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

Darren Paffey Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Gibson]

Q Will the Bill make a material difference to the leaseholders in the buildings or will the lack of resource in the ability to enforce on the ground be such a big block that they will not notice a material improvement?

Mark Norris: I think they will notice a material improvement from this legislation. The experience of the Joint Inspection Team is that you might know what is wrong with the building and what needs to be fixed, but progressing things through first-tier tribunals to get the ruling that that is what the building owner or responsible entity needs to do takes time. Giving us something that places a duty on responsible entities to fix the building—that says very categorically, “This is what you have to do”—will help to speed that process up. But you are right: councils will need resources and capacity in addition to that to help them make the most of the legislation and the tools available in it.

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

Q My question is to Lord Roe and Mr Pugsley. As in other parts of the country, residents of affected buildings in Southampton—we have dozens in the city centre—have waited years with waking watches while developers and management companies wrangle over responsibility. When they finally get a submission into the BSR, in some cases they have waited up to 40 weeks. You mentioned some of the statistics on improvement, but is there anything in the Bill that will materially assist or hinder you in more swiftly turning around those remediation approvals?

Lord Roe: Those are two different things. I would not want to confuse necessary operational improvement with legislation to deal with bad actors. What you are talking about there is our responsibility to appropriately take a decision on what is sometimes a very complex situation, with thousands of pages to each application, while also operating in the context of a national lack of suitably skilled people to do facade engineering—also a particular point of risk. All I can do is point to the evidence, which shows that there was an unacceptable situation a year and a half ago when we came in: if you were one of those residents and had an application submitted into our system, you could wait up to a year or more. That was not okay and I have apologised for it repeatedly in other Committees.

We were charged to turn that around. I would argue—I have got to say this in defence of the team responsible—that we have done that, because we are now at 92% approval and with 20-week determination times. That will come down further, although maybe not by a lot—this is not about poor bureaucracy or a lack of emails or care anymore; it is about the engineering complexity of getting a building safe that has been built really badly.

The message to your constituents is first that we are super-available. Charlie and I get hundreds of emails into the inbox every week from people who often have rightful challenge—or sometimes do not. They will get a reply and response and, where necessary, we will unpick individual cases from the top of the BSR hierarchy down.

The point is that we can evidence the operational improvement. It is real and it is there in the figures. It is also there in the experience of both industry and many residents. We meet with all the campaigning groups almost weekly to gather intelligence, try and pick off poor actors and recognise where we are doing wrong and where there needs to be improvement in the system. I know, though, that is not going to be a comfort to people who are still trapped inside those blocks and who are under tremendous pressure. All I can tell them—I am sure many of them will be watching—is that we will be doing everything in our power to improve our system and force recalcitrant actors to do better. However, it is a complex problem that has been three decades-plus in the making.

Charlie Pugsley: One thing in the Bill is a duty to bring forward the assessment; that is something that we found in our remediation enforcement unit and have chased up. We work closely with Homes England and other partners. If that duty helps drive that forward, one part of the bigger puzzle will have been progressed and can help. But as Lord Roe says, there is no silver bullet; this is about a collective endeavour.

[Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Q The three witnesses who have spoken have supported the Bill; I appreciate that Helen has not yet been able to give her view. However, we can have the best Bill in the world in terms of remediation and sorting out the cladding issues across the country; my question is about whether there are enough people with the right qualifications and skills to carry out all the duties that this Bill will place on the industry.

Lord Roe: It is not just the duties inherent within the Bill; it is the skilled contractors on the other side of it. The answer is no. This problem was built over decades, across successive Governments of all colours who neglected to invest in construction skills. This is not a political point, but the reality is that there is a very significant national endeavour to correct that, led at Secretary of State level. However, it will take time to reverse. There is a very real problem, and this is part of the complexity.

The Bill is a good tool for enforcement, which we will use, but to be fair to applicants, if you cannot get a specialist scaffolder because none is available in your area, or you cannot find the right facade engineer, we need to be pragmatic about how we chase your application. Otherwise, we will potentially force applicants to engage with poor or unskilled contractors. There are hidden dangers within all of this. If I am honest, all of us are trying to fix the plane on the runway because this mess was created over a number of decades.

The skill shortage is quite profound on both the industry side and for us. We pay very good rates; we are a costs-recovered agency. We employ the same private engineers that the applicants will be trying to employ as well, because there is a small pool of specialists within this field. There is currently a lot of investment to build that capacity, but you do not train these people in one year—it is not like that.

My point is that this Bill is great, genuinely, and we will use it selectively against people where it is appropriate to do so. Before someone else gets to it, I should say that that is unlikely to be resident managed entities, because that would be punching down. That is not okay and we are well aware of that, but there is a much bigger operational problem, which we are all charged with helping to solve, along with the industry, because we will not solve the problem without it.