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

Sarah Coombes Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Gibson]

Q Is the PAS 9980 use of the word “tolerable”, which is rather vague, detrimental to the clarity that you are seeking?

Giles Grover: We have been saying this since before it was even introduced: it is all about what “tolerable” means. Again, I understand that we need something about proportionality, but so many different fire engineers will have so many different opinions and views. If something is deemed tolerable, whether it is a building that requires works or does not require works, there must be assurance and proper audits to ensure that the conclusion is based on tests and evidence.

If I am being honest, we have been through 20 or 30 years of just a lot of rubbish being built. Now everyone is saying, “Residents, leaseholders and shared owners are at the heart of this”, but they are still doing all they can to avoid liability, including financial liability. We are the ones trying to battle for answers, and we are sadly just going around and around in circles.

[Sarah Coombes (West Bromwich) (Lab)]

Q End Our Cladding Scandal has been an incredibly strong advocate for leaseholders across the country. Although I am the MP for West Bromwich, one of my constituents was a leaseholder in a building in east London. The building was built in 2016, but it was found to have cladding and dangerous safety issues, and it then burned down. The residents were made homeless and it was very scary for them. They were forced to continue to make mortgage payments on non-existent homes, and the freeholder then went into administration. That shows not only the horrendous safety issues, but the nightmare financial scenario for lots of these leaseholders.

One of the things that residents often call for is greater certainty about what is happening to their buildings and when, particularly what remediation work will be done and over what timeframe. What value is there in requiring those responsible to set out the steps they will take and, critically, the timetable for remediation? What are your thoughts on that element?

Giles Grover: Every single leaseholder and resident needs to understand what is going on in their building and how long it is going to take, but they also need an independent route to raise concerns. The system has been designed in such a way that, even with the developer contract and the cladding safety scheme—which is doing sterling work, but in a very constrained system—a lot of it still relies upon us having to go to the managing agent or a freeholder for answers.

I have one person in a building who went to the RMC, which said, “Go to the developer”; but the developer said, “Go to the building safety regulator”, and the building safety regulator said, “Go to MHCLG.” They had to fill out a correspondence web forms, but they got a stock answer that said, “Go back to your freeholder.” Yes, people need to be put at the centre of it.

There is the ability to include dates and timescales, but they actually need to be monitored, overseen and enforced, with consequences and penalties at the end of it. That way, it is not just a case of saying, “Oh, it’s the BSR and the regulatory capacities; okay, fair enough. Oh, they’ve had to do more FRUs.” The problem is that the system still allows too much to rely on those self-interested actors making those decisions. They will all tell us that safety is at the heart—but we are actually watching their actions, not their words, and they still are just not good enough.

Sophie Bichener: It is really hard to force people to communicate correctly with leaseholders. A lot of the time, freeholders are saying, “We are communicating”, but for the leaseholders, the communication says, “We’re trying really hard to fix this at pace.” Our members never have a clear picture of whether that means next week or in five years’ time. I have actually never really seen any comms about my building that give me any timeline or confidence that anything is happening.

I think it would be really hard to mandate communication that involves leaseholders, but it absolutely has to happen in order to give leaseholders any confidence that their homes will be safe and that, if they want to try to move on, move out or sell, they can get information on when the timelines for making their building safe will fall into place, and they can then feel a bit more confident not only about where they live being safe, but about, “How and when can I move on with my life?”.

Giles Grover: I should try to be positive again, because I am possibly being a bit too negative. Homes England has built stipulated communication points into its cladding safety scheme, so there are certain points of the process where you have to upload it before you get more funding. That is completely sensible; it actually looks at the quality of it and makes sure that it goes to the right people. Again, the developer contract is the one where it is about ticking a box that just says, “I am communicating 100%, so everything’s fine—see you later.” We need more consistency across the piece.

There are ways to do this, and that is what we have been trying to say for the last two and half years. We can actually simplify things, put people at the centre and save money. Sadly, we have not quite got to that point yet.

[The Chair]

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

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[The Chair]

Mr Law, you have one quick question; we have not got very long.