe to too many of the applications crossing its desk. As the hon. Member for Northampton South said, the Building Safety Regulator rejects about 70% of applications to begin construction, compared with roughly 10% to 15% of applications that get rejected in the wider British planning system.

Something is very clearly wrong here. When 150 high- rise residential construction projects are delayed across the UK because of the BSR, when schemes are delayed 38 weeks longer than the target time for approval, and when 60% of affected schemes are in London, the city with the highest need and the greatest demand, it is clear that we must work together to realise a better future for the BSR and to unchain the industry from some of the restraints it currently wears.

The Building Safety Regulator is all too often a handbrake on development, rather than an accelerator of safe and effective development. I welcome the Minister to her place in her first Westminster Hall debate, and I know she will be eager to tell us about the Government’s attempts to reform the BSR and solve this issue in June earlier this year. On the face of it, increasing the BSR’s headcount could be a positive move, but only if the staff brought in have the requisite technical expertise in building and fire safety and are thus able to accelerate the planning process. By simply increasing the BSR’s capacity, the Government have not yet been able, as was promised in an MHCLG press release,

“to enhance the review of newbuild applications, unblock delays and boost sector confidence”,

because it has not solved the core issue: the number of application rejections.

As the British Property Federation has argued, improved dialogue with applicants and more guidance on the BSR application process would go a long way to speeding things up by vastly increasing the likelihood that applications are right first time, rather than their having to be revised after being rejected. In the age of artificial intelligence, mandating machine-readable submissions and building an electronic file management system that ingests structured data would be immeasurably useful, enabling the use of commercially available AI to triage completeness, flag inconsistencies and vastly speed up the process for both the applicants and the regulator.

As was said earlier—I believe by the hon. Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), but I stand to be corrected—introducing greater transparency around the BSR’s performance is certainly welcome. The new fast-track process seems like a good idea, although it remains to be seen whether it is effective, but clearly more needs to be done.

Reforming the operation of the BSR should not be about making developments less safe. Changes must instead tackle the fundamental problem: being process-focused to the point that we fail to deliver. That is particularly true in places such as London, where it has now become difficult to build anything at all. The existing urban environment lends itself to denser developments, which are inevitably viewed as higher risk under the BSR and therefore face very lengthy delays and huge additional construction costs. Consequently, there is a danger that we risk urban sprawl into the countryside and the destruction of the green belt, with homes being forced into communities with an inability to meet the infrastructure demands of all new residents.

It is important that all sides work constructively, across Government and Opposition, to deliver remediation, building safety and the best outcomes for local communities. This debate has encouraged me that we can work across the House to tackle burdensome regulation in the housing and planning industry, including where the Building Safety Regulator is playing its well-intentioned, but undeniably imperfect role. That requires real and serious focus from the Government, who will have to act far faster than they have done to date. I will listen with interest to what the Minister says.

16:08

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Samantha Dixon)]

I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) for securing this important debate on the performance of the Building Safety Regulator, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell) for so ably setting the context of this debate around the terrible Grenfell disaster. I recognise much of what he and other Members have said. We will make changes where necessary and we are focused on the outcome, which is a country with the safe homes that it needs.

Colleagues will have seen today’s announcement from the Mayor of London and the Secretary of State concerning a package of support for house building in the capital. The package is designed to improve the viability of housing developments in the near term, boosting the number of new homes, including affordable homes, to be delivered in the next few years. This action to accelerate development goes hand in hand with our continuing commitment to make sure that homes are safe.

The regulator plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of residents in high-rise buildings. Since its establishment under the Building Safety Act 2022, it has been central to delivering post-Grenfell reforms and restoring public confidence in the safety of the built environment. I appreciate and acknowledge the concerns raised by industry stakeholders, developers and Members of this House regarding delays, operational challenges and the impact on housing delivery. These are serious issues, and I welcome the opportunity to discuss them openly today.

In June, MHCLG announced its intention to transfer the Building Safety Regulator from the Health and Safety Executive into a new dedicated body under the Department, making it clear where responsibility lies. A statutory instrument to enable the transfer is expected to be laid before Parliament next month. This move will ensure that the BSR provides a dedicated focus for building safety and will strengthen accountability to Ministers and Parliament. Furthermore, it marks an important milestone towards the Government’s commitment to an integrated single construction regulator, as recommended by the Grenfell Tower inquiry.

A dedicated programme team has been established to manage the transition of people and services from the Health and Safety Executive to the new body, ensuring a smooth and orderly transfer without the disruption of the BSR’s ongoing operations. As we heard today, Andy Roe has been appointed non-executive chair of a new board within the Department to take on the functions of the BSR as part of initial steps towards creating a single construction regulator. That is the technical explanation, but put simply, he is chairing the BSR. I have been truly impressed by how hands-on he has been.

Andy, probably more than anyone in this room, understands the necessity of balancing the need for new housing with the safety of those houses. He brings a wealth of experience in safety regulation and leadership from his previous role as commissioner of London Fire Brigade. He is supported by the new chief executive officer for the BSR, Charlie Pugsley, who was also a senior officer in the London Fire Brigade. The new leadership team are already implementing significant operational changes based on their extensive industry experience.

Turning to gateway 2, we recognise that delays are unacceptable, which is why the Government announced these changes to the BSR in June. They are not just personnel changes, but substantial changes that have improved the way the regulator works. As part of the reforms, a new innovation unit is already managing 27 new build applications, consisting of 6,192 housing units. The innovation unit is already demonstrating progress, with the majority of applications currently meeting or bettering the 12-week service level agreement for processing applications. The BSR has also recently announced a new batching process for category A projects. This consolidates the teams used to review applications into one organisation, significantly reducing delays. The BSR has also committed to recruiting 100 new staff by the end of the year to boost its capacity.

Since July 2024, the BSR has met weekly with industry bodies to address gateway challenges and has increased two-way engagement with applicants. We are clear that the conversation must deepen. The BSR also plans to introduce an account manager model, where applications from large developers will be grouped and assigned a dedicated point of contact to ensure that issues are identified at the earliest opportunity. New guidance, developed in partnership with the Construction Leadership Council, has been published to help applicants clearly understand what is needed for a successful submission. The BSR is actively supporting the Construction Leadership Council to publish a further suite of industry guidance—expected around mid-November—on the statutory documents accompanying building control approval applications, staged approvals and gateway 3. The BSR is continually reviewing its guidance to help duty holders understand the legal requirements and how to comply.

My hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) both raised concerns about gateway 3 approvals. Gateway 3 is still new and only a few projects have reached it so far. As more projects reach this stage the backlog should clear, making specialist support more available to the BSR. Class 2 registered building inspectors are now able to handle simpler, high-risk work which frees up class 3 inspectors to focus on new builds and remediation, helping make the best use of available resources.

As of early September, BSR has received 16 gateway 3 applications for new build high-risk buildings, with nine already approved and issued with completion certificates, while seven remain under review. Those figures will grow as more schemes reach completion. Some applications have moved through quickly, demonstrating what a well-prepared submission can achieve. Others have required additional information before assessment could progress. This early experience is helping both developers and the BSR to refine the process, making sure it is consistent, efficient and firmly focused on safety outcomes.

The BSR has previously committed to improving operations by December. To support transparency and accountability, as we have heard, it published performance data on 16 October and will do so monthly to track progress publicly against that commitment. It reported that in August, gateway 2 determinations hit a record 209 across all application types. A total of 152 national new build applications are being progressed—that is 33,670 homes—with the newly established innovation unit handling 27 of these.

Most applications in the innovation unit are meeting or exceeding the 12-week service level agreement for new build applications, and the BSR expects nearly all new build applications to conclude by December, with the final three closing in January 2026.

The first recommendation from phase 2 of the Grenfell Tower inquiry was to create a single construction regulator to tackle complexity and fragmentation in the regulatory system. The Government have already begun implementation, starting with improvements to the BSR and plans to transition it into the new arms-length body. We intend to legislate when parliamentary time allows and will publish a prospectus later this year to set direction.

My colleagues asked a number of questions, in particular regarding skills and salaries. The BSR was designed to draw on industry experience while also managing the known shortage of skilled specialists. However, as the construction sector and partner regulators rely on the same limited pool, this continues to constrain the BSR’s capacity. While offering higher pay might attract talent, it risks destabilising partner organisations by shifting, not solving, the shortage. A long-term workforce strategy, like that under way in the fire service, is needed to build system-wide capacity, and we are working on it with local authorities, the BSR and registered building control approvers to help shape it.

In conclusion, the Government remain firmly committed to a building safety regime that is both robust and proportionate—one that protects residents while enabling the delivery of much-needed homes. We have listened to the concerns and taken decisive steps. We want to improve processes and ensure that they are fit for purpose. The reforms announced earlier this year are designed to address the very issues that have been debated today, and we will work closely with industry, residents and Parliament to ensure that the regulator delivers effectively. I am very grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North and for Northampton South for securing this debate, and I look forward to the continued dialogue ahead.

16:18

[Chris Curtis]

I will be as quick as I can. I welcome the Minister to her place and thank her for her response. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) for bringing their experience from industry and talking about some of the things they believe we need to do to address these problems.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales), who has had experience of homelessness and therefore knows personally the importance of getting this right. Finally, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), who reminds us of the backstory and the tragedy that made it so important for us to set up the Building Safety Regulator and get this right.

My first debate in this House was about building safety, and I talked about my brother, who is one of the brave local firefighters in Milton Keynes. If there were an incident in a high-rise flat, he would be one of the people risking his life to fix it, so it is important that we get building safety right. He will be one of those going into unremediated buildings unless we have a Building Safety Regulator that can act quickly enough to enable remediations, and he will be one of those going into older and unsafe buildings if we cannot move residents into safer buildings because we cannot build them in the first place.

We cannot forget the human cost of getting this wrong. I hope we are not back here in a year’s time still talking about a regulator that is not moving quickly enough and a country that is not building enough homes.

Question put and agreed to. 

Resolved,

That this House has considered the performance of the Building Safety Regulator.

04:20

Sitting adjourned.