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

Florence Eshalomi Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We are now sitting in public and the proceedings are being broadcast. Before we start hearing from the witnesses, do any Members wish to make a declaration of interest in connection with the Bill?

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall and Camberwell Green) (Lab/Co-op)]

Only that the headquarters for the London Fire Brigade are in my constituency.

Examination of Witnesses

Jaclyn Mangaroo and Kate Henderson gave evidence.

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[The Chair]

If there is anything that you want the Committee to know, you can write in. Ms Henderson, you suggested that there was some information that should be put before the Committee.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Jaclyn, for your members, I know that one of the issues is clarity about who is responsible for the buildings. Do you feel that this Bill will go far enough to achieve that, so you have greater clarity about who is responsible and remediation can happen quicker?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: That is a very good question. I think it goes some of the way by imposing that legal duty, but sometimes that does not fall on the person who will be accountable in terms of having the resources or being able to actually deliver remediation. I am thinking about resident management companies and right to manage companies that would become responsible entities and have that legal duty. They do not necessarily have the resources needed to compel a pledged developer, for example, or a product manufacturer to do that without pursuing them through litigation. RMCs and RTMCs do not really have those resources; they have the service charges, but they cannot always use those to fund litigation or remediation works themselves.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q What practical support do you think volunteer resident directors would need to fulfil their duties in this Bill?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: We welcome the remediation backstop, but that it would be great to see that come further forward so that you do not have to go through enforcement or sanctions to get to that remediation backstop. Particularly where we have evidence that buildings are stalled in the very early stages of project scoping, I think that that would be a reasonable opportunity for the regulators to step in and bring in a remediation manager or bring forward a remediation order or remediation contribution order. I do not think that some of those resources are necessarily being used proactively. I have not seen any transparent data on their use by Homes England and other regulators, and I think that could really help.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Kate, you touched on your members having access to the Government building safety fund. Obviously, that was not the situation before; what difference do you think that makes in terms of them undertaking the critical safety works that are so desperately needed?

Kate Henderson: Equal access to remediation funding, brought in last year at the spending review, is hugely welcome. It has made a big difference to our ability to deliver remediation at pace and to invest in existing homes and development. Previously, our members—housing associations—and councils had to self-fund remediation, which diverted resources away from new homes and refurbishment. Some of our members even had to sell buildings to pay for remediation work. Members are now actively applying to the cladding safety scheme and receiving funding. We are expecting starts and completions of remediation by our members to begin to increase as we get the approvals. Homes England will be able to provide more data on that.

Funding from the cladding safety scheme also funds things such as project management, which is really important to deliver remediation faster. It frees capacity within our member organisations to build new affordable homes and improve existing ones. I should say that the funding only covers external wall defects; members are still facing significant costs for internal walls, including compartmentation and fire doors. We very much welcome the cladding safety scheme funding for high-risk buildings, and new funding has become available for buildings under 11 metres that are also deemed high-risk. That opened earlier this year, and we understand that that fund for buildings under 11 metres is massively oversubscribed. It would be really useful to have the data from those applications to understand the scale of works required in high-risk buildings under 11 metres.

In the sector more broadly, there are lots of other significant changes happening. We absolutely support Awaab’s law and welcome the clarity in the decent homes standard, but recognise that those measures all add cost. Remediation funding that we have access to very much helps to meet those competing demands and makes them more manageable, but the overall financial picture remains complex and has its challenges.

[Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)]

Q I will put this question to both of you; please answer as you see fit. Is it a shortcoming of the regime that building owners, who will have the financial incentive to minimise remediation costs, will appoint and pay a fire risk assessor? We heard this morning that lack of independence and lack of consistency in assessments may be part of the issues of delays and leaseholder confidence. I wondered if you had any thoughts on that.

Jaclyn Mangaroo: That is a really good question. In some cases, it may be. We have seen it most often with the pledged developers where they are using a contractor that may be part of the organisation, and so are marking their own homework. For a responsible entity where it is an enfranchised building, or where an RMC or an RTMC has the opportunity, they have really no incentive to say that their building is safe when it is not. They have very little incentive to do that. They really want to go much further.

The regulation of the profession will certainly help to improve competency, and hopefully it will speed up the process and reduce delays, as long as that auditing of the fire risk assessments can be done quickly through Homes England. We are all about making sure that there are fewer delays, that stalled buildings can get started and that residents have peace of mind. There is no deadline. There is no set date for when buildings will be finished, so making sure that we get peace of mind, confidence and protection of residents into this Bill will be so important. That is how we have approached our written evidence to the Committee: does it speed things up, does it provide clearer accountability and will it actually give residents peace of mind and create safer buildings?

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[Gareth Bacon]

I am sorry, because that is fascinating and I could talk to you for a long time, but unfortunately other colleagues need to come in.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q It is good to see you again, Giles and Sophie; thank you for meeting me previously. Obviously, as you are aware, this Bill deliberately focuses on the unsafe external wall cladding, following on from the Grenfell inquiry, which found that the external walls were the principal reasons for the fire. One thing you have all stated is that you wanted the Government to come in where the responsible entity had failed in terms of remediation. Do you feel that the remediation backstop, which will in essence enable a public body to come in and get the work done, will make a difference for residents?

Giles Grover: Going back to the basics and the framing of the question, cladding was the reason for the fire spreading, but we must also look at the insulation that was part of the cladding, the stay-put policy, the defective smoke vents and the defective fire doors. That is not being fixed in one go immediately. That is the first problem with this.

We have always called for compulsory purchase orders. Bob Blackman was on the Housing Committee in 2020 that called for compulsory purchase orders, if the pace was not quick enough. The Government response was, “Okay, we might consider those.” It is long overdue, and a lot of this is now putting it on a statutory footing, but how long will it take to take effect? If you look at the Bill’s impact assessment, it is about 180 buildings and 12,000 residents, so it is not real material change, the change we were promised by Labour. It is probably good, but it should have been there a while ago. We need a heck of a lot more.

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[Gareth Bacon]

Q A final question from me, because other colleagues do need to come in. It is probably fair to say that there is a certain level of overlapping confusion about who the regulator is in the event of remediation, because we have local authorities, fire risk authorities and the Building Safety Regulator.

A question posed by one of my colleagues, who is not here this afternoon, is: in the event that they do not agree over who should be the lead regulator on something, who should hold the ring? Who should be the organisation that actually makes things happen? Who has the coercive power, if I can put it that way? Do you have a view as to who that should be, and do you think the Bill establishes that?

Ben Hopkinson: I am well aware that the Bill contains a duty to co-operate between the three different regulators you described; it is less clear to me whether it has the means to resolve differences between them. A duty to co-operate is one thing, but actually doing so and moving forward is another. I think we have seen that happen where different regulators overlap.

I know the Fingleton review on nuclear was very clear that there are concerns about whose obligation it is to decide, and that there is a culture of excessive caution in which you never want to be the one who actually makes the decision. On who the final regulator ought to be, I do not have a particularly strong view, whether it is local authorities or the BSR. I just think it should be specified whose decision it actually is. You would then build up some level of responsibility there, rather than having a slight fudge of, “Well, why don’t we all co-operate?”

Sam Dumitriu: I agree. In theory, the Building Safety Regulator should have access to the best expertise on this; however, it also has capacity challenges. One thing that I think has been underappreciated in the move from local authorities doing building control to the Building Safety Regulator is that local authorities, with housing targets and legal obligations, have an incentive to process things faster.

It is not just that it is their job; we know that many public bodies, even when they are given statutory targets to meet a certain deadline, do not necessarily decide things in that time. Local authorities at least have some sort of pressure from the top to say, for instance, “Actually, can you decide this a bit quicker? We don’t want to be in a position where we’ve missed our housing target by this much and therefore lose our ability to have a say over this type of development.”

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Ben and Sam, you have talked about the clarity that is needed on that. Do you feel that clear responsibilities for who does what will help with decisions on delivery and new housing coming forward?

Ben Hopkinson: Clear responsibility, and then having the incentives actually to make the decision, would be quite good. We have to remember that the new buildings we are processing applications for are inherently significantly safer than the ones they are replacing. When it comes to fire risk, the two largest risks are the age of a building and overcrowding, both of which new buildings help alleviate.

Even in the past several years, buildings have become significantly safer, with sprinkler systems, fire evacuation lifts and no flammable materials in cladding. We really ought to figure out all we can do to make it easier for new buildings to be built. If that means assigning a regulator a specific task and trying to avoid the paralysis you get when multiple regulators have some share of the say, that would be an improvement.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q On that, do you agree that we should prioritise the safety of residents in existing buildings over new builds?

Ben Hopkinson: Yes. There is definitely limited capacity within regulators, so we have to figure out where that capacity gets us the biggest safety improvement. Given that existing buildings are less safe than new buildings, they should be the priority for the BSR or a similar regulator.

Sam Dumitriu: I agree with that; I am happy to accept completely what Ben says.

[Sarah Gibson]

Q Would either of you have a view on whether the considerable flexibility in PAS 9980, and its term “tolerable”, has caused issues around the competent person scheme? Is part of the concern that people are not sure exactly what the criteria are for what they should and should not be doing? Is the term “tolerable” creating inconsistent standards in fire assessment, which is adding to the delays?

Sam Dumitriu: There is a trade-off between prescriptive and more flexible regulation. Sometimes you might like to have very clear rules, even if they err very far on the side of caution. I think that in the case of building safety, what we have had is a few pieces of Government guidance in the past that have probably been too tick box and restrictive, and that has caused problems. I think that the approach of PAS 9980 is the right one in focusing on proportionality. I also support the position in clause 44 on tolerable risk.

As mentioned, it is very important that we prioritise the types of remediation that happen, because there are very large constraints in terms of who can deliver and assess these projects. As a result, you need some way of making sure something is proportionate and remediation is not necessary in every case. It can be very costly and that work can also potentially push other projects back in the queue.

The area of policy that I have spent the most time focusing on in recent memory is the regulation of nuclear power, and Ben has also raised the Fingleton review. We have some very similar issues here because it is a question of “health and safety principles”, “reasonably practicable” and terms like that. You tend to see regulation that errs on the side of caution—which in safety is understandable—but there can be a tendency to do work that is not 100% necessary.

In the case of building safety, one consideration around external cladding is that you often might have a building owner who has financial interests in the cladding being remediated that are not solely safety related. There might be a different cladding material that requires less maintenance, is more resistant to weather or might make the building nicer. If there is a potential safety case, what you do not want is a situation where that cladding is changed even though we are pretty confident that, in the event of a fire, everyone can be safely evacuated—the building might experience some damage, but ultimately the people inside the building get out okay, which is what we really care about. My instinct is that we do not want to move to a system that requires more work being done over what is proportionate. It is really important when we look at all of these things.

I think that in the Building Safety Act, in many cases, we have erred on the side of regulation beyond what is proportionate, particularly around second staircase rules for buildings above 18 metres. I think that it could very easily be raised to 30 metres without providing any real risk to the public. We need to be very cautious about insisting on things beyond what is proportionate.

Ben Hopkinson: “Tolerable” seems to be the right standard in the Bill. There is a completely understandable drive for caution and safety within these complex issues. However, we have to be careful about proportionality. Already the Bill’s impact assessment shows that the costs of it are 10 times higher than the benefits. If you removed tolerability and mandated complete safety, how expensive would that be? Would we accidentally shut down new construction because we are burdening house builders with incredible asks on development capital?

There are a lot of competing issues here and tolerable seems to strike the right balance. Certainly, you want to make sure that the kind of buildings that are most unsafe are the ones that are remediated first, and removing a tolerable guideline risks buildings with only minor imperfections being treated exactly the same as the ones with the most dangerous cladding. I think that the Bill, as drafted, seems sensible and obviously we will look at the regulations as to how “tolerable” is actually defined.

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[Gareth Bacon]

Q One aspect of the Bill that colleagues are probably quite interested in is that there are potentially overlapping and conflicting regulators, such as local authorities, fire and rescue authorities and the Building Sector Regulator. Do you have a view on the duty to co-operate between those three? In the event that they do not agree, who should command the ring? Who should be the coercive power?

Alexander Cook: We support the co-operation of all authorities and the fact that they have to issue their statement. From my reading of the Bill and the proposals, Homes England is going to be the auditing authority of the fire risk appraisal of external walls, which is dictating the scope. The way it works in the developer remediation contract is that MHCLG will be the auditor of the FRAEW. If there is a dispute between the parties, it is the deciding function. It would seem logical that Homes England performs that function if that is the proposal in the Bill.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q To date, developers and taxpayers have contributed millions of pounds in remediation costs and construction product manufacturers have not paid anything. Do you feel that getting co-operation from them will help when it comes to the challenges and finances that Vistry and other developers face?

Alexander Cook: We welcome the changes on manufacturer redress and section 149. That will help make sure that all responsible parties are held to account and share the costs. It will not make any difference in terms of us accelerating our works and delivering what we need to. It just means that the funding at some point will be recovered and will help the future growth of homes, which Vistry is uniquely placed to do as part of the Government’s affordable housing programme.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Which of the Bill’s practical measures will make the biggest difference?

Alexander Cook: The clarity of the section 149 changes, especially for reliance and the evidence required to hold manufacturers to account.

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[Gareth Bacon]

I need to give the Minister some time, so thank you.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Steve, you mentioned that you welcome some elements of the legislation. Do you believe that the proposals to go further in respect of construction product manufacturers will address and reinforce the issue around polluter pays?

Steve Day: Yes, I did not actually say it, but it was another element that I was happy about. The cladding manufacturers largely have escaped liability. I do not know if you followed our campaign with the Earl of Lytton in the House of Lords. We initially had a remediation scheme, which was trying to make developers pay for breaches at the time of construction with a wide construction industry levy, which did bring in construction manufacturers. That aligns with our approach, but there are some areas where you could extend the levy. The build-to-rent sector, for instance, has largely escaped it. They could contribute, given that they are building. Build to rent would be an area.

Before the Committee, we had a look at the latest status of developers and house builders. The top 10 have £24 billion in net assets, largely due to hoarding land banks and making significant returns to shareholders. We looked at just how much were share buybacks and dividends. For instance, Barratt Redrow has announced an intention to return £400 million to shareholders. With £24 billion plus £400 million, they can afford to pay a little more to cover all these leaseholders. On the buildingsafetyscheme website, you can see a breakdown of all the information that I am giving here, including the items of the mortgage-backed securities—we are going to publish those so that everyone can see the exposure due to bad building in this country.

I really encourage the Committee to look at whether freeholders may evade their responsibilities. There have been certain restructuring events that you might want to consider, which may mean that you have a good bank/bad bank scenario as we had at Lehman Brothers, where some assets may be transferred to the bad bank, and then there is no money to pay the remediation liabilities. I would recommend looking at anti-avoidance measures, potentially as an amendment to the Bill.

[Sarah Gibson]

Q You mentioned something that I questioned earlier about the PAS 9980 use of the word “tolerable”, and the fact that that ambiguity can have an effect not only on the safety of the building in terms of your concerns about the materials staying in, but on the wider housing market in terms of mortgages and insurance.

My worry is that we have seen poor construction and a race to the bottom over the last 30 years in the UK construction industry, and now the Government are hoping to build large amounts of new housing. How do we make sure that the housing that we are building now will not be the retrofits of 2050, and that we will not be in the same position then? What key things do we need to be doing to make sure that this does not happen again? Is it a question of building control? Is it a question of enforcement? What do we do to make sure that we do not end up here again?

Ian Abley: It is a question of regulation 7. You already have the tools to do it. They are adequate. Building regulation requirement B4(1) said that the external walls should be adequate to resist the spread of fire. That is still the case. The definition of “adequate” is the thing that is missing. But that forces you into a world of very straightforward thresholds of what is and what is not safe.

The problem with tolerability, to my mind, is not so much that it has not collapsed into a low. If the high and medium-risk buildings that already exist are declared as such to the Building Safety Regulator, they have to go through building remediation, which puts them back into the building regulation loop. The structure of PAS actually encourages anybody with a medium or high-risk building who cannot afford to remediate to shop around and find a fire engineer who will give them a “tolerable” report, and they magically get to avoid the building regulation process entirely.

Regardless of David Crowder’s intent for setting up a structure that looks vaguely like something that the Health and Safety Executive would do—with the carrot of risk going from unacceptable through tolerable and down to acceptable—what PAS does is encourage remediation avoidance. Any impecunious building owner is going to find it far cheaper just to employ a fire engineer who will give them a “tolerable”. I have seen that on an epic scale with a signatory to the developer remediation contract.

It is a beautifully connived process where everyone seems to be doing their job, but all that happens is the risk gets accepted by the building owner and then the process stops. The estates of buildings fall off the statistics, and it looks like the remediation problem is not as big as was first thought. If clause 44 mandates the tolerability wheeze into the legislation instead of defining “adequate”, you will see that right the way down to the 11-metre height.

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[Gareth Bacon]

Q And if that were applied nationwide.

Dame Judith Hackitt: Yes. It would need to be a risk framework for all existing buildings that are in scope.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Thank you, Dame Judith, for joining us. Following on from the shadow Minister’s questioning, you will be aware that the Bill seeks to legislate for a single consistent approach on external walls to help give more clarity to residents, developers and manufacturers. Do you feel that having Homes England audit all assessments that need remediation is a good way forward in ensuring transparency and trust?

Dame Judith Hackitt: I personally do not have a view one way or the other on whether Homes England is the right place to put that. What I do have a view on is that it needs to be an agreed risk framework that everyone has bought into. It needs to be a body that has the technical competence to oversee that and, in cases where there is a dispute, to overrule that and agree the standard to which the buildings are going to be remediated.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Drawing on your experience and the work that you have led on, how would you characterise the culture among those responsible for building safety? Do you think we need to go further to change some of that?

Dame Judith Hackitt: I think it is impossible to characterise in one word. It is a very mixed picture still. I am going to focus on buildings in occupation, because we have moved a long way when it comes to new build. The new regulatory framework and the way in which that drives certain requirements has moved us a long way in terms of building the right culture for new build.

The big problem that we have to address, and which the Bill is clearly aimed at, is the lack of progress at the right pace when dealing with buildings that are already in occupation. There, I think the culture is very much one of diffuse and unclear responsibilities, even now. That is exacerbated by a lack of competence and a lack of knowledge among the people who are deemed responsible. The sad part is that because of all that, legal disputes take precedence over taking care of residents and reassuring them that their safety is of primary concern.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I will leave it there because I am mindful that other colleagues want to come in.

[Sarah Gibson]

Q Thank you, Dame Judith. I am very interested in your response to the concerns about PAS 9980, on which I have to say I sounded a bit like a stuck record earlier in the session. Concentrating on the issue of trying to get remediation through more quickly, and the level of technical competence, do you feel that the discrepancies in fire assessments that we heard about earlier—where one fire assessment by the building owner says everything is fine and the independent assessment by the leaseholder says it is not—would be solved by the suggestions that you made to Mr Bacon in respect of clear guidance on what tolerance means, or do we need greater control and accountability, and perhaps regulation, of fire engineers and fire assessors themselves? Is it a problem with the assessment and the criteria for the assessment, or is the problem a lack of accountability by those carrying out the assessments?

Dame Judith Hackitt: The part about fire engineers’ competence and how we assess that is being addressed separately from the Bill. We already know that there is more work we need to do there, and I am involved in that.

Let us be clear, however, that we are never going to get to a point where fire engineers always agree on a single solution, because the nature of the beast is such that different solutions may be arrived at that give an acceptable level of risk. That is one of the reasons why we have focused on making all the regulation outcome-based so that it gives people the opportunity to look at different routes and so on.

In the cases where disagreements occur, it is really important to have a body that can stop that becoming a long-term delaying process and a dispute through the courts, and focuses on agreeing what is going to be done, getting it done and letting other things play out while speeding up the process whereby residents get to a position where they can both feel safe in their building and, indeed, sell their properties and move on if that is what they want to do.

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[Gareth Bacon]

Q Should the intended meaning of the word “tolerable” be defined in the Bill?

Dr David Crowder: I worry about the consequences of doing so. “Tolerable” and, equally, all the other words serve the same purpose, particularly when you think about health and safety law. The intention of the PAS was to support the fire safety order to enable risk assessment. I am sure we will come back to that in a second. “Tolerable” or “adequacy” obviously take into account the level of risk, which we can look at as an absolute level. Is risk high, medium or low?

The question of tolerability, which is similar to proportionality, or “as low as reasonably practicable” as appears in the Health and Safety at Work Act, relates to the ability to pay and what is within the duty holder’s gift to actually do in order to address risk. If Parliament decides to enshrine “tolerable” in law, that would have to be accompanied by some level of resource that puts the duty holders on the same playing field in terms of what they do to meet that bar.

That is because, for example, what a housing association with tens of thousands of properties can afford to do is very different from an individual family who have decided to make their investment pot a block of flats. I have dealt with customers who put all their life savings into building a block of flats, and it ended very tragically. Their ability to pay is not the same as a big housing association with tens of thousands of properties. That is the risk. Again, the PAS is simply trying to address a problem. It is a scientific, engineering-led process, but if we choose to set the bar at a particular level in terms of safety, we have to make sure that people can meet it.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q As the lead technical author for PAS 9980, you have a situation where, in essence, businesses and engineers, who are effectively paid for by the developers and builders, are using PAS 9980 as a way to sign off some of the cladding. That is so that they can essentially pass the building assessments. For clarity, could you explain what the standard is and is not designed to do?

Dr David Crowder: In terms of the original commission that was given to the British Standards Institution by what was then the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, it was written purely as a method for appraising the risk of external wall construction. This is responding to the Fire Safety Act amendment of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. A legal duty was created in the wake of Grenfell Tower to ensure that owners of existing buildings had a means by which they could carry out a risk assessment. Under article 50 of the fire safety order, there is a duty for the Secretary of State to provide guidance to enable risk assessments to be carried out.

Once the provision for risk assessing external walls was added, there needed to be guidance to fulfil that role. The PAS is not formally identified in that sense, but my personal view is that that is what it is for. It is not a design document, and it is not there to circumvent building regulations. It supports an entirely different branch of legislation. As has been mentioned by previous witnesses, if an FRAEW recommends building work, that work becomes subject to the building regulations, but that is distinct from what the PAS is doing. The PAS simply looks at the building in its current state and enables a decision to be made on whether or not something should need to be done. It is not an evaluation tool either—I know that RICS refer to it as part of their EWS1s. It is simply doing the job of appraising risk and the life safety impact of buildings.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Do you feel that a risk-based assessment of external walls is more appropriate than assuming that the presence of combustible materials necessarily means the need for removal?

Dr David Crowder: I do, yes. I take the view, which I know is somewhat different from that of some witnesses you heard from previously, that the ban reflects Government, and indeed the country at large, losing faith in the construction industry, and concluding that the industry cannot be trusted to work with combustible materials. In the building regulations, regulation 7 sits apart from the functional requirements under schedule 1. Those are all couched in terms of safety, whereas regulation 7 simply says, “Do not use combustible materials.” That is fine, and I do not have an issue with it, given the way that trust has fallen away, but I am confident that it is perfectly possible to build a safe external wall façade, despite it containing combustible materials.

I am equally confident, as I have seen examples, that just because an external façade is non-combustible, it does not make it safe. I have seen a nine-storey-high terracotta rainscreen with no cavity barriers and weak enclosure around the windows, which means that smoke is potentially ducted across the nine storeys of that building. It is non-combustible—great, but it is still a life risk to the residents in that building.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Obviously, a number of people purchasing properties are not going into it as building, cladding and material experts. We are trying to legislate to identify the most dangerous form of combustible material on buildings. Do you feel that the Bill as it currently stands provides a sufficient definition of unsafe cladding and related defects?

Dr David Crowder: Again, I have not focused my interest on the Bill; I am concerned with the PAS. Currently, the Bill simply refers to the PAS, and the PAS gives a definition of whether a building is safe in terms of the risk of external fire. I know it is not for me to ask the questions, but I suppose there is a question to put back to those writing the Bill: are you seeking simply to limit the ability of any square metre of external wall to burn—to reduce its propensity to burn at all—or are you looking in the round at whether the people in the building are safe, in spite of the possibility of some fire spread?

This is where tolerability comes in. A number of public consultations have occurred around what people are content with. Let us start with buildings that comply with the building regulations as written right now, and buildings that have solid masonry wall construction. They are low risk, because the walls simply do not burn, so there is no hazard that anyone needs to concern themselves with in terms of the external walls. That does not mean that external fire spread will never occur, because you can still get window-to-window fire spread, but the walls will not make the problem worse.

If you have combustible material, the follow-on question is: how far does it go? How far up the wall could the fire spread if that combustible material was involved? Does it cross compartment lines, and is there therefore a likelihood of the fire going somewhere else? The final question then concerns the internal arrangements: if that spread should occur and covers a reasonable distance across the building, are there facilities for people to get out of the building?

We have taken a very scientific approach to it, and I am not sure it is conducive to legislation, to return to your question. There is probably a shorter, punchier way of doing it, but my fear, and the driver behind the way the PAS is written, is about giving people options and not assuming that everyone has the resources to do absolutely everything to mitigate risk.

[Sarah Gibson]

Q I am one of the people concerned about the word “tolerable”. Your suggestion is that the definition is clear enough. Our earlier witnesses have said that they have seen building owners come up with assessments that differ vastly from other assessors, yet your feeling is that the definition of what they should be aiming at is sufficient and we do not need to go any further with it.

You mentioned that, for fire engineers, control and signing up to ethical standards and so on is in the process of being done. One would therefore expect that fire assessors, who are, of course, more likely to be involved in the remediation we are talking about, would also be included in that regulation. My question is: do you think that the level of control over those applying the assessment and the ethical codes that go with it are sufficient to limit the issues we have seen around discrepancies? Is it more a question of enforcement than legislation for what is causing the discrepancies?

Dr David Crowder: I think that enforcement would help. The answer to your question lies not necessarily within “tolerable” but in the freedom that users have been given to simply reach different conclusions and walk away. That is what we have tried to clamp down on with the redraft.

By way of example, I review FRAEWs on occasion, and I am quite obviously well versed in what PAS 9980 says. We have risk tables in the PAS that give different risk ratings to different features of buildings, and I have seen instances where appraisers will quietly slip in that a feature of a building has a different risk rating from what the PAS says it should have, and that then flows through and changes their outcome. The new PAS—the 2026 edition—says that, for any deviation, including that, you have to declare in your report that you have done something different. With multiple appraisals, people now have to explain why they have reached a different conclusion.

I have seen instances in the past where appraisers are restricted by their professional indemnity insurance and all they can do is condemn combustible cladding. They will not be given professional indemnity insurance unless they condemn everything combustible and give the okay only on stuff that is non-combustible. I argue that it is an ethical problem that they are allowing their work to be influenced by a pressure other than the science and engineering—that needs to be declared. If that is the reason their report says something different from the previous one, they need to say that that is the case.

Equally, it might just be because they do not have the risk appetite. If it is simply risk appetite, they need to say that, so that people can take them to task and we can start getting some clarity. We have done everything we can to try to narrow the field, and I would like to see more appraisers being held to account when they are providing answers that people do not understand.

The additional thing is peer review. We have also prescribed in the 2026 edition that when an appraiser is reviewing somebody else’s FRAEW, they should not simply start again at the beginning, run through the whole process and then reach their own answer, which is likely to be different because different engineers have different views. We now positively say that they are instead expected to go through the other engineer’s work—

--- Later in debate ---

[Florence Eshalomi]

Thank you for that; it is really important. I am not sure if all colleagues are aware of the new highlights from Minister Pennycook today in terms of charges being passed on to leaseholders. It is allowing leaseholders to interrogate and ask their building freeholders for more information around the insurance costs. It is allowing leaseholders to challenge some of those costs as they come forward. These are all measures we hope will help in some cases where leaseholders have been asked to pay more but in essence get a much poorer service.

Separate to that is the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, which I know you have campaigned on for a very long time, Mr Cooper. We are hoping it will come back to the House before the end of the year. The Prime Minister committed to that in PMQs yesterday. That will help leaseholders in terms of challenging unfair ground rents, where we are seeing many leaseholders pay in excess of £1,000 for nothing.

There are big issues around the service charge. Some leaseholders actually want to get rid of their managing agents, so the right to manage is another area being covered. We are looking at a whole range of packages to help leaseholders who have ultimately made that commitment to a home, because for many of them that dream has turned into a nightmare.

I hope, as the Bill progresses, the packages in it, especially some of the packages for non-qualifying leaseholders and packages for buildings under 11 metres, will help alleviate some of the cost of living pressures that many leaseholders up and down the country are facing.

[Andrew Cooper]

Thank you, Minister. I was going to ask you about the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, but you got ahead of me.