Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what progress his Department has made on identifying solutions to support leaseholders with (a) the incidental costs of waking watches and (b) other incidental costs with the exception of remediation incurred as a result of dangerous cladding having been installed on their leasehold properties.

The most effective way to make buildings with unsafe cladding safe and eliminate the need for interim measures and associated costs is to have the unsafe cladding removed as quickly as possible. That is why we are prioritising £1.6 billion public subsidy on remediation of unsafe cladding. However, we recognise residents’ concerns about the cost of waking watch measures and the lack of transparency of these costs. That is why we have collected and published information on waking watch costs. This will enable those that have commissioned it to make comparisons and challenge providers on unreasonable costs. The data is available at: www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-safety-programme-waking-watch-costs.

The Government also welcomes the National Fire Chiefs Council's update to its guidance on Simultaneous Evacuation published in October (available at: www.nationalfirechiefs.org.uk/Simultaneous-evacuation-guidance). We have asked the Fire Protection Board to advise Fire and Rescue Services on how best to operationalise the revised guidance including looking into other measures such as installing building-wide fire alarm systems to reduce the dependency on waking watches wherever possible.