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

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Gibson]

Q Thank you, Dame Judith. I am very interested in your response to the concerns about PAS 9980, on which I have to say I sounded a bit like a stuck record earlier in the session. Concentrating on the issue of trying to get remediation through more quickly, and the level of technical competence, do you feel that the discrepancies in fire assessments that we heard about earlier—where one fire assessment by the building owner says everything is fine and the independent assessment by the leaseholder says it is not—would be solved by the suggestions that you made to Mr Bacon in respect of clear guidance on what tolerance means, or do we need greater control and accountability, and perhaps regulation, of fire engineers and fire assessors themselves? Is it a problem with the assessment and the criteria for the assessment, or is the problem a lack of accountability by those carrying out the assessments?

Dame Judith Hackitt: The part about fire engineers’ competence and how we assess that is being addressed separately from the Bill. We already know that there is more work we need to do there, and I am involved in that.

Let us be clear, however, that we are never going to get to a point where fire engineers always agree on a single solution, because the nature of the beast is such that different solutions may be arrived at that give an acceptable level of risk. That is one of the reasons why we have focused on making all the regulation outcome-based so that it gives people the opportunity to look at different routes and so on.

In the cases where disagreements occur, it is really important to have a body that can stop that becoming a long-term delaying process and a dispute through the courts, and focuses on agreeing what is going to be done, getting it done and letting other things play out while speeding up the process whereby residents get to a position where they can both feel safe in their building and, indeed, sell their properties and move on if that is what they want to do.

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield Hallam) (Lab)]

Q Thank you, Dame Judith, for your work in this area over many years and for your appearance today. I want to ask you a bit more about that issue. You have described quite well what should happen, but could you describe what needs to change so that can happen, and so that responsibility for making existing buildings safe leads to action rather than the repeated discussion that you outlined?

Dame Judith Hackitt: I am not here to suggest for one minute that we should copy everything that has been done by Cladding Safety Victoria in Australia. However, when you look at the series of measures that it has put in place, there is a lot that we can learn. I have already talked about the agreed risk framework that everyone buys into. In addition, to speed up the process, it arrived at a mechanism whereby, when people cannot agree on what needs to be done, progress is not slowed.

Progress still takes place: the Government pay for it, but they take over the right from the building owners to recover costs from the parties who are held to be responsible. The Government are therefore acting in the intermediary space, not as the funder for work that others fail to do. It is a model that we could learn from, of that I am convinced.

[Olivia Blake]

Q Do you welcome the backstop elements of the Bill?

Dame Judith Hackitt: Yes, I do. As I said, I am very supportive of what the Bill is trying to do, but in a number of areas we are missing an opportunity to go a little further on writing specifics into primary legislation, rather than leaving it to guidance that is open to interpretation and without certainty.

[Peter Fortune]

Q If we can find an example of something that is working—I appreciate the relative scale and so on—it seems to me not very sensible not to try to copy as much of it as we can.

Dame Judith Hackitt: Yes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Blackman]

Thank you, that is very helpful.

[Olivia Blake]

Q In the evidence we heard today, there was quite a lot of support for some of the measures in the Bill, particularly around identifying ownership and the provisions around the backstop, as well as the “polluter pays” principle. Do you think this suite of measures will actually help with the increase in pace that we need to see on remediation?

Florence Eshalomi: I am hoping so. One of the areas that Lord Andy Roe and Charlie Pugsley outlined was capacity across industry. A key issue that has been raised is around the quality and competency of fire assessors; making sure they are in place to carry out the assessments, first and foremost, is quite important. We are working to ensure we are helping and speeding that up.

I know that local government colleagues will raise the extra burdens cost, and we are looking at that. Hopefully, all these different measures should help, ultimately, to speed up that remediation. We have a target; we have not met that target yet, but we are on course and working at pace to make sure we hit it in time.

[The Chair]

I do not think we have time for a further question. I thank the Minister for giving evidence. We have now come to the end of the session. The Committee will meet again at 9.25 am on Tuesday 17 November to begin line-by-line consideration.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned.—(Sarah Coombes.)