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

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Lewis Cocking]

Q This is interesting, because you say that there are not enough qualified people in this industry and this space, and then you do not think the Government should be doing any more.

Lord Roe: No; I do not think the two things are the same. I think they are doing enough, but sometimes—I mean this with the greatest respect—I sit in front of Committees that want to see reversed in one or two years a problem that was decades in the making. Some of these people can take up to a decade to train. We are talking about very specialist work, particularly in the context of external remediation and façade engineering. These are some of the most experienced and qualified people in the engineering world. You cannot just invent them. It is a bit like growing the number of environmental health inspectors—these are really specialist.

There is £625 million inside the Construction Skills Mission Board, I think. To be fair, the previous Government had started a lot on this as well and I want to recognise that; the previous Administration, through Michael Gove, had started to do a lot of things with this, but it takes a long time to resolve. All the time the housing economy is difficult, by the way, it has an impact on available skills and the people who are going to get employed. So we are trying to get ourselves out of a cycle.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

Q Lord Roe, you have answered a few questions that I had about the balance of regulation and delivering on applications that are for high-rise flats but are not about cladding—they are about windows, for example, in my constituency. So my question is to Helen Fisher. What are your views on the Bill and specifically on independent scrutiny?

I have in my constituency a case that I think is a useful test case for the Bill. Barratt Redrow built a building; cladding was an issue but, in looking at that, all sorts of other issues about the whole structure of the building were uncovered. My constituents have been decanted for three years and they are asked to go back next week on the basis of a report by the developers, Barratt Redrow, who in their mind caused all those problems. My constituents want independent scrutiny of that. They want independently to know that, for example, the concrete that it has been made with, which is in question, is the right one. Are they safe to go back? Does the Bill allow for that? Where do residents go when they are being asked to return, or during a process of remediation, for that independent aspect of it? Do you think that is strong enough, or could more be done about the quality and consistency of assessments?

Helen Fisher: I will start with the same message that you heard from the other panel members: Homes England supports the introduction of more tools to ensure that there are things that can be done against those who are not doing what needs to be done.

In response to the question about independent scrutiny, the Bill is introducing tools to ensure that fire risk appraisals of the external wall are put on to a level where they will all have independent peer review. Our experience in Homes England is that when we put the cladding safety scheme together, we listened to residents and leaseholders; we worked extensively with End Our Cladding Scandal and others, and the message—this is the question that you are asking—came out very clearly from them that, over the decade since Grenfell, trust has broken down significantly between developers, building owners and managing agents. We placed the design of that programme significantly in the middle of that to make sure that any independent investigation that had been done by any party was brought into Homes England and put through panel engagement that was independently qualified in order to peer-review, challenge and ensure.

There are policy aspects that are difficult, such as proportionality; PAS 9980 itself has subjectivity to it, and we know, with our engineers and our panels, that there is a degree of growth there over the last two or three years in the programme. Scrutiny exists in the cladding safety scheme. I think we need to bottle that, and this Bill moves towards that—making sure of independent auditing of key investigation documents, such as a fire risk appraisal of an external wall, is having that form of scrutiny.

That is crucial for residents and leaseholders, so that they can have confidence in the documentation that is delivered by individuals and they do not have to concern themselves about who the original instructor of the documents is—whether it is a developer, a freeholder or a right-to-manage company. We have dealt with both ends of that spectrum from betterment and wanting the work to go further than expected, to the other end, where the position is trying to do the least amount of work as is tolerable.

I have a slightly different problem from Andy and Charlie, as we deal with this at every height. The Building Safety Regulator covers buildings of 18 metres-plus, and then there are high-rise buildings. The majority of 11 to 18-metre buildings now coming through are right-to-manage or small entities, so there is a need for us to operationally adapt to that to ensure we are giving support and helping with independent scrutiny, not just to ensure we hold the market to account, but to ensure support for right-to-manage companies so that they can take independent audit as assurance that that work is right for them.

Lord Roe: Could I just add something to provide a bit of assurance, since I imagine that some of your constituents will be watching? Obviously, if an HRB is above the threshold of 18 metres, it will come through our gateway process, which I know is onerous, but is onerous for a reason. We are going to look at the dead load of the façade engineering. We then look at it in the in-build phase as well, so we are going to get eyes on what they are doing—it is like building your extension—and then we sign it off. That is the point of enhanced building control, but it carries some complexity and it takes time.

On the flipside, although it does not solve some of the other problems around the split between internal and external defects, every high-rise building requires a building assessment certificate. That has been in law since 2024. Again, it was not communicated properly when the regulator was set up—we are not going to defend that—but we have done an enormous amount of communication since to educate and put guidance out there. That will mean that it has to come into our system on the basis of an assessment. We will look at the quality of that assessment in determining whether the evidence coming to us is accurate.

The safeguards are there in the legislation. The problem is that if you are living in one of these blocks, it is complex, it is long, it can be costly and there is a shortage of the specialists you need to deal with stuff. It is mind-blowing for professionals in the space who have been doing it for years—you do not have a hope as a resident management company director. I have the utmost sympathy for them.

The challenge to us is less about the Bill. I give credit to Helen; we see each other weekly and meet the campaign groups together. We are trying to get intelligence to improve across our shared systems. It is all about our operational improvement at the other end to bring internal and external defects together. Even if the funding does not match, can we do better inside our organisation to put it in the same team, so that you look at the building at one time? We are not there yet. We are on a pretty radical journey of transformation inside the regulator. A lot of stuff is a lot better, but there is more to do.

[Rachel Blake (Cities of London and Westminster) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q I want to ask about part 3 and the ownership of buildings. Many buildings in my constituency have complex ownership structures, some of which involve companies or individuals who do not live or operate mainly in the UK. I do not know who is best placed to answer this, but does part 3 address the foreign ownership of property sufficiently?

Mark Norris: Shall I go first and have a quick stab at that? As you know, there are complex problems with finding out and addressing ownership of buildings. As Lord Roe said, there are bad actors who deliberately try to obfuscate ownership to make it more difficult for people to enforce against them. Certainly, the experience that local authorities have had when using the Housing Act 1988 is that that is a problem.

The provisions in the Bill are at least trying to move us into a position where it is harder for people to hide behind legal entities and not take responsibility for what they should be doing. That is a stronger provision that enables regulators to take action to identify who the right people are. It is really helpful. Will it entirely solve every single problem? No, it probably will not. There will continue to be bad actors who do the best they can to hide behind something, but this is a good step in the right direction and gives us additional tools to take the action that we want to take against the people who really are responsible.

Lord Roe: May I add one thing? It goes back to Gareth Bacon’s question, which is a good question, about the hierarchy of regulation. An extension of that is, “Who do you enforce against?”, in terms of what Mark said. It is important for regulators to talk to each other about hierarchy, who owns it and what you are going to do in the detail across different bits of legislation, but you need to make sure you are not enforcing against people who do not hold power in the system, particularly the resident management companies. There might be some rogue RMCs out there where you might need to do it, but I have not yet come across that situation.

I need people out there to hear that, certainly from our perspective, this measure would be a tool of absolute last resort against those entities, because most often they do not have the power even to resolve their own issues. I want to be really clear about that, because I know there is a heightened level of anxiety about what the Bill might do to those people, as if we are being forced as regulators into doing things to RMCs. We are not. We have choices as regulators. This is a great tool for some of the people you identify. Personally, I do not think it is designed to punch down at RMCs. I think it would be completely inappropriate. We would do everything else in our power to help resolve the situation with them before you got anywhere close to this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Gibson]

Q I want to ask about the suitability of PAS 9980. One of our previous speakers, Ms Fisher, mentioned that PAS 9980 has relativity in it and includes the word “tolerable”. I am extremely concerned, and I want your views—sorry, I have slightly led you. I wonder whether you feel that PAS 9980 is the correct statutory methodology for the Bill, and whether you feel that leaseholders might be left unsafe, or feeling unsafe, and paying higher insurance premiums because of the word “tolerable”, which does not have a very definite definition and is such a relative term, as Ms Fisher mentioned. What alternatives might there be for a better definition of what “resolved” looks like?

Penny Pender: That is a really good question. It depends on what you want to be achieved through the Bill. From the point of view of controlling the risk of fire spread on external walls—that fire safety point of view—we are satisfied that the PAS does what it needs to do. Obviously, it does not deal with how the building should have been constructed to begin with or those wider issues, so if that is something that people are looking for it to resolve, they will remain frustrated. Even though we are happy that it would deal with those critical life-safety issues, you are right to highlight that some of the wider issues, such as insurance, would not be addressed through that means.

Spencer Sutcliff: We think that PAS 9980 is an appropriate assessment, and we would not want, necessarily, to bring in further methodologies that could confuse the arrangement or provide further inconsistencies. It goes back to the root cause, which the previous panel touched on a number of times: the competency of the assessor. When you are using an assessment that always has an element of subjectivity, you are entirely reliant on the competence of the assessor, and we have seen various examples of different assessors coming to different conclusions using that assessment. There is some ongoing concern.

We really welcome and would like to see more of the auditing arrangements for Homes England. Certainly in the initial stages, I would like to see Homes England audit those premises that have been deemed “tolerable” and not just look at the ones that are effectively failing the assessment, because there needs to be confidence that those assessments are done in a consistent manner. We are back, a little bit, to the root cause around who is doing the assessments in the first place.

Penny Pender: If I might build on that, as Spencer says, no matter what methodology you select, if the people using that methodology do not have the right competencies to begin with, you will come across those issues. For the time being, we need that methodology. It is what we have available to us, so changing it at this point might not be helpful. I am aware that the PAS has been updated recently to make it clear that you have to have regard to and think about the wider risks in the building, so it should ultimately lead to those risks being identified. It is just a challenge for people, when they do identify them, how to address them.

Spencer Sutcliff: There is extensive work ongoing around the regulation of those assessors, and we have standards in place. We do not yet have formal regulation of who is permitted to carry out those assessments; that is a work in progress, and we really encourage that the pace of that work is maintained and that it is brought in as soon as possible.

[Fleur Anderson]

Q My question is to the deputy commissioner about the Bill’s co-operation framework. I am the MP for Putney, and I have a lot of high-rise buildings, which are at a lot of different stages: some have been remediated, some are ongoing, some have not yet started, and the London Fire Brigade is involved in several of them. One case, which I think is the sharp point of this and a test case for the Bill, is a Barratt Redrow development. Having been decanted for three years, people will be going back next week on the basis of assessments done by Barratt Redrow, but the residents do not have any more trust in the developer because of what has happened. They want an independent assessment to assure them that they can go back, but they are being told that they have to go back or the locks will be changed. It is quite serious.

Do you think that the Bill’s co-operation framework will help? The LFB, the borough council, the local management committee and the developer are all involved in conversations, but who can the residents go to for that independent assessment to be assured that the building is safe? Is there anything more that can be done in the Bill to help in that situation?

Spencer Sutcliff: I think the Bill provides a sufficient framework for the work to be done to clarify the exact position around the responsibilities of each of the enforcing entities. It is not unusual at all for the London Fire Brigade to have protocols and memorandums of understanding with different enforcing authorities. For example, we have a long-standing MOU in London with the local authority around houses in multiple occupation, because we both have enforcement powers under the fire safety order and the Housing Act. It is right and proper that we distinguish the type of building, the type of occupancy and who is the lead enforcing authority. To act at the same time is not good practice; it creates inconsistency and would not be correct.

I think the framework proposed in the Bill is sufficient. We have already drafted an enforcement protocol with the Bill in mind, so the timescale proposed in the Bill to set out that framework is suitable and can be met.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

Q I apologise for being late, Mr Chairman; as you know, I was in business questions. I declare my interest as the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group for fire safety and rescue.

In terms of the fire safety of buildings, are you content that the Bill, as currently structured, is sufficiently robust to achieve the safety inspections and sign-off that will be required in the future?

Dan Daly: One thing we have been really clear about ever since the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire is that a whole-system approach is required to ensure building safety. Dame Judith quite rightly identified the need for the whole regime to be looked at. There are still elements within that—they have been referenced today—around competency, which is still an issue. There are the general skills requirements both across the construction sector and within fire risk assessors; we talked about fire engineering skills and those with the technical ability to address some of the risks that we now face, particularly when dealing with a historical property.