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

James Asser Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We have five minutes left and one Member to get in, so I will be grateful if you can keep your answer quite brief.

Kate Henderson: Yes, of course. I agree with what has been said. It is important to recognise just how distressing this is for leaseholders and shared owners, who feel trapped, cannot sell their home and are facing rising service charges and insurance bills. People really need a route forward. Accelerating remediation is absolutely the key to this. For us, having access to remediation funding has been a really important step forward, but we want to work with Government to unblock delays and ensure that wider safety defects do not leave residents facing continued uncertainty. There is more I could say there, but I will not. I will just say, on risk registers, that the Regulator of Social Housing will collect this data and will be engaging with all housing associations, but they have to stress-test their business models.

In terms of risk, the Bill itself is part of a tool for addressing the wider building safety crisis. Building safety will be a top risk for all our members, and they will all have mitigation strategies.

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

Q I deal with huge numbers of leaseholders every week—in East London, this is a big issue—and many of them are in effect doing second, voluntary jobs in trying to work and manage their buildings. Many of them are now taking up volunteer resident director roles. I was speaking to some last week. They are very willing and they are teaching themselves, but they were saying that one thing they would very much like is routes into support to make sure that they are doing their job properly. This is with the extra duties coming in through the Bill. What practical support do you think we should be putting in place—generally, but also specifically in relation to the Bill?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: Where there is an RMC or an RTM director or company, they should be given access to a fund to at least fund the litigation up front; they should not have to be scrabbling around in their pockets to try to fund litigation or go after developers. That would be really helpful. It is unfair that they have taken on a role as a volunteer, as you say, are trying to do the right thing and are having this duty visited upon them. I think they will need special consideration when it comes to the enforcement and sanctions in the Bill. They do not have a big pot of money to fund either the remediation work itself or the litigation costs or legal costs to pursue the responsible parties.

[The Chair]

We have come to the end of our allotted time. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you very much for your evidence.

Examination of Witnesses

Giles Grover and Sophie Bichener gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

May I steer you back to what the Bill is about and to the questions, rather than a much more general view?

Sam Dumitriu: I am just saying that if we want to place cost burdens on developers, we need to be transparent about when there is a strong justification for doing so. At the moment, I think the justifications in this Bill make a lot more sense than those for many of the other burdens we place on developers.

[James Asser]

Q I want to come back on a point you have made a couple of times about new buildings being inherently safer. I understand the logic: you mentioned the technology in them. However, I wonder where you factor public trust into that, and how it fits in with regulation.

One problem that we face on the back of the cladding scandal is that so many of the buildings we are dealing with are very new. As I was telling the Committee earlier, I have five tower blocks evacuated, with hundreds of people homeless. All those blocks are under 10 years old. Naturally, all the neighbouring developments are now questioning whether they are safe, because of their similar age, even though they are different buildings by different developers.

People have to trust that new buildings are safely built, but they are looking over their shoulder when new development comes along—you see a lot of that now. Although I understand your point, to sell and develop, you need trust for those new buildings; people need to be able to say, “I’m going to move into them.” Where do we factor that in? A big part of the cladding scandal is that it has stretched into so many new builds. Logically, you should be right, but there is that problem.

Ben Hopkinson: I am well aware of the somewhat justified concerns about quality in new builds, especially given that new builds are expected to fund all these different priorities, and corners are sometimes cut on certain issues. However, just think about what new builds now have that older buildings do not: no flammable materials on façades; they all go through the Building Safety Regulator; and they all have sprinklers, wet risers for water all the way up, firefighting lifts, smoke ventilation, three fire doors between a flat and an exit, and two means of escape. There have also been certain changes to the way that fire brigades handle large incidents. Taken together, I think you can feel pretty confident that new builds are safer than existing buildings.

[Sarah Coombes]

Q I agree with James’s point that we have had some awful examples involving relatively recent buildings. One, which I have mentioned a couple of times and will not go into again, burned down not many years after it was built, leaving the leaseholders in a totally nightmare situation. On the question of liability, I take the point about burdens for developers but we have just had End Our Cladding Scandal in; they talked about leaseholders who are not to blame for any of this and are left with enormous bills, unable to sell their properties and trapped in unsafe homes. That has a knock-on effect on the wider housing market.

Part of the Bill is about holding product manufacturers liable. A lot of Government money has gone to fixing this, and developers have also put in money, but we feel that product manufacturers so far have not played their part in the equation to fix this safety crisis. Do you have any comments on that part of the Bill in terms of getting all this stuff sorted and fixing some issues you have raised?

Sam Dumitriu: One concern when you are trying to work out who is really liable for a problem is that there are often a lot of cooks. Cladding materials that could be used safely in certain contexts have often been used in the wrong context, and in that case you would not want the liability to fall on the manufacturer.

One of the reasons why this has been a slow process is that some of the things we are dealing with are very complicated. Sometimes, you are dealing with people who have left the country and found ways of avoiding things, which is not acceptable, but you are also dealing with cases where there is genuine professional disagreement. In those cases, you do not want people responding to that by coming up with a done decision that is not necessarily correct.

Ben Hopkinson: I echo that. Clearly, manufacturers have not been contributing to the remediation, and there are definitely instances where they should have. I have one broad concern. If a cladding manufacturer has been mis-selling or was not following the rules and regulations in place at the time, they should absolutely pay, and it is good that the Bill is holding them to account. But if the manufacturer followed all the Government guidelines at the time, it is a little bit more complicated, because you do not want to do too much retrospective liability increasing. That will make people unsure: “If I follow all the Government guidelines and regulations right now, but something that neither the Government nor any of the manufacturers or developers foresees then happens, am I on the hook for that?”

There has to be some limit to these retrospective claims, because they destroy investor confidence and any attempts to build new buildings. If you can be held liable even if you followed all the rules in place at a time, why would you want to manufacture building products or build the homes we desperately need? If a cladding manufacturer mis-sold a product or was clearly engaged in corporate malfeasance, they should be punished, and money should be recouped from them. But if they were acting honestly and following the rules at the time, that is a much more difficult circumstance.

When we are changing the standards, this becomes a Government burden and should in turn be funded from general taxation, if we think as a society, “These are changes we should make to buildings.” We do not want retrospective attempts to take back money from people who were following the rules, because that just leads to people not wanting to invest in the first place.