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

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

Q43 Ms Henderson, welcome; it is nice to see you again. What progress do you think housing associations have made in remediating their stock and removing flammable cladding?

Kate Henderson: First, thank you for inviting the National Housing Federation to give evidence to the Committee. The safety of residents is our No. 1 priority, and we welcome the Bill and its intention. I also acknowledge and pay tribute to the work of Grenfell United; we are here because of the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower, where 72 people lost their lives.

We are absolutely committed to accelerating the pace of remediation in the social housing sector. There was no funding for social housing remediation until the spending review in 2025. Social housing providers were paying for remediation themselves, and that took money away from major refurbishments and new supply. Since the very welcome access was granted to the cladding safety scheme, we have been able to accelerate the pace of remediation, and we expect more properties to come forward.

We can supply the facts and figures on how many properties we have remediated self-funded and how many are being remediated with Government funding to the Committee. I have the details here, but I am not sure that anyone wants me to go through the facts and figures now.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q You touched on the topic of my second question, which is about the impact that having to remediate cladding has had on the ability of housing associations to deliver new housing stock. Has it been a marginal or massive impact? If you have facts and figures on that, they would be welcome.

Kate Henderson: Not having funding for remediation has undoubtedly taken huge capacity out of the social housing sector. Since the fire, we have been working very hard to remediate buildings, but the pace of that, without Government funding, was much slower than we would have liked. Last year’s funding has changed this, but it is not just about money; it is also about the system around it. It is about the capacity of the Building Safety Regulator, and not just external walls but internal defects, and the system of assurance and having enough technical competency to support us in that work.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q You talked about the capacity of the Building Safety Regulator, and I think you also mentioned availability of sufficiently qualified people to do the work. What are your thoughts on those issues?

Kate Henderson: The new leadership of the Building Safety Regulator has undoubtedly improved things, but up until the last 18 months, when gateway 2 timeframes have started to improve, it has been very slow. It is really important that the Building Safety Regulator and the forthcoming single construction regulator are adequately resourced by Government to deliver at scale and pace. In the wider construction sector, there is huge upskilling to do to ensure we have the expertise to do fire risk assessments of external walls—FRAEWs—and get consistency of implementation of methodology with PAS 9980,. We are working with lots of people and contractors in the process, but we need many more.

In addition to needing more people with expertise, we need consistency, which I know came up in evidence this morning. At the moment, we are hearing from our members that PAS 9980 is subjective, and different assessors will come up with different decisions. You can have two assessors look at the same property; one will say it requires remediation and one will say it does not. The proposal for a mandatory audit system with Homes England is very welcome. We would like a feedback loop to be built into that system so that any poor practice can be identified and challenged and any patterns of inconsistencies can be flagged. Then, that feedback can be taken back into account in any future updates of PAS 9980.

[The Chair]

Q Did you want to briefly add anything on those questions, Ms Mangaroo?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: I agree with a lot of what you said, Kate, particularly around the upskilling and resource elements. What we and our members see is that some of the delays start much earlier in the gateway 2 process. The real problem, which this Bill, with some amendments, will hopefully tackle, is where buildings are completely stalled from the beginning—where scope of works cannot be agreed and, like Kate said, where FRAEWs differ. Standardisation and auditing of FRAEWs will definitely help, as long as that is a speedy process. I understand that we are still waiting on regulation of the fire risk assessor profession.

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[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from End Our Cladding Scandal. We have until 3 pm for this panel. Could the witnesses briefly identify themselves?

Giles Grover: Hi, I am Giles Grover. I am the co-lead of End Our Cladding Scandal. I am a resident and leaseholder, and an RMC director and principal accountable person. I have been trapped and involved in this crisis since August 2017, and I still have a home that is not safe.

Sophie Bichener: I am Sophie Bichener, a campaigner for End Our Cladding Scandal and an impacted leaseholder. My building has been through one round of remediation. It was found to be unsafe the month after the Grenfell tragedy, and we are still working through trying to fully remediate it. Giles and I support leaseholders up and down the country who are like us: trapped in buildings that are unremediated and unsafe.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Welcome, both of you. When the Bill was published about a month ago, your website stated that you do not support the Bill in its current form and do not think it goes far enough. Why do you feel that, and what would have to happen to the Bill for you to change your position?

Giles Grover: Essentially, improving a failed system is not the same as introducing one that is capable of fixing this crisis once and for all. We have been dealing with this for nine years, and particularly for the last two years we have been pointing out all these issues—the gaps in protection, the non-cladding defects that keep being mentioned and what needs to be done to actually end this crisis—but we have not really seen any movement.

The Bill is still focused on external walls. It puts a lot of strain on volunteer directors and rules out developers from a legal duty to remediate, and it still focuses on cladding. It does not really deal with all the issues we have seen for the last seven, eight or nine years. As far as we are concerned, it just addresses a lot of the gaps and mistakes from the Building Safety Act—the ineffective protections and the fact that people are just getting pushed from pillar to post. This Bill will make things a heck of a lot more complicated for people, and it will not deliver the certainty we need to actually end this crisis.

Sophie Bichener: We consider a lot of people and a lot of different situations. When we saw the Bill, we were able to stress-test it through lots of different buildings and leaseholders. There is not likely to be a silver bullet that fixes every single scenario, but this Bill leaves too many gaps in our minds, as Giles said, with the non-cladding defects and non-qualifying leaseholders, and it places an unfair burden on RMC buildings and leaves leaseholders with sky-high interim costs. While we wait for these laws to play out and for buildings to be remediated, many leaseholders are still struggling with the interim costs and unaffordable service charges.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Mr Grover, you say that it would make things a hell of a lot more complicated for people. Can you elaborate on that?

Giles Grover: I do not know how far back to go in terms of all the legislation that is already out there, but we can start with the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, and there is the Fire Safety Act 2021, which clarifies that, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, the Building Safety Act 2022 and the changes to it with leasehold reform—and now we have another Bill. We have all these different laws that have been put in place, a heck of a lot of different interpretations of risk and different funding schemes. That will need regulators all over the place—central regulators, local regulators, MHCLG regulators. You have the developer contract, the building safety regulator, the recovery strategy unit and local remediation acceleration plans as well.

This is just adding a layer of complexity. It is not actually giving us what we need. We have some people in some buildings at some heights being protected from the costs of some defects. Rather than fixing that and addressing those gaps, we are focusing on cladding and not thinking about making a building fully safe. We have a number of buildings where the cladding remediation cannot even start because of structural issues because of non-cladding defects. It is not actually doing anything for the people, residents, leaseholders and shared owners who are the victims of the crisis—the only innocent ones.

Successive Governments have caused this crisis, along with the construction industry and the bad practice it has enabled. We still find this game of everyone blaming everyone else and saying, “They should do the right thing.” Residents and leaseholders are trapped facing attritional battles, and RMCs and RTMs are trying to get answers, and you just go round in circles. Nothing in this Bill is really going to do much to help that, whether it is legislation or delivery. Delivery needs to be key and really focused on. This just feels like more legislation—push it out, and see how it has gone in five years. It will not help people at all.

[Gareth Bacon]

I am sorry, because that is fascinating and I could talk to you for a long time, but unfortunately other colleagues need to come in.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q It is good to see you again, Giles and Sophie; thank you for meeting me previously. Obviously, as you are aware, this Bill deliberately focuses on the unsafe external wall cladding, following on from the Grenfell inquiry, which found that the external walls were the principal reasons for the fire. One thing you have all stated is that you wanted the Government to come in where the responsible entity had failed in terms of remediation. Do you feel that the remediation backstop, which will in essence enable a public body to come in and get the work done, will make a difference for residents?

Giles Grover: Going back to the basics and the framing of the question, cladding was the reason for the fire spreading, but we must also look at the insulation that was part of the cladding, the stay-put policy, the defective smoke vents and the defective fire doors. That is not being fixed in one go immediately. That is the first problem with this.

We have always called for compulsory purchase orders. Bob Blackman was on the Housing Committee in 2020 that called for compulsory purchase orders, if the pace was not quick enough. The Government response was, “Okay, we might consider those.” It is long overdue, and a lot of this is now putting it on a statutory footing, but how long will it take to take effect? If you look at the Bill’s impact assessment, it is about 180 buildings and 12,000 residents, so it is not real material change, the change we were promised by Labour. It is probably good, but it should have been there a while ago. We need a heck of a lot more.

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[The Chair]

Q We now hear oral evidence from Britain Remade and the Centre for Policy Studies. We have until 3.30 pm for this panel. Will the witnesses briefly introduce themselves?

Sam Dumitriu: I am Sam Dumitriu, the head of policy at Britain Remade.

Ben Hopkinson: I am Ben Hopkinson, the head of housing and infrastructure at the Centre for Policy Studies.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Good afternoon, gentlemen; it is good to see you both. Nine years on from Grenfell, we still have buildings in this country with cladding on them. As we have just heard—this was equally important at Grenfell—we also have buildings with internal fire problems. I understand why the Government are focusing on cladding, but it is not the only issue. What are the main bottlenecks? Why do we still have buildings with cladding on them nearly a decade after Grenfell?

Ben Hopkinson: There are a couple of things. There is inherently a capacity issue with the number of skilled fire inspectors. There is also a reasonable lens of professional debate within fire risk assessments. If you have a building owner and a developer, there might be reasonable professional debates over what the tolerable risks are, and that takes time. We also have to remember the sheer scope and scale of the cladding issue. I think there are 4,000 or 5,000 affected buildings across the country, and that obviously takes time. We have seen good progress being made. I suspect that, with the Bill, we will come quite close to ending it as a problem in the next few years.

Sam Dumitriu: One important thing to remember is that a lot of these important building safety projects will often themselves face bottlenecks in terms of getting approval and sign-off from the Building Safety Regulator. One of the issues that we have come across as an organisation is that many things are going through the Building Safety Regulator that probably should not be, which is leading to safety-critical issues being held up in a queue as a result.

I will give one example. We spoke to a gentleman living in Maida Vale who had a window that needed replacing. However, he was told—I think he had pretty good legal advice on this—that, in order to replace that window, he would have to get sign-off from the Building Safety Regulator. In theory, there are meant to be competent person schemes that people can go to, but, in practice, he went to three separate competent person schemes and none were willing to sign off on the works. He suspects that a lot of people are doing that kind of work behind the scenes and not going through the normal routes, but if you try to follow the rules, they seem to imply that that would be something you would need to submit. He can correct me if I am wrong, but Ben wrote about a separate case involving—I think it was a bathroom renovation, was it?

Ben Hopkinson: Yes, it was just a flat refurbishment, and that took at least nine months and several thousand pounds to go through the Building Safety Regulator. That raises questions: should restoring a flat’s kitchen, combined with installing new safety doors within the flat, really be an issue that takes nine months to get sign-off? In the first instance, should it even be something for the BSR to look at when there are a lot of other pressing commitments on its time?

[Gareth Bacon]

To take that example, why did it end up on the desk of the Building Safety Regulator? Was it because it insisted on that, or because people thought, “Oh crikey, I don’t want to sign this off; I’ll give it to the regulator”?

Sam Dumitriu: There are two potentially different issues between the two cases we have mentioned. In the case that I mentioned, the legislation was designed, in theory, so that competent person schemes could take these issues on, and would be happy to do that. Obviously, if you are a window fitter or whatever, you have an incentive to be quick on these things if you want more windows replaced. I think the issue was that a number of them do not believe the balance of legal risk to be right, so are concerned about liability or insurance.

Getting to the bottom of this issue has been a challenge, but we do know that the competent person schemes are not actually doing the job that they were intended to do. Work is therefore being passed to the Building Safety Regulator, which is in turn creating a backlog where projects that we really care about and are important to get done for safety reasons are being held up, stuck behind them in the queue.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q We had witnesses from the Building Safety Regulator in front of us this morning, and they acknowledged that it had teething problems at the beginning, but stated that it was getting better and they felt that things were going much more smoothly now. Is that a perspective that you would endorse?

Sam Dumitriu: When I have spoken to developers recently, they have suggested that, although the wait times for the Building Safety Regulator have dropped, part of that is because a bit of backlog is being cleared while not much is coming in. We know there has been a big slowdown in taller buildings, particularly in London, in part because other building safety regulations, such as the second staircase rule, have created new challenges around viability.

The question is: the Building Safety Regulator might be doing better now, but would it still be if it was getting the kind of throughput we would hope for, if the Government are to hit their 1.5 million homes target, for instance?

[Gareth Bacon]

Q A final question from me, because other colleagues do need to come in. It is probably fair to say that there is a certain level of overlapping confusion about who the regulator is in the event of remediation, because we have local authorities, fire risk authorities and the Building Safety Regulator.

A question posed by one of my colleagues, who is not here this afternoon, is: in the event that they do not agree over who should be the lead regulator on something, who should hold the ring? Who should be the organisation that actually makes things happen? Who has the coercive power, if I can put it that way? Do you have a view as to who that should be, and do you think the Bill establishes that?

Ben Hopkinson: I am well aware that the Bill contains a duty to co-operate between the three different regulators you described; it is less clear to me whether it has the means to resolve differences between them. A duty to co-operate is one thing, but actually doing so and moving forward is another. I think we have seen that happen where different regulators overlap.

I know the Fingleton review on nuclear was very clear that there are concerns about whose obligation it is to decide, and that there is a culture of excessive caution in which you never want to be the one who actually makes the decision. On who the final regulator ought to be, I do not have a particularly strong view, whether it is local authorities or the BSR. I just think it should be specified whose decision it actually is. You would then build up some level of responsibility there, rather than having a slight fudge of, “Well, why don’t we all co-operate?”

Sam Dumitriu: I agree. In theory, the Building Safety Regulator should have access to the best expertise on this; however, it also has capacity challenges. One thing that I think has been underappreciated in the move from local authorities doing building control to the Building Safety Regulator is that local authorities, with housing targets and legal obligations, have an incentive to process things faster.

It is not just that it is their job; we know that many public bodies, even when they are given statutory targets to meet a certain deadline, do not necessarily decide things in that time. Local authorities at least have some sort of pressure from the top to say, for instance, “Actually, can you decide this a bit quicker? We don’t want to be in a position where we’ve missed our housing target by this much and therefore lose our ability to have a say over this type of development.”

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Ben and Sam, you have talked about the clarity that is needed on that. Do you feel that clear responsibilities for who does what will help with decisions on delivery and new housing coming forward?

Ben Hopkinson: Clear responsibility, and then having the incentives actually to make the decision, would be quite good. We have to remember that the new buildings we are processing applications for are inherently significantly safer than the ones they are replacing. When it comes to fire risk, the two largest risks are the age of a building and overcrowding, both of which new buildings help alleviate.

Even in the past several years, buildings have become significantly safer, with sprinkler systems, fire evacuation lifts and no flammable materials in cladding. We really ought to figure out all we can do to make it easier for new buildings to be built. If that means assigning a regulator a specific task and trying to avoid the paralysis you get when multiple regulators have some share of the say, that would be an improvement.

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[The Chair]

Q We will now hear oral evidence from Vistry. We have until 3.50 pm for this panel. Can the witness please introduce himself for the record?

Alexander Cook: I am Alexander Cook, the managing director for special projects at Vistry. I oversee the group’s building safety remediation programme.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Good afternoon, Mr Cook. What progress are developers making in remediating their buildings?

Alexander Cook: First, on behalf of Vistry, we have been at the forefront since the tragic events of Grenfell in 2017 to make sure we are proactively managing and liaising with building owners. We signed the pledge in 2022 and the developer remediation contract in 2023. To date, 51% of our developer buildings started are completed. It is worth noting that, if 27 buildings had not had delays from blockers this year, we would have been at 70%. I can give some real world examples from our experience of where that has happened.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q The contract, I understand, required 80% by July this year. Obviously, you have not got to that point. Do you know anyone who has? What I am getting at with this question is whether that target is realistic.

Alexander Cook: The targets were always a stretch. There are a number of developers that have achieved it, as per the remediation acceleration group data that is issued in the quarterly reports. There are challenges across all of these projects. These are multi-stakeholder projects, so you have fire engineers, responsible entities, RTMs, managing agents, lawyers and project managers. When you try to go back and forth with each of these parties, throw in a scope dispute or an RTM dissolves, and you have to go to a freeholder.

Good progress has been made across the industry, and we are at 51% across the board. The majority of those are sitting in the top right quadrant. To date, good progress has been made, and Vistry has been working proactively with all its buildings to move this forward, but there is still a way to go. We are confident that next year we will be able to get a lot of these things moved forward with some of the support we have had from the MHCLG.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Nobody would dispute that remediating buildings and making them safe have to be a high priority, but when you do that there is an opportunity cost. Has it had an impact on the ability to deliver new housing?

Alexander Cook: Vistry has a dedicated special projects team with funding allocated to remediation, so it is a priority for us that does not take away from the day job. We have, however, had challenges on the new-homes side with Building Safety Regulator applications, which have delayed delivering those homes for up to nine months. We obviously acknowledge that residents need safe buildings, and that is the priority, but some of those statutory approvals are where the blockers have been.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q We had Building Safety Regulator representatives in this morning. They acknowledged that it was initially slow but felt they had very much improved the situation more recently. The nine-month thing you mentioned has come up before. Would you agree that it has got better?

Alexander Cook: We have seen improvements. Of our applications? Not yet. We have had seven remediations applications submitted, all of which had time extensions and three of which are now approved, so we can see the backlog starting to come down. We have not had a fast application or a statutory timeframe application as yet, but we know industry colleagues that have, so we can see the improvements that have been made. Hopefully, going into next year, their recruitment will improve and their capacity and consistency of decisions will help all of us move forward.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q One aspect of the Bill that colleagues are probably quite interested in is that there are potentially overlapping and conflicting regulators, such as local authorities, fire and rescue authorities and the Building Sector Regulator. Do you have a view on the duty to co-operate between those three? In the event that they do not agree, who should command the ring? Who should be the coercive power?

Alexander Cook: We support the co-operation of all authorities and the fact that they have to issue their statement. From my reading of the Bill and the proposals, Homes England is going to be the auditing authority of the fire risk appraisal of external walls, which is dictating the scope. The way it works in the developer remediation contract is that MHCLG will be the auditor of the FRAEW. If there is a dispute between the parties, it is the deciding function. It would seem logical that Homes England performs that function if that is the proposal in the Bill.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q To date, developers and taxpayers have contributed millions of pounds in remediation costs and construction product manufacturers have not paid anything. Do you feel that getting co-operation from them will help when it comes to the challenges and finances that Vistry and other developers face?

Alexander Cook: We welcome the changes on manufacturer redress and section 149. That will help make sure that all responsible parties are held to account and share the costs. It will not make any difference in terms of us accelerating our works and delivering what we need to. It just means that the funding at some point will be recovered and will help the future growth of homes, which Vistry is uniquely placed to do as part of the Government’s affordable housing programme.

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[The Chair]

We now hear oral evidence from Ian Abley and Steve Day. We have until 4.20 pm for this panel. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves briefly for the record?

Steve Day: Thanks very much for your time today. I am Steve Day. I am a building safety campaigner, and have a national campaign called buildingsafetyscheme.org. There are notes applicable to my evidence on the website.

Ian Abley: Good afternoon, Chair. I am Ian Abley. I used to be a site architect, and then, after Grenfell, I started working for the Fire Protection Association. I have spent most of my life trying to work out what “properly build” is in the first place.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming. Does the Bill as drafted protect leaseholders from unreasonable service charge increases?

Steve Day: I will take that from a leaseholder’s perspective. I am a leaseholder in a block of flats in south-east London, in Woolwich. We have highly combustible Euroclass E on our fire shafts, which is the second most combustible material being retained under PAS 9980; it is banned on new buildings. The Association of British Insurers has confirmed that there will be permanently high insurance if these combustibles are left on.

We have two fire reports. One was commissioned by the building owner and the builder, and it basically said, “Leave the panels in place,” without any fire performance test evidence to show the risk of leaving it on. Then the residents raised £4,300 to do a review of that fire risk assessment and it said, “These panels are dangerous. These must come off.” Both are valid under PAS. The building owner has clearly stated in writing that they will choose the cheaper of the two reports—the one that leaves the dangerous panels on the sole means of escape, using PAS as justification.

PAS has two flaws. First, it ignores building regulations at the time of construction. Building regulations are the baseline for the fire safety order. The fire brigade operates on the assumption that the building regulations at the time of construction are complied with. If you have a remediation standard that does not really look into these building regulation breaches, you can see why the insurers are giving us permanently high insurance—in addition, of course, our insurance doubled with RAAC. We have £6,000 a year service charges, and because of these retained panels on our sole means of escape under PAS, we have no chance of getting the charges back down, so no, the Bill is not helping us.

I do welcome the parts of the Bill that are useful. This is a very difficult subject for me, because I lost one of my best friends, Amanda Walker, who worked on my building safety scheme campaign with the Earl of Lytton and actually presented to Parliament. She was so taken down by the building safety crisis that she took her own life. To be clear, the coroner said it was misadventure, so I am not saying that I know more than the coroner, but I know how badly the building safety crisis affected her and ruined her life. I want to pay tribute to her and to the Government for recognising that part of her campaign as an enfranchised leaseholder was to be protected from cladding costs. They have announced that that is happening, so that is good. The new legal duty to remediate is good, as is the remediation backstop.

The key problem is that the Building Safety Act is identifying building safety risks, but the remediation standard to deal with the problem is watering it down to a tolerable standard that does not recognise as an issue building regulation breaches at the time of construction, which are unlawful breaches. Secondly, it does not require any fire performance test evidence to know the risk of leaving banned material—combustibles are banned on buildings above 11 metres. The insurance is high, as the ABI has confirmed in its evidence to other Committees. Leaseholders are in a terrible position. I will let Ian come in now, but thank you very much for the question.

Ian Abley: I want to stress that leaseholders entered a market where there was a constant, which they expected to have. They may never have read the building regulations, but the constant was always there and sensible. That was requirement B4(1), which said that a building should “adequately” resist the spread of fire up its external walls, which you would expect. My mum would expect that; my sons would expect that. That has been a constant since the Building Act 1984 split the approved document from the requirements.

A difficulty is being replicated in clause 44 of this Bill, however. “Adequate” was never defined except in the approved document, and now “tolerable” is being substituted for the word adequate, which is worse. The failure after Grenfell was not to interrogate what was “adequate”. Since then, we have found out—through great effort, a long period of time and a huge inquiry—that class zero was the problem, because the approved document contained approval for combustible cladding. It did not contain approval for combustible insulation, so it does not explain the defects over 30 years of construction found by people such as Andy Roe, as he described this morning.

The substitution of “tolerable” for “adequate” just leaves that issue free-floating. While the Building Safety Regulator is being given sharper teeth and may be able to bite better, it is being muzzled by the introduction of the concept of tolerability in place of the concept of adequacy.

I would argue that the only Secretary of State post-Grenfell to grapple with the adequacy problem was James Brokenshire. He did a very good job—actually, an extraordinarily clear-headed job—before he sadly died of cancer, which was to introduce modifications to regulation 7, which is about materials and workmanship. He took the problem out of the approved document and stuck it in regulation 7, so that builders could not ignore it.

The difficulty with the approved document arises from section 7 of the Building Act 1984, which means that the approved document is non-mandatory but nevertheless statutory guidance. So you can ignore it, provided you satisfy the requirements.

Let me illustrate the two things that the Bill needs to grapple with and should sort out. There are all of the defects that builders have created by ignoring the approved document and therefore not complying with the requirement, such as putting combustible insulation in high-rise buildings. Since 2006, that has been clearly prevented under paragraph 12.7 of fire safety regulations, and prior to that builders should not have been using combustible insulation on high-rise buildings. That is made difficult because the approved document had a fundamental flaw, which originated in class zero; the wording did not change from 1976 right up to the Grenfell Tower fire.

That test in 1987 was being given a water-cooled frame to test thermoplastics, in other words the kind of cladding that was on Grenfell Tower—aluminium composite material. The problem materialised at the Garnock Court fire in Irvine in 1999. At that time, Nick Raynsford did not remove class zero from the approved document or modify it, and nor did anybody else after that, despite the Government’s own unpublished research on the subject. Not only was class zero known to be wrong at the time, but the policy was sustained all the way through the code for sustainable homes—when insulation was being pushed, including in high-rise buildings—right the way up to the Grenfell Tower fire, when its consequences became obvious.

Class zero served as misguidance. What the Bill needs to do is to define what “adequate” is, and not sell the PAS to the people who would like to open this process up to a subjective view of tolerability.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Thank you; that was a very helpful introduction. If I can circle back to the question that I asked, which was around the danger that the cost of remediation gets passed on to leaseholders through increased service charges, do you think the Bill does enough to prevent that from happening?

Steve Day: No. We say that rather than incremental improvement of the protections, we would like all leaseholders to be protected from all costs related to building safety defects. What we say is that if building regulation breaches occurred at the time of its construction, you did not get what you paid for. The builders should not be allowed, under PAS, to get away with that; they should remediate to the standard of the current building regulations. That is not betterment; that is punishment for breaking the law at the time of construction.

Secondly, if the regulations have changed post-Grenfell and the defects are a result of regulations changing regarding things that were lawful at the time of construction, we say that the buildings affected should be remediated to as low a standard as is reasonably practicable, with fire performance test evidence for those combustibles in buildings above 11 metres.

To answer your specific point, what is happening in the Bill is that we have protections that provide no protection at all for buildings below 11 metres. The under 11 metre fund has closed, so there is no protection. There are partial protections for those that have more than six properties, and no protection at all for non-cladding costs. Then we have the risk of multiple remediation. Under PAS, the fire risk assessor is encouraged to deem some remediation tolerable without any evidence to know the risk of leaving it on. Then it says, “But, by the way, if you can, you should bring the risk down from tolerable to low,” so the PAS is encouraging you as a fire risk assessor to undermine “tolerable”. Then, it says in the 2026 version, which is the latest one in force, “When you do a refurbishment, you should potentially do a bit more, because that tolerable standard is a little bit suspect. Do a bit more.” The PAS itself does not trust its own definition of tolerability.

On the other side of that, if it is deemed tolerable, under a highly subjective assessment, these fire risk assessments are done every year and can recommend that the PAS assessment is redone potentially every five years, like EWS1, which is expensive in itself, but we may have to fork out another 40 or 50 grand in five years’ time. Then, with all the defects deemed tolerable—remember it is ignoring building regulation breaches at time of construction and leaving defects on without any evidence to know the risk—there is a good chance that tolerable risk might become medium or high under the PAS for a subsequent remediation.

This comes on to my real worry, which, as a leaseholder, is saleability and insurability. The ABI has condemned PAS. It was excluded from the steering group, which is questionable, because it has been saying for a long time that PAS is not good enough in its current form and needs to take into account the risk post Grenfell of the genie being let out the bottle and people not trusting building regulation compliance. Let me explain why. These are the June 2024 figures of life-endangering building defect rates in four of our top house builders—it was on BBC News, and it is published on the Government website. Barratt Redrow has a 35% life-endangering defect rate as per the developer contracts, Bellway 43%, Taylor Wimpey 77% and Crest Nicholson 69%. These defects have been all over the built environment for the last 30 years.

We should not be having a tolerable assessment that says, “Oh, by the way, if it’s deemed tolerable now, it may either be upgraded to high in the future, or you need to do a little bit more later on when you do a refurbishment and we need to push it down.” All of these are extra costs. If we combine the threat of rolling, unlimited remediations, the cost of all the protections that partially protect and or include no protection whatsoever for buildings under 11 metres, and the 11 metre cladding fund closure, you can see that the simplest solution is to protect all leaseholders. In doing so, we would actually be able to ensure that there would be certainty. I think the definition of permanently complete on a remediation should be that the insurance comes down so the extra building defect premium is removed and the property is sellable.

There is also the risk of the market concerns around this. There is potential for significant financial crisis-type litigation in respect of mortgage-backed securities. I came from an investment banking background and worked in IT in Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan. We look at risk. If you have a load of buildings in which all the defects have been ignored by a watered-down remediation standard and all the defects have been left on without any fire performance test evidence, do you not think that the insurers or the lenders might have picked that up? They are watching today. What I am saying is that if we want to contain this, we really need to recognise that those alarming defect rates I have just quoted to you, which are all available in the public domain, mean that there could be litigation in relation to the UK mortgage-backed securities that are sold to anyone who wants to buy them. Credit, insurance and other derivatives related to UK mortgage-backed securities could blow up.

My buildingsafetyscheme.org team and I have analysed the prospectuses of some of the leading bonds in mortgage-backed securities, and some do not even mention the credit risk of the non-cladding liability; some mention the cladding liability, but do not mention the non-cladding liability; and some do not mention any liability at all. These are all linked to UK residential mortgages, so they are not being honest in the documentation that they sell bonds on. There is a problem here.

[Gareth Bacon]

I am very conscious that I have taken up half the session.

Steve Day: Yes, I am sorry I went on a bit.

[Gareth Bacon]

I need to give the Minister some time, so thank you.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Steve, you mentioned that you welcome some elements of the legislation. Do you believe that the proposals to go further in respect of construction product manufacturers will address and reinforce the issue around polluter pays?

Steve Day: Yes, I did not actually say it, but it was another element that I was happy about. The cladding manufacturers largely have escaped liability. I do not know if you followed our campaign with the Earl of Lytton in the House of Lords. We initially had a remediation scheme, which was trying to make developers pay for breaches at the time of construction with a wide construction industry levy, which did bring in construction manufacturers. That aligns with our approach, but there are some areas where you could extend the levy. The build-to-rent sector, for instance, has largely escaped it. They could contribute, given that they are building. Build to rent would be an area.

Before the Committee, we had a look at the latest status of developers and house builders. The top 10 have £24 billion in net assets, largely due to hoarding land banks and making significant returns to shareholders. We looked at just how much were share buybacks and dividends. For instance, Barratt Redrow has announced an intention to return £400 million to shareholders. With £24 billion plus £400 million, they can afford to pay a little more to cover all these leaseholders. On the buildingsafetyscheme website, you can see a breakdown of all the information that I am giving here, including the items of the mortgage-backed securities—we are going to publish those so that everyone can see the exposure due to bad building in this country.

I really encourage the Committee to look at whether freeholders may evade their responsibilities. There have been certain restructuring events that you might want to consider, which may mean that you have a good bank/bad bank scenario as we had at Lehman Brothers, where some assets may be transferred to the bad bank, and then there is no money to pay the remediation liabilities. I would recommend looking at anti-avoidance measures, potentially as an amendment to the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from Dame Judith Hackitt. We have until 4.40 pm for this panel. Dame Judith, could you briefly introduce yourself for the record?

Dame Judith Hackitt: Yes. I am Dame Judith Hackitt. I authored the independent review of building safety and fire regulations immediately after the Grenfell Tower fire, which led to the series of recommendations that formed the Building Safety Act. Since then, I have been chairing the industry safety steering group, working on driving culture change within the built environment sector.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Good afternoon, Dame Judith. Thank you for joining us. To what extent does the Bill address the systemic failures that you identified in your review?

Dame Judith Hackitt: This remediation Bill builds on a number of things that we have learned since the enactment of the Building Safety Act 2022. I am very supportive of many of the measures in it, although there are a few other things that would help enormously. I think it goes a long way towards addressing some of the shortcomings that we have learned of in the last few years, but there are some other things that we could do to make it move even faster.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Would you like to elaborate on that?

Dame Judith Hackitt: With pleasure. The most important thing that we need to do within this remediation Bill is to give certainty to residents, in particular, who have been waiting a very long time to know whether their buildings need remediation and whether they are safe. Although some of the recommendations move us in the right direction, they do not take away the uncertainty and the room that exists for people to debate in court or through lawyers what needs to be done and by whom. Unless we address that and give residents certainty, we are missing an important opportunity in this Bill.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q On your point about residents needing to know whether their buildings need remediation and are safe, I do not know whether you were watching our proceedings immediately before you came on, but we certainly heard that from some of our previous witnesses. Connected to that, the president of the Institute of Construction Management previously described PAS 9980 as “loose”, “spineless” and “open to interpretation”. I think our previous witnesses would have entirely endorsed that view. Do you?

Dame Judith Hackitt: I certainly think it is open to too much interpretation. As I have shared with lots of people, we now have the ability to see what other people have done around the world, so we can see that there is perhaps a better way to do that. I have recently been reviewing the activities in Victoria in Australia, and they have completed all their remediation. Granted, it is on a different scale from ours—they had to remediate in the region of 1,000 buildings—but it is all complete. It has been completed to a standard that was set centrally, about which there is no dispute, and everyone has bought into it.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Do you believe that we are missing a trick by not imposing similar conditions here?

Dame Judith Hackitt: Yes, I do. Defining tolerable risk in statute and getting buy-in from residents and other stakeholders, including investors and insurers, is key to making progress. That would ensure not only that residents feel reassured that we are working to a consistent standard, but that we have a basis on which to rebuild confidence in the markets in our building stock.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q To be clear about what you said, is your position that the Bill would be improved if the Government define what they mean by “tolerable” on the face of the Bill?

Dame Judith Hackitt: Yes.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q And if that were applied nationwide.

Dame Judith Hackitt: Yes. It would need to be a risk framework for all existing buildings that are in scope.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Thank you, Dame Judith, for joining us. Following on from the shadow Minister’s questioning, you will be aware that the Bill seeks to legislate for a single consistent approach on external walls to help give more clarity to residents, developers and manufacturers. Do you feel that having Homes England audit all assessments that need remediation is a good way forward in ensuring transparency and trust?

Dame Judith Hackitt: I personally do not have a view one way or the other on whether Homes England is the right place to put that. What I do have a view on is that it needs to be an agreed risk framework that everyone has bought into. It needs to be a body that has the technical competence to oversee that and, in cases where there is a dispute, to overrule that and agree the standard to which the buildings are going to be remediated.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q We will now hear evidence from DCCH Experts LLP. We have until 5 o’clock for this panel. Would you kindly say who you are for the record?

Dr David Crowder: Good afternoon. My name is David Crowder, and I am a partner at DCCH Experts. Probably more relevant to this session is that I am the lead technical author for PAS 9980. I will not list my various other credentials as they are in my written evidence.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q We heard from previous witnesses that we still have a significant proportion of housing stock with cladding attached. In your assessment, does the Bill go far enough in expediting the remediation of the remainder?

Dr David Crowder: I will start by saying that my written evidence was not about the Bill; I am here for questions regarding PAS, because I am conscious that there has been a lot of debate about that. My personal view on remediation is that it has taken too long. I investigated Grenfell myself—I spent a year inside the tower, from when it was still burning. I do not want to see that again.

I have worked as fast as I can, and I know many other fire engineers who are, frankly, tired after 10 years of working flat-out on this. There are not enough of us. That is a sad side effect of fire engineering not being a very popular subject pre-Grenfell, and going from being a bit of a sideshow in the industry to suddenly being the thing that everyone demands for a building project. There is now movement to try to increase the number of courses. Given that my qualifications and training took well in excess of 10 years to achieve, I am not particularly optimistic about how much faster things can go unless there is a fundamentally different approach, but I support remediation taking place as quickly as possible.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q You are not optimistic about how much faster it can go without appropriate support. Is that the phrase you used?

Dr David Crowder: A different approach. Fire engineers are currently capacity-limited. As I say, everyone I speak to in fire engineering is doing everything they can.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Do you therefore think that the 12-month target remediation date set out in the Bill is realistic?

Dr David Crowder: No. That is the short answer. Most of my work is in disputes, legal cases and prosecutions. I am well aware that there is a significant degree of panic about meeting that deadline among the good building owners and developers, because they take it seriously. The practicalities involved make it extremely challenging for those who are willing. For those who are not, I do not hold much, if any, hope of them meeting that deadline.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Like you, I saw Grenfell tower from the inside. In my case, it was a week after the fire. I was taken around by the London fire brigade. Some of the fire failings inside the building that they pointed out to me were very obvious—the lack of fire doors being one of them. I saw one fire door that was still there and had done its job on a floor somewhere in the teens, but none of the flats had any doors. They were all gone. Various holes had been knocked through walls for pipes and things like that, which were breaches.

The Bill concentrates on cladding. To a degree, that is understandable, because we all saw the pictures of Grenfell and the fire going up the outside. One of the reasons why the stay put policy that the fire brigade deployed in the early stages of the fire failed utterly is the breaches inside the building, as opposed to just the cladding going up the outside. Do you think the Bill could have been expanded to cover fire remediation internally as well as externally?

Dr David Crowder: I do. However, I would suggest there is an equally acute problem with internal fire protection as there is with cladding. There is a difference between what was expected of buildings built 10, 20 or 50 years ago versus those built today. I am aware of the criticism, but the PAS has tried to consider buildings of all ages by taking a technology-agnostic view of risk to try to work out what is safe enough—I am sure we will come back to that. We use the term “tolerable”, and again I am sure we will come back to that.

I have been privy to a lot of this, and the difficulty with internal compartmentation is that if you ask a compartmentation specialist or passive fire protection contractor to look at a building, they will insist on current best practice installations because that is part of their professional requirements. There is not currently an equivalent mechanism by which you can look at fire stopping or a fire door that is 20 or 30 years old and reach a conclusion as to whether it still provides adequate performance or needs to be replaced for good reason, as opposed to simply being an old door.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Let us talk about PAS, then. I think you were in the room when our previous witnesses gave their views, and you would have heard the quote I attributed to the president of the Institute of Construction Management, who was very uncomplimentary about PAS 9980. Do you share that view?

Dr David Crowder: Well, no. Having written it, I am supportive of the standard and what it is trying to achieve. Again, I refer the Committee to my written evidence. The standard is just that, a standard. It is a document. It is not the same as its users. It does not have the power to police its users. As Dame Judith mentioned, a lot of work is going on about the regulation and professionalisation of the fire engineering industry. I can only support that. I am a chartered engineer registered with the Engineering Council, and I have to comply with the ethical behavioural principles of the Engineering Council as part of my work. Those include integrity, honesty and pushing back on anyone who might try to persuade me to behave in a certain way.

Chartered engineers are not the only game in town. There are also incorporated engineers and engineering technicians. They all do different things. Chartered engineers tend to be in leadership, big-picture positions. Incorporated engineers have a greater tendency to be doers—they are more middle-management level. Engineering technicians tend to do very intricate, detailed work. They do the sort of thing that a chartered engineer is not good at. Fire alarm technicians are a good example.

The key point is that they all have to sign up to the Engineering Council’s statement of ethical principles. Having that kind of registration across the board would be extremely helpful in providing confidence in how users are actually applying the PAS. We did a lot of work in how we rewrote the document we published in September to try to address the shortcomings. For example, we have been as strict as we can. Bear in mind, it is a voluntary standard. As it stands, it does not have any power, but we require that any deviation from what is in the standard is recorded in the report so that there is transparency.

Equally, if there is a difference of opinion where a customer, or whoever, commissions multiple FRAEWs—or one simply follows another chronologically—we now require the appraiser to say why they have a difference of opinion with the previous FRAEW. It is no longer a black-box environment where customers, or indeed leaseholders, are simply receiving FRAEWs, seeing that there is a different outcome and not understanding why. We have put a lot of work into trying to improve the transparency of the process.

Equally, we are bordering on hand-holding the appraisers through the process. We have defined the decision-making process that they have to follow at every stage to work through how they deal with uncertainty, to make sure that they are making good, conservative, worst-case assumptions where they do not know things, and only improving upon that once they have evidence that allows them to do so.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q My final question is around “tolerable”. We heard what Dame Judith Hackitt said about that. Do you have a view?

Dr David Crowder: “Tolerable” is a word. “Adequate”, “reasonable”, “tolerable” or “good enough” could be used.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Should the intended meaning of the word “tolerable” be defined in the Bill?

Dr David Crowder: I worry about the consequences of doing so. “Tolerable” and, equally, all the other words serve the same purpose, particularly when you think about health and safety law. The intention of the PAS was to support the fire safety order to enable risk assessment. I am sure we will come back to that in a second. “Tolerable” or “adequacy” obviously take into account the level of risk, which we can look at as an absolute level. Is risk high, medium or low?

The question of tolerability, which is similar to proportionality, or “as low as reasonably practicable” as appears in the Health and Safety at Work Act, relates to the ability to pay and what is within the duty holder’s gift to actually do in order to address risk. If Parliament decides to enshrine “tolerable” in law, that would have to be accompanied by some level of resource that puts the duty holders on the same playing field in terms of what they do to meet that bar.

That is because, for example, what a housing association with tens of thousands of properties can afford to do is very different from an individual family who have decided to make their investment pot a block of flats. I have dealt with customers who put all their life savings into building a block of flats, and it ended very tragically. Their ability to pay is not the same as a big housing association with tens of thousands of properties. That is the risk. Again, the PAS is simply trying to address a problem. It is a scientific, engineering-led process, but if we choose to set the bar at a particular level in terms of safety, we have to make sure that people can meet it.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q As the lead technical author for PAS 9980, you have a situation where, in essence, businesses and engineers, who are effectively paid for by the developers and builders, are using PAS 9980 as a way to sign off some of the cladding. That is so that they can essentially pass the building assessments. For clarity, could you explain what the standard is and is not designed to do?

Dr David Crowder: In terms of the original commission that was given to the British Standards Institution by what was then the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, it was written purely as a method for appraising the risk of external wall construction. This is responding to the Fire Safety Act amendment of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. A legal duty was created in the wake of Grenfell Tower to ensure that owners of existing buildings had a means by which they could carry out a risk assessment. Under article 50 of the fire safety order, there is a duty for the Secretary of State to provide guidance to enable risk assessments to be carried out.

Once the provision for risk assessing external walls was added, there needed to be guidance to fulfil that role. The PAS is not formally identified in that sense, but my personal view is that that is what it is for. It is not a design document, and it is not there to circumvent building regulations. It supports an entirely different branch of legislation. As has been mentioned by previous witnesses, if an FRAEW recommends building work, that work becomes subject to the building regulations, but that is distinct from what the PAS is doing. The PAS simply looks at the building in its current state and enables a decision to be made on whether or not something should need to be done. It is not an evaluation tool either—I know that RICS refer to it as part of their EWS1s. It is simply doing the job of appraising risk and the life safety impact of buildings.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from the Minister. We have until 5.20 pm. Could the witness please briefly introduce herself for the record?

Florence Eshalomi: Good afternoon. I am the Member of Parliament for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green. I am also the Minister of State with responsibility for homelessness, democracy, communities and faith. That includes building remediation.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q I do not want to detain the Minister too long so I am going to focus on the areas where there was more contention with the witnesses today: PAS 9980 and the question of “tolerable”. Starting with PAS 9980, why is it that the Government decided to legislate to make that method the statutory assessment methodology?

Florence Eshalomi: One of the things that the Government have been looking at is the fact that PAS 9980—as the Committee may be aware—was designed and developed by the British Standards Institution and went through a rigorous consensus-based public consultation process. On balance, we feel that it provides a robust and proportionate, industry-recognised methodology for assessing the risk. I think it is fair to say that residents will see fire as not discriminating. However, it is a case of making sure that we are looking at the issues around a building’s external walls and the action needed to keep residents safe. That is at the forefront of everything that we are trying to do in this potentially quite long and technical-seeming piece of legislation.

The other thing is around looking at how PAS 9980 will be put into practice and into law to make sure that it is consistent with external wall requirements. There will be secondary legislation at a later stage to require that a fire risk appraisal of external walls be carried out. That will help to give clarity about how external walls should be assessed, and we hope that this will also give regulators a firm benchmark in terms of targeting or challenging any poor assessments.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Why is that being done under secondary legislation? Why is it not on the face of the Bill now?

Florence Eshalomi: One of the key things that we are trying to do is look at some of the other areas contained within the inquiry. We feel that this approach will be better in terms of making sure we are legislating on the key areas around the principle that the developer pays in terms of the levy and the additional measures for non-qualifying leaseholders. All those issues are coming to the forefront first.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q I am conscious of time so I am going to move on to the question of “tolerable”. You heard Dame Judith Hackitt’s evidence and some of the discussion. You also heard the Liberal Democrat position consistently throughout today. When he gave his evidence earlier, Steve Day was very clear that he thinks that the lack of specificity around “tolerable” is leading to higher insurance premiums and costs to leaseholders. Is that something that the Government agree with? If so, would this Bill be improved by putting some kind of definition to the word “tolerable”?

Florence Eshalomi: This is an area that we are still keen to look at and are developing with leaseholders and insurance companies. You may be aware that the Financial Conduct Authority is going through a review at the moment on the issue of how remediation and reductions in risk are reflected in the pricing structure. My understanding is that the Treasury Committee is also looking at this. What we are seeking to do with this Bill is strengthen the confidence in the assessments’ decisions through the independent auditing of the FRAEWs, including powers to audit the assessments that conclude that no remediation is required.

With regard to the question of risk maybe being posed and assessed as tolerable, I will go back to some of the comments the Committee heard earlier. Essentially, we need to make sure that residents are safe, but a tolerable risk does not mean that a building is unsafe. Today’s evidence sessions have also highlighted some of the other areas in which leaseholders are rightly pushing us to go further in terms of some of the internal wall defects, which in some cases are causing some of the issues around insurance. I am hoping that during the passage of this Bill, we can look at some additional measures.

However, the building insurance premiums can sometimes reflect a range of areas, not just external wall fire risk: it could be claims for things such as flooding, water or other damage. I think that we need to look at the whole issue of building insurance as a package in the round, not just the external wall risk and the issue of what is and is not tolerable.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q That is a reasonable point, but you have heard the concerns around the lack of specificity. Dame Judith talked about one standard applied uniformly, as opposed to introducing a level of ambiguity into the Bill. She feels that it would be much more beneficial for it to be specific. Is it the position of the Government that you do not agree with that?

Florence Eshalomi: What we need to distinguish is the fact that PAS 9980 as it stands does not remove or replace the need for buildings to comply with building regulations; maybe we need to make that a lot clearer. This is around highlighting that any remediation work that needs to be carried out must also meet building regulations that may apply to that. Again, there is the technical aspect of the Bill, and what we are seeking to do with this legislation is make clearer who owns that risk. PAS 9980 and building regulations serve two entirely different purposes. We are very clear on what building regulations are doing in terms of the regulations for new buildings, whereas PAS 9980 considers the risk and tolerable risk of buildings as they stand now, looking at the critical issue around safety when it comes to life and to external walls.

On the question of whether we should revisit the whole issue of “tolerable”, that goes back to my response to your initial question. Across the sector and industry, we feel that PAS 9980, set by the British Standards Institution, strikes the right balance in trying to find a way forward through something that has been at an impasse for many years—successive Governments have tried to resolve this.

It is about how we get the best approach in terms of moving forward in a really complicated but important area that is affecting so many people up and down the country. They want a resolution and to know that if something goes wrong in their building, which a number of them have invested a lot of money in—sometimes their life savings—they know who they can go to to remediate that. A lot of them bought in good faith and they should not have to turn themselves into building experts just to know that the building they are living in is safe.

[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.