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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, whether he plans to take steps to ensure that building developers, which have not signed the building safety repairs pledge, rectify fire safety defects in buildings they have developed.

The Secretary of State has made it clear that developers must take responsibility for buildings with which they are associated. As of 23 May, 45 of the largest developers have signed a pledge to undertake all necessary life-critical fire safety work on 11m+ buildings they had a role in developing or refurbishing over the past thirty years.

Those pledges are being converted into legally binding contractual commitments, and the Department intends to establish a statutory Responsible Actors Scheme to make sure that industry actors are doing the right thing. The Department is now reaching out to further industry actors who were not involved in initial negotiations, and inviting them to make similarly binding commitments.

We have made clear that we will not hesitate to use our recovery unit and new powers in the Building Safety Act to go after companies and executives who fail to do the right thing.

We have also committed to using a building safety levy on the industry to raise a further £3 billion to pay for remediating cladding on 11m+ buildings where a developer cannot be identified or held responsible.