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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, whether his Department has conducted checks of the type carried out on residential buildings at (a) NHS hospitals, (b) schools, (c) colleges, (d) universities and (e) other public buildings.

We have initiated testing in priority buildings across the public sector, including hospitals, schools, colleges and universities. We are prioritising testing on buildings where people sleep overnight, which have Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) cladding and are of a certain height. Where appropriate, organisations are working with the fire and rescue service to put in place precautionary safety checks and measures. We have set up an expert panel to advise us on any immediate steps that should be taken to ensure fire safety, and we will act on those. The role of the expert panel and the advice already given following Grenfell is set out in a note published last week at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/explanatory-note-on-safety-checks-and-testing