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

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from the Building Safety Regulator, Homes England and the Local Government Association. We must stick to the timings in the programme motion that the Committee has agreed, and for the purposes of the witnesses, that means that this session will end at 12.05 pm. I ask each of the witnesses to introduce themselves for the record.

Charlie Pugsley: Good morning. I am Charlie Pugsley, acting chief exec of the Building Safety Regulator.

Lord Roe: Good morning. I am Andy Roe, chair of the Building Safety Regulator.

Helen Fisher: Good morning. I am Helen Fisher, the director of the cladding safety scheme and interim measures alarm fund at Homes England.

Mark Norris: I am Mark Norris from the Local Government Association.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

Q Lord Roe, first, it is good to see you again. Secondly, do you believe the Bill is sufficiently clear on which body will be responsible for enforcing the legal duties for remediation?

Lord Roe: It is nice to see you. The Bill gives powers to a series of regulators, which is useful. The first thing I want to say is that we welcome the Bill as another tool in our arsenal. It is not a panacea, but it will certainly be useful with the most recalcitrant actors in this landscape. I think, between us, we are clear how we operate. We are in constant dialogue—multiple meetings a week—with the likes of Homes England, local authorities, the London Fire Brigade and other fire services, and there is very good co-ordination.

There is no single hierarchy that necessarily fits all circumstances. My experience of having been a regulator in this space for a very long time is that you choose the most appropriate regulator set against the circumstances. You need to do that early in any potential enforcement process. It normally comes through a memorandum of understanding in the context of those individual circumstances. To set a sort of hierarchy within this would potentially be a mistake.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Can you explain why? To play devil’s advocate, when you have fire rescue authorities, local authorities and the Building Safety Regulator effectively all competing for the same space, why would the Bill not be an opportunity to make it very clear who should be enforcing remediation?

Lord Roe: Because remediation itself is a complex issue. Without wanting to go into infinite detail, the reality is that there is normally a number of different routes to enforcement on a dangerous building, and it is not necessarily through this piece of legislation. I want to be clear: this is one tool in the arsenal. If we were presented with a problem building or entity organisation, the first thing we would do is get on to the other regulating and enforcing organisations and decide what the best route of enforcement is. It might not be this Bill. It could be the Housing Act. It could be the fire safety order. The point is that determining a hierarchy for remediation is potentially a mistake. I would rather we operate as we do, which is in clear collaboration and set out in an MOU. I do not know if there is anything you would add to that in terms of practical reality, Charlie.

Charlie Pugsley: Normally, for example, the Building Safety Regulator would be expected to take the lead on high-rise buildings, but we have one case currently that we are working with the London Fire Brigade on, and we are both looking at enforcement. If the fire brigade is six months ahead—you are legally not allowed to duplicate—it is in the public interest and the interest of efficiency for the fire brigade to make that decision. If that is the case, so be it—they should decide, to get the enforcement in the most timely and effective way.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q How do you think the Bill takes things forward? If it will not clarify who is going to take the lead, how does it advance the position?

Lord Roe: It gives us more powers to tackle the worst actors in the remediation landscape. It gives us the additional ability to call those people in and force them to make progress. That is the advantage of this legislation.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q From your experience, looking at how this Bill is laid out and the work that you have been doing, what does persistent non-compliance look like?

Lord Roe: I am conscious of time, but it comes in all shapes and forms. It could be reluctance to devote the money required to an expensive specialist contracting model to get the work done, so you can hold things up at contract. It could be putting forward really poor, under-resourced design proposals. There are multiple different ways you can hold this process up. To be fair, lots of things make operating in this landscape complicated and hard. Perhaps I will come back to that as a principal answer: this is a good tool. It will not solve remediation, but that is not what it is intended for. A lot of stuff on the delivery side has to be improved, whether it is inside the regulator or the other agencies or out in industry. That will probably give us the greatest gain, but this is a very useful tool where people are not complying.

With the greatest respect, I hope the witnesses this afternoon bring up-to-date evidence. We have gone from a 30% approval rate and a median determination time on approvals into the gateway 2 system of over a year, which was completely unacceptable. Charlie and I were charged with trying to shift that. We publish data transparently every single month. We are now at a 92% rolling approval rate. We got the median determination time down to something in the region of 20 weeks, and we will reduce it further. I personally am not experiencing huge levels of non-compliance, to be fair to the industry. They have worked hard to improve the standard of applications and move things on, but this is a very difficult space to operate in—and where there are bad actors, this will be a good tool.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from the National Fire Chiefs Council and Jonathan Smith, the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade. For this session, we have until 12.40 pm. Will the witnesses please briefly introduce themselves for the record?

Dan Daly: My name is Dan Daly, and I am the director of service delivery improvement at the National Fire Chiefs Council.

Penny Pender: My name is Penny Pender. I am the head of policy at the National Fire Chiefs Council.

Spencer Sutcliff: I am Spencer Sutcliff, the deputy commissioner at the London Fire Brigade, representing Jonathan Smith, the commissioner.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q It is good to see you again, Mr Daly. It feels like a London Fire Brigade reunion here today. Are there enough competent fire risk assessors to hit the 12-month deadline that the Bill suggests?

Dan Daly: Currently, the answer would be no. For the work that has been ongoing, there have been some improvements to the monitoring of people who are undertaking risk assessments. Some work ahead—important work—is on the competency and regulating the role of the fire risk assessor. At the moment, more work is being undertaken by fire risk assessors, and that has been monitored. There is probably an overexaggeration of the levels of competency by individuals. Looking at the membership of professional bodies, alongside that competency route, is one of the ways to address the current shortfall. I admire the ambition in the Bill; it is important that we put high expectations on the delivery and remediation of buildings, but a number of aspects—one is the competency of fire risk assessors and access to them—are the Achilles heel of that ambition for the timeframe.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q I cannot speak for colleagues across the House, but I think that there probably is unanimity of support behind the intention of the Bill. The fact that we are still talking about buildings with unsafe cladding, more than nine years after Grenfell, is obviously not where we want to be. It is one thing to have ambition, but it is quite another to have the place markers in place actually to achieve that ambition. Is there a danger that, by putting a deadline of 12 months into the Bill, we are in fact setting people up to fail? Is it realistic that we can be in the position that, 12 months after Royal Assent, the targets will be hit?

Dan Daly: It is a fair challenge. As I say, personally, I quite like the idea of pushing or challenging timetables. Having said that, a number of the unresolved issues in the Bill we were talking about three years ago probably, and they remain unresolved. There is a pace to delivering the Bill and putting it in place where I think there are some weaknesses, and where those challenges are still present.

One of the aspects where we will be challenged is, to an extent, the pressing timeline to have a Bill in place, because it has been a long time coming. What we are seeing behind some of that is that it then pushes some real pressure on to other regulators, particularly around how we will work together under a collaboration and who takes the lead, which was part of the questions to the last panel. Those pressures are highly challenging, and it might have been better to have resolved them more satisfactorily before the Bill was launched.

[Gareth Bacon]

I am conscious of colleagues, so I will stop there.

[The Chair]

Minister?

--- Later in debate ---

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q One of the key issues we found was with residential personal emergency evacuation plans. We intend to legislate to mandate them, taking into account fires and people with additional disabilities. What difference do you think assessing the inside of a resident’s own home beforehand would make to the effectiveness of a personal evacuation plan?

Spencer Sutcliff: Naturally, we are very supportive of RPEEPs and personal evacuation plans. However, our preference would be for the measure to go further and look at fire risk within homes, rather than just being focused on the escape routes.

Dan Daly: I think there are other benefits, one of which is about providing extra assurance on the plans that have been put in place. We know that fires start inside individual dwellings; they rarely start in the common parts of a building. There is also an opportunity to ensure the maintenance of some of the passive fire safety protection that is designed within a building—whether that is where people have access to common service risers, or where they have made adaptions to fire doors and things inside those properties. That is part of the building integrity overall.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q I want to follow on from Ms Blake’s question, which mirrors a concern of mine. In the event that regulators do not agree, who has the coercive power to make things happen? If I have understood you correctly, you think the Bill would be strengthened if it made it clear, in the event of a dispute resolution, who holds the ring.

Dan Daly: I think the partnership agreement I was talking about would set out very clearly, in certain circumstances, who was leading on what. At the moment, where that is not as clear as it could be, and where there is a reliance on separate entities coming up with these in quick order after the Bill is passed, that leads to the possibility of inconsistency in how they are done. Of course, they do not always come to those agreements quickly, because there will be different viewpoints, so I do not think it would be unhelpful to do that ahead of time.

[Sarah Coombes]

Q A lot of the Bill is about breaking the impasse and trying to get the works done that are so desperately needed for leaseholders. Where engagement has not been secured, what difference will it make to be able to impose a financial penalty? Do you have a view on whether that element of the Bill will allow things to move forward?

Penny Pender: I think that the Bill provides a few more tools in the toolbox, as some of our colleagues said earlier. I think the introduction of some of those financial penalties is really interesting and useful to see. The proof will be in the pudding, so it is certainly worth trying them in certain circumstances and seeing how it goes. We hope that they will be helpful. I know that some fire and rescue services have potential interest in those being expanded beyond just the Bill to the application of the whole fire safety order. I think this will be a really useful opportunity to see how it goes, and then to learn from that. Hopefully, it will make a difference.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Bacon]

Q Good morning, Ms Green. It is nice to see you. Do you think that the Bill is sufficiently clear as to which organisation holds responsibility for enforcing remediation on buildings?

Kate Green: I think it is true to say, Mr Bacon, that one of the things that residents are looking for is greater certainty, and this is a very complex regulatory and enforcement landscape. We would certainly like to see greater clarity, not necessarily in the Bill, but perhaps in supporting documentation and guidance on how different regulators and enforcers interact with one another, on the escalation processes, and on who is responsible for taking enforcement action in specific circumstances, so that residents can be confident in how the processes work and that they work smoothly and seamlessly.

[Gareth Bacon]

Q You have basically mirrored some of the concerns that have come out in our panels so far this morning. One set of organisations that will be responsible for doing some of the work is local authorities, which we all know are extremely hard pressed at the moment. Does local government have sufficient capacity to carry out the enforcement measures required by the Bill?

Kate Green: Capacity is a real concern across the whole system, including for local authorities, as you rightly identify. We have welcomed, and Greater Manchester fire and rescue service, which I oversee on the mayor’s behalf, has welcomed the additional funding that we have received, but it will be important that all new burdens on local authorities are funded adequately and sustainably. The enforcement requirement—that regulatory role—is here to stay; it is not just a one-off, albeit that we clearly have a surge of activity and demand as we remediate a significant number of buildings in Greater Manchester, as part of the legacy of the appalling Grenfell Tower fire nearly 10 years ago.

I think it is important to recognise that particularly across fire safety enforcement and inspection we are struggling to recruit and, more significantly, to retain staff. There are real pressures and competition from private sector employers, who can offer much higher salaries. In Greater Manchester, across all 10 of our local authorities, we are giving high priority to protecting and supporting our residents, but there is no doubt that in times of considerable financial pressure on local government, as you identify, that is a challenge—and it is one that the Government will need to ensure is adequately resourced, so that local authorities and other statutory services can properly fulfil their responsibilities.

[Florence Eshalomi]

Q Good afternoon, Kate. Outside London, Greater Manchester has one of the higher caseloads of tall buildings with remediation issues. From what you have heard directly in the extensive work and engagement of Greater Manchester with your residents and leaseholders, where do you think the Bill will make the biggest difference to a number of those residents?

Kate Green: The first thing is to provide greater certainty and clarity about what is encompassed in the Government’s remediation commitments. We very much welcome the Bill and the funding already being made available to us to take steps to support our residents. It is useful to have those much more effective funding pathways.

We particularly welcomed the improvements in the funding process through the cladding safety scheme. I pay tribute to Homes England and Helen Fisher, whom I think you have heard from already this morning. That scheme has been a real game changer in enabling funding to begin to move into the system so that buildings can be remediated.

I welcome the provisions in the Bill on mitigations for residents who are exercising the right to manage their buildings or are in resident management companies, although we have concerns that there remains a risk of penalties and sanctions for those residents. We have made progress in Greater Manchester as a result of the attention that the Government have given to remediation of buildings with fire safety defects in recent years. According to MHCLG data, remediation has been completed for 152 buildings in Greater Manchester, but that means that we still have 181, as at quarter 4 last year, for which remediation is deemed outstanding. I would also point to the buildings that require remediation for other defects that will not be covered by the scope of this legislation.