Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill (Second sitting)

Andrew Cooper Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Lewis Cocking]

Q But do you not see that as a risk? You must have a view on what would happen in those scenarios. Where all those regulators and relevant bodies do not agree, surely someone needs to pick who the buck stops with.

Kate Henderson: We would very much welcome clarity on the regulatory system to ensure that we get clarity on the works that need to happen in a timely way. How that would be worked out is perhaps a question for Government. I do not think I am best placed on that one.

Jaclyn Mangaroo: I agree with that. I think clarity is absolutely key for every provision in the Bill. It is not something that TPI can necessarily comment on, but we need to identify who the final decision maker is.

[Andrew Cooper (Mid Cheshire) (Lab)]

Q Jaclyn, I am interested in what happens when a building owner is liquidated. You are probably aware that the Government have commissioned some work with the Law Commission to reform bona vacantia. That will take a few years, but in the meantime this Bill sets out a possible workable route in terms of appointing a manager. Do you think that goes far enough? Is that a workable way forward?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: Hopefully, issues in those cases will be few and far between, but the backstop and the appointment of a remediation manager is the only way to go. It is important that residents have some certainty and a point of contact in somebody who will be responsible for that. At the moment, yes, I think the Bill does go far enough in those cases.

[Andrew Cooper]

Q Kate, the Government are asking a lot of the social housing sector, and have been for the last few years. I recognise what you say about safety being the top priority, but the Government are calling on you not only to deal with remediation, but to build new homes, ensure they are decent homes to improve the quality of the stock, and dampen mould. Many of your members are engaged in estate regeneration activities.

On the other side, the Government have provided some certainty to the sector through rent convergence, through the 10-year rent settlement, through the social and affordable homes programme and by bringing you in scope of the building safety fund. Do we have the balance right in the resources that are available to the sector from central Government versus what you would expect housing associations to fund directly, either through service charges or through rents paid by tenants?

Kate Henderson: Thank you very much for the question. In the last 18 months, the Government have done a huge amount to rebuild the capacity of the social housing sector—housing associations and councils. Importantly, that has included equal access to building safety funding with an additional £1 billion into the cladding safety scheme. Alongside that, we now have a 10-year rent settlement, rent convergence and the new National Housing Bank. Low-interest loans will hopefully be introduced soon. We also have, of course, the social and affordable homes programme.

The Government have very much listened and engaged and are working constructively with us. We are ambitious, both about ensuring that our existing homes and service provision are of the quality that we would all want and about building many more new homes. All our members are impacted by the building safety crisis, but those less impacted now have more capacity to deliver homes. If grant funding were available, we could deliver tens of thousands more social and affordable homes.

In terms of the balance we have now, we are looking at the overall regulatory landscape. As I say, we support the introduction of the decent homes standard and the implementation of Awaab’s law. We absolutely support and are working very hard on the building safety regulations. But there is a cost to all of this. Our ability to do all those things at once will be down to the individual priorities of organisations. We are meeting quite stringent timelines, which have been set by Government, on things like minimum energy efficiency standards. We support that direction of travel, but there is only so much money in the system.

You mentioned regeneration. We would really welcome more flexibility in the social and affordable homes programme to deliver replacement supply as well as new supply. We are very focused on net additions. I understand that we desperately need more homes, but we do need to invest in places. Similarly, when it comes to investing in building safety measures, I have mentioned the welcome funding that came earlier this year for high-risk buildings under 11 metres. There is not enough money to support those works. If there were more money, based on assessment of the applications that have come into Homes England for the under-11-metre scheme, that would free up the capacity to do more supply. We want to do all those things; our ability to do them at pace is impacted by how much money there is in the system.

[Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)]

Q I will repeat a question I asked this morning: do you think the Bill protects leaseholders from unreasonable increases in service charges?

If I can be cheeky, I have a second question, which should perhaps go to Kate. Do you have sight of your members’ risk registers? If so, how are they flashing up some of the challenges presented in the Bill?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: Much of our written evidence is focused not just on the service charges, but on the unintended consequences. It might fall on residents to fund litigation to pursue the responsible people—the polluter, effectively—to deliver remediation. We want to see greater protection for those.

There is already a lot of law, particularly under the Building Safety Act 2022, around what can be passed through the service charges and what cannot. Building Safety Act costs and service charges have gone up around 50% in the last two years. That is still a very small proportion of those service charge costs, but where residents are not protected at all is for risk mitigation measures, interim measures, fixing internal defects and non-cladding work. There is no funding for that. It is outside the scope of the remediation contract for the developers; it is outside the scope of PAS 9980.

Ultimately, when we speak to our members, mostly residents are picking up the tabs for those interim measures, regardless of whether they are waiting for the cladding to be replaced. Compartmentation, fire stopping and fire doors is a significant issue. We must look at how we fund that and how we protect leaseholders from those rising service charge costs.

The other thing, which came up this morning as well, is higher insurance premiums. We are seeing insurers and lenders price risk not just on cladding, but on those internal defects and on structural defects. We do not just have a cladding crisis; we have a safety and construction quality crisis. That is what we are finding. These buildings are not lasting as long as they should. That is coming home to roost and is landing on leaseholders. They did not cause these problems in the first place, but it is being visited upon them, so one of the things we would like to see is greater protection for those residents.

Part of that solution will be looking at the qualifying and non-qualifying leaseholder protection provisions in the Building Safety Act. We appreciate that the Secretary of State introduced proposals to change some of the rules around that. We would like to see it go altogether. Why, as a leaseholder, should you have to pay for any defect that was not of your making? The process, the regime, is highly complicated. It is very, very difficult for a leaseholder to get involved in the process, and it creates an unstable resource pot to fund the remediation, because even if you have a cap, you only pay 10% of that cap, which means that you could be waiting 10 years until the pot is large enough to undertake those works.

There is a lot that can be done to protect leaseholders from further costs from all this. Good question—thank you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Gibson]

Q I share the extreme concern of the hon. Member for Orpington. Dame Judith made it clear that other countries have been better at clarity than we have been. I know that the Minister cares about this issue enormously and wants to get it right, so I am slightly confused. It is absolutely clear, nine years later, that there is a complete lack of clarity in the UK on which agency has the final control.

We have not had accountable assessors, so we can have an assessment that decides that a building is tolerable but actually that tolerable level, as decided by an assessor, turns out not to meet the standard of building regulations, even at the time of construction. Why are we surprised that people cannot then sell their houses, get mortgages, or get insurance? We should not be. We must recognise that if we are going to put in a new piece of legislation, which will add to the amount of legislation that a leaseholder must look at, it has to be watertight—forgive the expression. The point has been raised today and it still concerns me: there is a lack of clarity about where—with which agency—the buck actually stops. A leaseholder needs to know where to go at the end. Who is really, finally responsible and accountable?

We also must make sure that the assessors who make the decisions can be held accountable, and that they have an ethical code in place to make sure that they cannot be manipulated by their employer. We should make sure that we make those points really clear during scrutiny of the Bill. That will make a difference to our leaseholders, who have waited so long for this legislation. I want to make sure that the Committee irons out those points over the next few weeks.

Florence Eshalomi: I totally hear that and accept it. To be honest, no one Bill can fix this mess. We are trying to make sure that leaseholders who have invested in good faith are not burdened with all the costs, hence the Bill introduces the charge for construction product manufacturers, which is important. To date, construction product manufacturers have not played their part in fixing the mess they created.

We are trying to strike the right balance. We have heard from the National Housing Federation and the LGA. If colleagues from the LGA, and other councillors, were here they would highlight the difficulties that they have in bringing forward new development. I see that acutely in my constituency, where—as the Committee knows—the Government introduced measures to change housing targets, which is having an impact.

A more prescriptive, blanket approach could lead to more extensive remediation, but will it make residents safe? Will it achieve the ultimate goal? How can we have the least disruption to residents? Some residents may have to leave their homes, and some will have additional costs—we must make sure those costs are recouped—and ultimately slower remediation. How do we make sure that we give more power and support to BSR to get the buildings that have been identified remediated?

We must be honest: although the issues in New Zealand are not similar to those here, there are areas where we can definitely learn. I will task officials to look a bit closer at that, and see if there is anything in the Bill that we can tweak during its passage. It is about being open, honest and receptive to those challenges, about making sure that we are being challenged and ultimately about trying to get something right as we progress the Bill.

[Andrew Cooper]

Q This afternoon there has been some discussion about the risk of remediation costs being passed on to residents through service charges. Clauses 105 and 106 are intended to protect leaseholders from costs being transferred through the service charge. Today, Minister Pennycook announced measures to provide greater transparency on what service charges cover. Weighed against the evidence we heard today, does the Bill go far enough in providing that protection, or is further change is needed?

[Florence Eshalomi]

Thank you for that; it is really important. I am not sure if all colleagues are aware of the new highlights from Minister Pennycook today in terms of charges being passed on to leaseholders. It is allowing leaseholders to interrogate and ask their building freeholders for more information around the insurance costs. It is allowing leaseholders to challenge some of those costs as they come forward. These are all measures we hope will help in some cases where leaseholders have been asked to pay more but in essence get a much poorer service.

Separate to that is the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, which I know you have campaigned on for a very long time, Mr Cooper. We are hoping it will come back to the House before the end of the year. The Prime Minister committed to that in PMQs yesterday. That will help leaseholders in terms of challenging unfair ground rents, where we are seeing many leaseholders pay in excess of £1,000 for nothing.

There are big issues around the service charge. Some leaseholders actually want to get rid of their managing agents, so the right to manage is another area being covered. We are looking at a whole range of packages to help leaseholders who have ultimately made that commitment to a home, because for many of them that dream has turned into a nightmare.

I hope, as the Bill progresses, the packages in it, especially some of the packages for non-qualifying leaseholders and packages for buildings under 11 metres, will help alleviate some of the cost of living pressures that many leaseholders up and down the country are facing.

[Andrew Cooper]

Thank you, Minister. I was going to ask you about the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, but you got ahead of me.

[Bob Blackman]

Q One of the defences the building industry uses is to say, “When we built these buildings, we got them signed off, and the regulations in place at the time were the ones that should be in situ, so why should we pay for the remediation?” I have always thought that the insurance companies that insured these builders in the first place should be the ones funding this remediation, but they seem to have got off over the years—not completely scot-free, but with very little challenge to them. Are you minded, within the Bill, to make sure that the insurance industry pays its fair share of this remediation? I am not clear that, within the Bill as it stands, that is the case.

Florence Eshalomi: I am happy to take that away, look at it and come back to the Member.