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

Peter Fortune Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Andrew Cooper]

Q Kate, the Government are asking a lot of the social housing sector, and have been for the last few years. I recognise what you say about safety being the top priority, but the Government are calling on you not only to deal with remediation, but to build new homes, ensure they are decent homes to improve the quality of the stock, and dampen mould. Many of your members are engaged in estate regeneration activities.

On the other side, the Government have provided some certainty to the sector through rent convergence, through the 10-year rent settlement, through the social and affordable homes programme and by bringing you in scope of the building safety fund. Do we have the balance right in the resources that are available to the sector from central Government versus what you would expect housing associations to fund directly, either through service charges or through rents paid by tenants?

Kate Henderson: Thank you very much for the question. In the last 18 months, the Government have done a huge amount to rebuild the capacity of the social housing sector—housing associations and councils. Importantly, that has included equal access to building safety funding with an additional £1 billion into the cladding safety scheme. Alongside that, we now have a 10-year rent settlement, rent convergence and the new National Housing Bank. Low-interest loans will hopefully be introduced soon. We also have, of course, the social and affordable homes programme.

The Government have very much listened and engaged and are working constructively with us. We are ambitious, both about ensuring that our existing homes and service provision are of the quality that we would all want and about building many more new homes. All our members are impacted by the building safety crisis, but those less impacted now have more capacity to deliver homes. If grant funding were available, we could deliver tens of thousands more social and affordable homes.

In terms of the balance we have now, we are looking at the overall regulatory landscape. As I say, we support the introduction of the decent homes standard and the implementation of Awaab’s law. We absolutely support and are working very hard on the building safety regulations. But there is a cost to all of this. Our ability to do all those things at once will be down to the individual priorities of organisations. We are meeting quite stringent timelines, which have been set by Government, on things like minimum energy efficiency standards. We support that direction of travel, but there is only so much money in the system.

You mentioned regeneration. We would really welcome more flexibility in the social and affordable homes programme to deliver replacement supply as well as new supply. We are very focused on net additions. I understand that we desperately need more homes, but we do need to invest in places. Similarly, when it comes to investing in building safety measures, I have mentioned the welcome funding that came earlier this year for high-risk buildings under 11 metres. There is not enough money to support those works. If there were more money, based on assessment of the applications that have come into Homes England for the under-11-metre scheme, that would free up the capacity to do more supply. We want to do all those things; our ability to do them at pace is impacted by how much money there is in the system.

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

Q I will repeat a question I asked this morning: do you think the Bill protects leaseholders from unreasonable increases in service charges?

If I can be cheeky, I have a second question, which should perhaps go to Kate. Do you have sight of your members’ risk registers? If so, how are they flashing up some of the challenges presented in the Bill?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: Much of our written evidence is focused not just on the service charges, but on the unintended consequences. It might fall on residents to fund litigation to pursue the responsible people—the polluter, effectively—to deliver remediation. We want to see greater protection for those.

There is already a lot of law, particularly under the Building Safety Act 2022, around what can be passed through the service charges and what cannot. Building Safety Act costs and service charges have gone up around 50% in the last two years. That is still a very small proportion of those service charge costs, but where residents are not protected at all is for risk mitigation measures, interim measures, fixing internal defects and non-cladding work. There is no funding for that. It is outside the scope of the remediation contract for the developers; it is outside the scope of PAS 9980.

Ultimately, when we speak to our members, mostly residents are picking up the tabs for those interim measures, regardless of whether they are waiting for the cladding to be replaced. Compartmentation, fire stopping and fire doors is a significant issue. We must look at how we fund that and how we protect leaseholders from those rising service charge costs.

The other thing, which came up this morning as well, is higher insurance premiums. We are seeing insurers and lenders price risk not just on cladding, but on those internal defects and on structural defects. We do not just have a cladding crisis; we have a safety and construction quality crisis. That is what we are finding. These buildings are not lasting as long as they should. That is coming home to roost and is landing on leaseholders. They did not cause these problems in the first place, but it is being visited upon them, so one of the things we would like to see is greater protection for those residents.

Part of that solution will be looking at the qualifying and non-qualifying leaseholder protection provisions in the Building Safety Act. We appreciate that the Secretary of State introduced proposals to change some of the rules around that. We would like to see it go altogether. Why, as a leaseholder, should you have to pay for any defect that was not of your making? The process, the regime, is highly complicated. It is very, very difficult for a leaseholder to get involved in the process, and it creates an unstable resource pot to fund the remediation, because even if you have a cap, you only pay 10% of that cap, which means that you could be waiting 10 years until the pot is large enough to undertake those works.

There is a lot that can be done to protect leaseholders from further costs from all this. Good question—thank you.

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[The Chair]

We have roughly 10 minutes and four Members to get through.

[Peter Fortune]

Q Your experience of being tethered to this hideous situation is so frustrating. When I speak to residents in my constituency who are trapped, they constantly talk about the lack of communications and the unfair and unexplained costs that are being heaped on them. Do you feel like your thoughts, experiences and suggestions have been taken into account in the construction of the Bill?

Giles Grover: Not really, no. Honestly, we have tried so hard to help to show officials the way forward and what they can do to actually improve the situation. I am a residents’ management company director; because of the way that the developer contract has been handled at my building, I have tried to resign, but we cannot resign, because it will then go to the head leaseholder.

At RMCs all over the country, we have volunteers who really want to look after their homes. They are clever, intelligent people and they do the same things that freeholders do, which is to appoint agents, but they are still battling well-resourced developers and well-resourced freeholders and are trying to follow really labyrinthine policies.

There was one building in Sunderland that needed waking watch cost payments and had to put that in place in a few days. MHCLG said to them, “Fill out a building liability order, send that to your freeholder and give them 30 days to respond.” But they needed 20 grand or 30 grand that week—what is going to happen there?

A lot of it is the mentality. We have seen what has happened over the last 20 or 30 years under successive Governments, across industry. We have to put people at the centre of it and forward fund where it is needed, whether for interim measures or non-cladding defects, and then have the Government use their power to recover those funds. That would be the only sensible way forward. Until we get that in place, this crisis is not going to end.

Sophie Bichener: I would add that the Second Reading announcement on the non-qualifying improvement from three to six properties was definitely something that we had been speaking about quite a lot; we felt that had been heard, but it is not protecting all leaseholders, which is what we have said, relentlessly—no leaseholders should be paying for this. Why should one leaseholder be innocent and another have to pay for a building? Although it is welcome, I do not think it went far enough.

I feel that leaseholders are just getting more and more desperate. Giles and I have campaigned on this for 10 years. People are looking for answers and for a way out and, unfortunately, we were not able to go back from the Bill meetings we have had to say, “Yes, this is a little glimmer of hope for everybody.”

There are a few bits in the Bill that will go some way to helping some people; but, as we said at the start, it is not all people. Ten years on from Grenfell, I do not think we should still be wondering, “Will everybody be involved in the help that is coming?”. It should be that everybody has a chance to live in a safe home—if not now, they should know when that will be made safe. At present, there will still be too many people who do not have answers.

Giles Grover: The Government need to understand the number of people who hate their home right now—they are first-time buyers, and they just hate where they live. What is this system that we are living in?

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

Q Part 3 of the Bill deals with building ownership information, which has often been a cause of delay in trying to establish where ownership lies. To what extent do you think what is in the Bill at the moment will unblock some of those delays that a lot of your members, activists and people you work with have experienced?

Giles Grover: It will probably help but, again, it should have been in the Building Safety Act in the first place. Everything should have been effective from 14 February 2022. We were told at that point that freeholders would not be able to sell and pass on their liabilities, but they could; we saw that happen at a number of buildings. It might help to clarify a little bit, but it should have been there a long time ago—and what does that clarity mean? It will just mean that they carry on with this remediation that will leave us in the homes that we are trapped in, which are not fully safe and sellable, or they will force us to pay huge costs as well. Yes, we need to get to that point, but ultimately it is the gaps and issues that we need to address, so that when we get to that point we are not suffering the costs and effects.

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[Darren Paffey]

Q Do you not think it would be sufficient, as things stand, to have a kind of ultimate set of dates—which, actually, the Secretary of State has already done to some extent? Would you expect there to be almost micromanaged turnaround times for each part of the process? Where is the right balance, in terms of having one end goal that everyone is working to or shorter timeframes that everybody has to comply with, but might be seen as overreach?

Alexander Cook: It could be. A lot of the things that we come up against with lawyers are in terms of how the remedial works contract is drafted. If you think of construction contracts, it would not be unreasonable for there to be definitions of delay. Rather than just having “a reasonable excuse”, which is a bit broad, you could have specifics, and then there could be timeframes related to some of those, which would help to accelerate buildings where the responsible entities are not performing.

[Peter Fortune]

Q How do you think this seemingly interminable planning crisis has affected the wider market, in terms of building costs, delivery or stuffing up the pipeline?

Alexander Cook: I cannot comment widely on the market—that is not my speciality area—but I can say that we have seen that safety is a factor in residents’ requirements, which is completely justified. We have also had experiences in London, as I said earlier, where delays to projects have then affected the supplier demand, in terms of where people are available—what flats, what height, and so on—across the UK. Ultimately, the market has slowed in London, particularly due to the regulator’s decisions that have not allowed us to get on site. With our dedicated team on the remediation side, it has not affected the delivery, as such; if we were able to proceed, we would have.

[The Chair]

If there are no further questions from Members, I thank you very much on behalf of the Committee for your evidence. We will take a short break before the next panel.

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[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.

[Peter Fortune]

Q What is your understanding of why there is a reluctance to follow that model, where applicable? Also, what is your understanding of the reluctance to solidify or consolidate the “tolerable” level? Why not just firm it up? Why do you think there is pushback on it?

Dame Judith Hackitt: I cannot answer the second part of that question, I am afraid. We have to get to a landing on what is an acceptable level of risk. I know that will not be easy, but I think it has to be done centrally, rather than allowing these debates and different interpretations to continue. They are holding up progress, of that there is no doubt.

[Peter Fortune]

Q We heard from previous witnesses that there was a shift away from an “adequate” level to a “tolerable” level, so there must have been a decision to shift from one to the other. What purpose does that serve?

Dame Judith Hackitt: Personally, I think the language is unfortunate. We need to be talking about life safety here. It must be an acceptable level of risk that does not put people’s lives at risk. Part of the debate is property loss versus life safety—what matters is life safety.

[Peter Fortune]

I do not understand what the reluctance is.

Dame Judith Hackitt: Neither do I.

[Sean Woodcock]

Q Dame Judith, we are obviously here largely because of the Grenfell fire and its consequences. At the time, I was a local councillor and working in social housing. The very strong impression given to those of us wearing those hats, from the Government down, was that this was such a terrible tragedy that it could not be allowed to happen again, and that, although there would be trade-offs, we would make sure that lessons were learned and that remediation happened to prevent a repeat. We are now further away from that, nine and a half years on. Given your experience in Victoria and the question about culture, do you share my concern about whether that consensus is still there all the way down? Do you have any views on that? Is that at the root of the issue?

Dame Judith Hackitt: Is the question whether I think people are less committed to—