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

Noah Law Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Minister for Homelessness, Democracy, Communities and Faith (Florence Eshalomi)]

I declare that the headquarters of the London Fire Brigade are in my constituency and that I meet the fire commissioner.

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

I declare my interest as a volunteer director of the St Austell community land trust.

[The Chair]

If any interests are particularly relevant to a Member’s line of questioning or speech, they should declare them again at the appropriate time.

Examination of Witnesses

Lord Roe, Charlie Pugsley, Helen Fisher and Mark Norris gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Blackman]

Q There are buildings—I can take you to some of them, including around the Wembley stadium area—that have been put up since Grenfell with unsafe cladding. There are huge numbers of them, and they are completely uninsurable and unsaleable for the leaseholders who own them. The reality is that developers have got planning permission, stretched out their development and, as a result, put up unsafe cladding that accorded with the regulations at the time. Is the Bill sufficiently robust to force those builders to remediate their buildings and, going forward, to require them, notwithstanding the fact that they have planning permission and sign-off, to remedy this before they put the buildings up?

Dan Daly: To your latter point, it is the role of the Building Safety Regulator to make sure that these things are built correctly from this point on. The last panel talked about the work in that regard.

I think the responsibilities for remediation are clear in the Bill, which assigns responsibility through the “polluter pays” principle, so it is much clearer who is responsible for repairing buildings. Our ability to enforce that would be improved if some of the protocols were agreed around who collaborates and who leads. I note the work in the LFB around writing protocol at the moment, but elsewhere in the country there are some really ambitious and difficult timeframes; if we press ahead as we are now, something in the region of 157 individual partnership protocols will need to be written so that each regulator understands its role in holding the relevant persons to account. That is a challenge.

While the Bill makes it clearer who is responsible, who is going to lead the charge to hold those people to account could be made even clearer through something like a review of the LACORS protocol that we currently have, to make sure that those things are in place and applied consistently across the country. As I said, I commend colleagues in London for being on the front foot in getting that agreement in place. If that agreement was adopted as a national standard, it would bring some consistency of approach across the country and some confidence in how these things are dealt with.

[Noah Law]

Q I have a couple of brief follow-ups for you, Dan, on the last two questions. First, would some level of independent review or auditing of FRAEWs go some way towards addressing some of the concerns you raised about standards? Secondly, you made the point about stretch targets of 12 months on timing. Would you consider the duty to co-operate a stretch target, or a useful one, in ensuring co-operation between enforcement stakeholders?

Dan Daly: I will pick up on your last question and then hand over to my colleague on the independent auditing, because we have been talking about that. We already have a duty to collaborate, so that is not new, but providing some clarity around how regulators and agencies will work together in a consistent way that is applied nationally will improve it. I am not sure that it offers us individually anything more than we currently have, but across the wider sector, that duty to collaborate is not unhelpful.

Penny Pender: The point in the Bill about solidifying independent auditing is crucial, and I agree with everything that Helen on the previous panel said. That is a really welcome part of the Bill, and it will hopefully assist in these cases. If I may speak to the concern that Mr Blackman mentioned, just because something has planning permission does not mean that it meets the functional requirements of the building regulations. If those buildings went up with combustible cladding on them, they do not meet the building regulations, full stop. Hopefully there are sufficient powers across the built environment to deal with that, and we would hope to see the Building Safety Regulator and others step in where needed.

There might be room for examining the implementation dates for the Bill, because there are some possible gaps. The Bill will only apply, I think, to buildings that were built before April ’22. There are some periods of time there, such as the possible 15-month gap between when the Building Safety Act came into force and when gateway 2 started, that might bear examination and would be good to look into. There was also an eight-month gap between the Bill coming into force and the review of the combustible cladding ban.

You might recall that there was a combustible cladding ban put in place for buildings over 18 metres; that was reviewed and it was clarified that it would apply from 11 metres, but there was an eight-month gap during which it might have been incorrectly perceived by some in industry—even though we would disagree—that it was acceptable to put combustible material on to those buildings. Even though we would say ultimately that it still does not meet the functional requirements, some may have misunderstood that, so it would be worth examining the timeframes in the Bill to make sure that that is okay.

[Rachel Blake]

Q Building on the previous questions, I want to ask about part 4 and the duty to co-operate. My first question is: do you think that the system is prepared to meet the timeline set out in clause 75—the Building Safety Regulator preparing a statement within eight months, within which it has to consult the other organisations? Do you think the whole system is prepared to deliver on that timescale?

Penny Pender: That is a good question. I would suggest that it is possibly not necessary. There is already a lead regulator’s protocol in existence. It is known as the LACORS guidance, produced by local authority co-ordinators of regulatory services. All authorities would have had local agreements in place aligning to that at some point. The challenge is that it was not kept up to date, particularly following the implementation of the Building Safety Act.

We have been advocating for it to be updated since then. That could be achieved without waiting for primary legislation, and it would be helpful if it was done once and done nationally, and then local regulators were given the option to adopt it or to develop their own ones if they felt that was necessary. As Spencer said, London has done a lot of the heavy lifting already with the pan-London fire safety protocol, so that could easily be lifted and shifted and adopted nationally.

As Dan said, the impact assessment identifies that outside of mayoral arrangements, there could be anywhere up to 157 local partnership agreements that would have to be developed and signed off within only a four-month time period. Our concern is that that could distract from local enforcement on the ground, because in some of the smaller authorities, the staff who are needed for enforcement would have to be diverted towards developing the agreements or writing to the Secretary of State to justify why they have not. We think it should be done nationally and done once.