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

Darren Paffey Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Peter Fortune]

Q Your experience of being tethered to this hideous situation is so frustrating. When I speak to residents in my constituency who are trapped, they constantly talk about the lack of communications and the unfair and unexplained costs that are being heaped on them. Do you feel like your thoughts, experiences and suggestions have been taken into account in the construction of the Bill?

Giles Grover: Not really, no. Honestly, we have tried so hard to help to show officials the way forward and what they can do to actually improve the situation. I am a residents’ management company director; because of the way that the developer contract has been handled at my building, I have tried to resign, but we cannot resign, because it will then go to the head leaseholder.

At RMCs all over the country, we have volunteers who really want to look after their homes. They are clever, intelligent people and they do the same things that freeholders do, which is to appoint agents, but they are still battling well-resourced developers and well-resourced freeholders and are trying to follow really labyrinthine policies.

There was one building in Sunderland that needed waking watch cost payments and had to put that in place in a few days. MHCLG said to them, “Fill out a building liability order, send that to your freeholder and give them 30 days to respond.” But they needed 20 grand or 30 grand that week—what is going to happen there?

A lot of it is the mentality. We have seen what has happened over the last 20 or 30 years under successive Governments, across industry. We have to put people at the centre of it and forward fund where it is needed, whether for interim measures or non-cladding defects, and then have the Government use their power to recover those funds. That would be the only sensible way forward. Until we get that in place, this crisis is not going to end.

Sophie Bichener: I would add that the Second Reading announcement on the non-qualifying improvement from three to six properties was definitely something that we had been speaking about quite a lot; we felt that had been heard, but it is not protecting all leaseholders, which is what we have said, relentlessly—no leaseholders should be paying for this. Why should one leaseholder be innocent and another have to pay for a building? Although it is welcome, I do not think it went far enough.

I feel that leaseholders are just getting more and more desperate. Giles and I have campaigned on this for 10 years. People are looking for answers and for a way out and, unfortunately, we were not able to go back from the Bill meetings we have had to say, “Yes, this is a little glimmer of hope for everybody.”

There are a few bits in the Bill that will go some way to helping some people; but, as we said at the start, it is not all people. Ten years on from Grenfell, I do not think we should still be wondering, “Will everybody be involved in the help that is coming?”. It should be that everybody has a chance to live in a safe home—if not now, they should know when that will be made safe. At present, there will still be too many people who do not have answers.

Giles Grover: The Government need to understand the number of people who hate their home right now—they are first-time buyers, and they just hate where they live. What is this system that we are living in?

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

Q Part 3 of the Bill deals with building ownership information, which has often been a cause of delay in trying to establish where ownership lies. To what extent do you think what is in the Bill at the moment will unblock some of those delays that a lot of your members, activists and people you work with have experienced?

Giles Grover: It will probably help but, again, it should have been in the Building Safety Act in the first place. Everything should have been effective from 14 February 2022. We were told at that point that freeholders would not be able to sell and pass on their liabilities, but they could; we saw that happen at a number of buildings. It might help to clarify a little bit, but it should have been there a long time ago—and what does that clarity mean? It will just mean that they carry on with this remediation that will leave us in the homes that we are trapped in, which are not fully safe and sellable, or they will force us to pay huge costs as well. Yes, we need to get to that point, but ultimately it is the gaps and issues that we need to address, so that when we get to that point we are not suffering the costs and effects.

[Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)]

Q Sophie, you mentioned the financial incentive to minimise remediation costs as much as possible and broadening the scope to cover more things. Which organisations, including perhaps yours, have you seen make the economic case for broadening the scope of the Bill and ensuring that remediation is done in a much broader sense and that we use the opportunity and this moment that we have?

Sophie Bichener: Do you mean—

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Gibson]

Q But do you think all fire assessors should be part of that?

Alexander Cook: I think fire engineers should be, as they are now. Improvements could always be made in terms of the fire assessors, and that could be done through the Bill, with guidance on clarifying those roles, especially for FRAEWs.

[Darren Paffey]

Q You mentioned a number of the blockers earlier. I do not know whether you were referring to individuals and organisations or processes and so on. I am just wondering what your view is on things like clause 8’s duty to remediate, clause 14’s duty to prepare a remediation compliance plan and clause 29’s duty to co-operate. Would those things, taken together—and with the entire Bill as it currently stands—deal with some of the blockers that you had in mind? Is it about process or is it about “unwilling” and “unco-operative”?

Alexander Cook: There is definitely no “unwilling”. Everyone wants to remediate and they want to get to the same goal. People want to co-operate, but it is not necessarily about co-operating; it is about their response times. When so many parties are involved, maybe changes to the Bill could introduce a stricter turnaround time from responsible entities, and that might introduce acceleration. For us, one of the particular delays and blockers is where you have fire engineers, lawyers and responsible managing agents taking a little bit longer to get through all of those before they actually get a response. When you multiply that by the hundreds of buildings, it soon adds up. The changes to the Bill will help, but I think there is still a way to go.

[Darren Paffey]

Q Do you not think it would be sufficient, as things stand, to have a kind of ultimate set of dates—which, actually, the Secretary of State has already done to some extent? Would you expect there to be almost micromanaged turnaround times for each part of the process? Where is the right balance, in terms of having one end goal that everyone is working to or shorter timeframes that everybody has to comply with, but might be seen as overreach?

Alexander Cook: It could be. A lot of the things that we come up against with lawyers are in terms of how the remedial works contract is drafted. If you think of construction contracts, it would not be unreasonable for there to be definitions of delay. Rather than just having “a reasonable excuse”, which is a bit broad, you could have specifics, and then there could be timeframes related to some of those, which would help to accelerate buildings where the responsible entities are not performing.

[Peter Fortune]

Q How do you think this seemingly interminable planning crisis has affected the wider market, in terms of building costs, delivery or stuffing up the pipeline?

Alexander Cook: I cannot comment widely on the market—that is not my speciality area—but I can say that we have seen that safety is a factor in residents’ requirements, which is completely justified. We have also had experiences in London, as I said earlier, where delays to projects have then affected the supplier demand, in terms of where people are available—what flats, what height, and so on—across the UK. Ultimately, the market has slowed in London, particularly due to the regulator’s decisions that have not allowed us to get on site. With our dedicated team on the remediation side, it has not affected the delivery, as such; if we were able to proceed, we would have.