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

Peter Fortune Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We have one minute for a question and answer. I call Peter Fortune.

[Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)]

Q At two buildings in my constituency, which Andy might know—St Mark’s and Northpoint—residents complain that they do not get communication from either the building owners or the management agents, especially about costs and safety regulations. Is there enough in the Bill to encourage or force better communication with residents?

Lord Roe: The quick answer is that some of it helps, but my message—perhaps this is a good point to summarise from our point of view—is that there is a culture and leadership piece that needs to be understood in industry. We have watched industry really up its game over the past year and a half, so this is not a chance to bash them up, because I think people have worked very hard, but we still see appalling communication at an operational level from operational teams.

Even when the chief exec is leading the strategic entity well—we are talking about some large developers here—something happens at the operational level and they treat residents with disdain. There is no way you can enforce your way out of that, to be honest. We need the industry to take responsibility—even if it is bad news, please can you just communicate with your residents in a way that puts them, as a human, at the centre? Time and time again, that is where it starts to go wrong.

Charlie Pugsley: This is where all of us on the panel will communicate directly with those entities. We will put it in writing, even where it is outside the duty of resident communication, for example, and we will be really clear about what we expect.

Lord Roe: Again, the offer here is that if you have individual examples where the weight of the regulator will help, we are in with chief execs of the big and small developers all the time. We frequently have conversations in which we ask them to up their game, even if we cannot enforce it.

[Peter Fortune]

And I have your phone number.

[The Chair]

Order. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions of this panel. On behalf of the Committee, I thank our witnesses for their evidence. We will now change to the next panel.

Examination of Witnesses

Dan Daly, Penny Pender and Spencer Sutcliff gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Coombes]

Q A lot of the Bill is about breaking the impasse and trying to get the works done that are so desperately needed for leaseholders. Where engagement has not been secured, what difference will it make to be able to impose a financial penalty? Do you have a view on whether that element of the Bill will allow things to move forward?

Penny Pender: I think that the Bill provides a few more tools in the toolbox, as some of our colleagues said earlier. I think the introduction of some of those financial penalties is really interesting and useful to see. The proof will be in the pudding, so it is certainly worth trying them in certain circumstances and seeing how it goes. We hope that they will be helpful. I know that some fire and rescue services have potential interest in those being expanded beyond just the Bill to the application of the whole fire safety order. I think this will be a really useful opportunity to see how it goes, and then to learn from that. Hopefully, it will make a difference.

[Peter Fortune]

Q Quite a few of us used to be on the London Assembly, and we used to question Lord Roe. One of the issues he used to bring up was the number of qualified personnel in the fire brigade who were leaving after the training to go and work in the private sector. I do not think he has quite turned from gamekeeper to poacher, but are you still finding that pressure? Will that be an issue as the Bill starts to take effect?

Spencer Sutcliff: That has been a fairly long-standing concern of ours. We have obviously prioritised that and done a lot of work in-house, and our competency levels—as we would determine them—have improved fairly significantly over the last few years. We certainly had a moment in time when we lost quite a high number of highly competent and experienced staff to the private sector, because we simply could not compete financially. We have been well supported by the London Mayor and our GLA colleagues to make arrangements to reduce that impact a little, and that has had some positive effects. Recently, over the last 24 months, we have thankfully had much less of that.

[The Chair]

That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions to this panel. On behalf of the Committee, I thank the witnesses for their evidence.

Examination of Witness

Kate Green gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield Hallam) (Lab)]

Q As a northern MP, I think it is important that we understand the role of mayoral strategic authorities and what part they will play in speeding up the pace of the cladding remediation with the new duties under the Bill. Do you feel that they will help to speed up the process that we currently find ourselves in?

Kate Green: I think that the mayoral combined authority has had and can continue to have a role in helping to speed up the process. In Greater Manchester, shortly after the appalling fire in Grenfell Tower in 2017, the then mayor established a high-rise taskforce, chaired by Paul Dennett, the Salford city council mayor. Paul now chairs a high-rise oversight group where we are able to convene local authorities and the Greater Manchester fire and rescue service. Homes England attends, as do the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, housing providers, developers and residents. They can all be convened around one remediation programme.

Of course you will know, as members of the Committee, that we and other mayoral combined authorities published our local remediation acceleration plans in recent months. Those plans are the articulation of the whole-system approach that I think mayors and mayoral combined authorities can help to put in place. We have been able to use our plan to do a number of things, including, obviously, to understand more clearly what buildings are affected in Greater Manchester and what the nature of the risk is in each of those buildings. We have been able to be close to and very fully engaged with our residents, and to ensure that a residents-first focus sits at the heart of the work that we are doing in Greater Manchester and the work that we want to see nationally.

We have been able to bring the social housing partners to the table, which has been exceptionally useful in considering how we get social properties remediated and how we can work with our social housing providers in Greater Manchester to do that as swiftly and as effectively as possible. We can escalate matters when they become stalled. We have also been able to lobby Government; I think it has been helpful that Greater Manchester has been able to present a concerted voice to successive Governments for funding and for action—now resulting in this legislation.

There is a lot more that we hope to do with our local remediation acceleration plan in the coming months and years, and at the heart of that will be resident engagement. Our residents continue to live with a very significant impact on their mental health and their financial position, and in many cases with continuing uncertainty about when their buildings will be fully remediated. I see the work that we are able to do as a mayoral combined authority, maintaining the spotlight on the lived experience of our residents and reflecting that back both into the action that we can take and into the action that we ask national Government to take, as being crucial.

The final thing I will say, given that I have the very specific role of oversight of the fire and rescue service, is that in Greater Manchester we have been able to prioritise having the right capacity in the Greater Manchester fire and rescue service to support the regulatory regime—the inspection and enforcement programmes that are required. That work, and the oversight of the implementation of all the recommendations that came out of the two Grenfell Tower inquiry reports, is being taken forward. We can oversee all that through a series of governance structures that are led by our chief fire officer. One of the things that mayoral combined authorities are in a very useful position to do is to draw all those different players in a geography together.

[Peter Fortune]

Q You talked about the financial protection for residents. Do you think the Bill does enough to protect them from unreasonable service charge increases, and is there a sufficient vehicle in the Bill to enable them to challenge, question or appeal increases that they consider unreasonable?

Kate Green: On right to manage and resident management companies—although obviously we are also concerned that all charges are eventually at risk of being passed through to residents—the first thing I would say is that they are already experiencing quite significant financial burdens, because they are unremunerated for what is in many cases a substantial workload. Despite the welcome mitigations in the Bill, they also still ultimately face the risk of criminal sanctions, so we would certainly like attention to be given to that.

In terms of service charges, there are concerns around transparency; residents must be fully informed about the way in which service charges are made up. In my past life as a constituency MP, I think we saw that some professional commercial managing agents were more transparent than others. There needs to be that ability to ensure that the conduct of commercial managing agents is in the interests of residents—obviously they will be acting in the interests of their principal, but we should be very clear about their obligations on behalf of their principal to residents. Frankly, appeals are the last resort, are they not? What we actually want to see is a robust system, which ensures that service charges are fair and proportionate, and that no resident is required to pay, through their service charge or otherwise, for faults and defects in their building that are not of their making.

[Peter Fortune]

Q Do you think the Bill does that?

Kate Green: I would certainly want to see more protection for residents who are acting in the right to manage and resident management company space. Prescribing more closely what can and cannot be reflected through service charges may be something that the Government should explore.

[Sagal Abdi-Wali]

Q You spoke about the undue burdens that residents have had to go through for so many years. I want to ask about the clear backstop. Where those responsible have ultimately failed to act, what difference do you think it will make in allowing public bodies to step in and get the work done?

Kate Green: The difference ought to be, from the perspective of the resident, that the work gets done first and that the argument about who pays does not delay the work to make their homes safe. A backstop needs to be exactly what it claims to be: a backstop. What we actually want is a system that ensures, much more swiftly, much earlier and much more effectively, that people fulfil the remediation obligations imposed on them.

As I say, we are probably particularly concerned about those developers whose remediation activity will be overseen through the medium of the developer contracts. We still have quite a complex landscape, I think, of ways in which residents might try to compel remediation. A backstop is necessary, but we would much prefer to see a left shift, ensuring that the obligation to remediate is carried out by responsible actors at the earliest point and is compliant with regulatory requirements from the start of the process.