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

James Asser Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

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

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

As we have London Fire Brigade witnesses, I declare that my partner works for it, in fire safety.

[Sagal Abdi-Wali (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

I declare that I am still a councillor in a local authority.

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[Florence Eshalomi]

I will let colleagues come in.

[James Asser]

Q Starting with a practical example, five tower blocks in my constituency—the deputy commissioner may be aware of the case—have been evacuated because of serious concerns about structural problems. A month in, we are surrounded by engineers, some people are still in the building, many are scattered and homeless, and businesses are unsure what they are doing.

We cannot answer what is actually wrong with the building, but everything stems from that in terms of whether we need to be clearing people out. In the first instance, everyone phoned the fire brigade, because they thought, “Hey, it’s not safe,” but it sits outside the fire brigade’s powers because it is not a fire issue; it is a structural one. In terms of your powers and where powers lie, where those responsible fail to take building safety seriously or to act when they should, what differences would clearer duties and stronger consequences make? Would additional powers in your remit be helpful in achieving that?

Dan Daly: As the previous panel talked about, the Bill provides a number of tools to a number of different regulators, and that is helpful and should be applauded. In terms of some of the unresolved questions and historical challenges that Lord Roe was talking about, the Bill will struggle to address some of the structural issues, and we will still find ourselves with the issue of who takes the lead in some circumstances. Because the issue falls back to one of public safety, fire and rescue services are often the agency that will stay around, even when we do not necessarily have an ability to affect the outcome, particularly when it comes to structural issues and issues of construction competence down the line. We will be there predominately to support residents and to try to protect their safety.

I am not sure whether it tackles the historical issues. They are some of the unresolved elements of competency throughout the system that we identified and were talking about three or even four years ago, when the Bill was first mooted. I am not sure whether it does enough to tackle those, but it does give some responsibility to regulators elsewhere, which does add value.

Spencer Sutcliff: The example in your constituency is somewhat symbolic of the wider building construction issues over the last few years. I have great sympathy for the impacted residents; it is a terrible situation for them. Dan Daly is correct that the London Fire Brigade has been drawn into this issue despite not having the powers, as it stands, to resolve it—although we naturally have responsibilities around emergency response and other contingency arrangements.

We welcome the Bill, and the work that we will be done to clarify the enforcing responsibilities of each responsible agency will be welcomed—we are a long way through that as it stands anyway, with various protocols and long-standing work and arrangements—but it will not necessarily resolve this particular issue, and I suspect that other unique challenges will show themselves over the years, like this one has more recently.

[The Chair]

Mr Asser, you want to repeat the declaration you made at the start of proceedings.

[James Asser]

Yes. I am sorry; I should have done that beforehand. My partner works for the London Fire Brigade in fire safety issues.

[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.

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

James Asser Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We have five minutes left and one Member to get in, so I will be grateful if you can keep your answer quite brief.

Kate Henderson: Yes, of course. I agree with what has been said. It is important to recognise just how distressing this is for leaseholders and shared owners, who feel trapped, cannot sell their home and are facing rising service charges and insurance bills. People really need a route forward. Accelerating remediation is absolutely the key to this. For us, having access to remediation funding has been a really important step forward, but we want to work with Government to unblock delays and ensure that wider safety defects do not leave residents facing continued uncertainty. There is more I could say there, but I will not. I will just say, on risk registers, that the Regulator of Social Housing will collect this data and will be engaging with all housing associations, but they have to stress-test their business models.

In terms of risk, the Bill itself is part of a tool for addressing the wider building safety crisis. Building safety will be a top risk for all our members, and they will all have mitigation strategies.

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

Q I deal with huge numbers of leaseholders every week—in East London, this is a big issue—and many of them are in effect doing second, voluntary jobs in trying to work and manage their buildings. Many of them are now taking up volunteer resident director roles. I was speaking to some last week. They are very willing and they are teaching themselves, but they were saying that one thing they would very much like is routes into support to make sure that they are doing their job properly. This is with the extra duties coming in through the Bill. What practical support do you think we should be putting in place—generally, but also specifically in relation to the Bill?

Jaclyn Mangaroo: Where there is an RMC or an RTM director or company, they should be given access to a fund to at least fund the litigation up front; they should not have to be scrabbling around in their pockets to try to fund litigation or go after developers. That would be really helpful. It is unfair that they have taken on a role as a volunteer, as you say, are trying to do the right thing and are having this duty visited upon them. I think they will need special consideration when it comes to the enforcement and sanctions in the Bill. They do not have a big pot of money to fund either the remediation work itself or the litigation costs or legal costs to pursue the responsible parties.

[The Chair]

We have come to the end of our allotted time. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you very much for your evidence.

Examination of Witnesses

Giles Grover and Sophie Bichener gave evidence.

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[The Chair]

May I steer you back to what the Bill is about and to the questions, rather than a much more general view?

Sam Dumitriu: I am just saying that if we want to place cost burdens on developers, we need to be transparent about when there is a strong justification for doing so. At the moment, I think the justifications in this Bill make a lot more sense than those for many of the other burdens we place on developers.

[James Asser]

Q I want to come back on a point you have made a couple of times about new buildings being inherently safer. I understand the logic: you mentioned the technology in them. However, I wonder where you factor public trust into that, and how it fits in with regulation.

One problem that we face on the back of the cladding scandal is that so many of the buildings we are dealing with are very new. As I was telling the Committee earlier, I have five tower blocks evacuated, with hundreds of people homeless. All those blocks are under 10 years old. Naturally, all the neighbouring developments are now questioning whether they are safe, because of their similar age, even though they are different buildings by different developers.

People have to trust that new buildings are safely built, but they are looking over their shoulder when new development comes along—you see a lot of that now. Although I understand your point, to sell and develop, you need trust for those new buildings; people need to be able to say, “I’m going to move into them.” Where do we factor that in? A big part of the cladding scandal is that it has stretched into so many new builds. Logically, you should be right, but there is that problem.

Ben Hopkinson: I am well aware of the somewhat justified concerns about quality in new builds, especially given that new builds are expected to fund all these different priorities, and corners are sometimes cut on certain issues. However, just think about what new builds now have that older buildings do not: no flammable materials on façades; they all go through the Building Safety Regulator; and they all have sprinklers, wet risers for water all the way up, firefighting lifts, smoke ventilation, three fire doors between a flat and an exit, and two means of escape. There have also been certain changes to the way that fire brigades handle large incidents. Taken together, I think you can feel pretty confident that new builds are safer than existing buildings.

[Sarah Coombes]

Q I agree with James’s point that we have had some awful examples involving relatively recent buildings. One, which I have mentioned a couple of times and will not go into again, burned down not many years after it was built, leaving the leaseholders in a totally nightmare situation. On the question of liability, I take the point about burdens for developers but we have just had End Our Cladding Scandal in; they talked about leaseholders who are not to blame for any of this and are left with enormous bills, unable to sell their properties and trapped in unsafe homes. That has a knock-on effect on the wider housing market.

Part of the Bill is about holding product manufacturers liable. A lot of Government money has gone to fixing this, and developers have also put in money, but we feel that product manufacturers so far have not played their part in the equation to fix this safety crisis. Do you have any comments on that part of the Bill in terms of getting all this stuff sorted and fixing some issues you have raised?

Sam Dumitriu: One concern when you are trying to work out who is really liable for a problem is that there are often a lot of cooks. Cladding materials that could be used safely in certain contexts have often been used in the wrong context, and in that case you would not want the liability to fall on the manufacturer.

One of the reasons why this has been a slow process is that some of the things we are dealing with are very complicated. Sometimes, you are dealing with people who have left the country and found ways of avoiding things, which is not acceptable, but you are also dealing with cases where there is genuine professional disagreement. In those cases, you do not want people responding to that by coming up with a done decision that is not necessarily correct.

Ben Hopkinson: I echo that. Clearly, manufacturers have not been contributing to the remediation, and there are definitely instances where they should have. I have one broad concern. If a cladding manufacturer has been mis-selling or was not following the rules and regulations in place at the time, they should absolutely pay, and it is good that the Bill is holding them to account. But if the manufacturer followed all the Government guidelines at the time, it is a little bit more complicated, because you do not want to do too much retrospective liability increasing. That will make people unsure: “If I follow all the Government guidelines and regulations right now, but something that neither the Government nor any of the manufacturers or developers foresees then happens, am I on the hook for that?”

There has to be some limit to these retrospective claims, because they destroy investor confidence and any attempts to build new buildings. If you can be held liable even if you followed all the rules in place at a time, why would you want to manufacture building products or build the homes we desperately need? If a cladding manufacturer mis-sold a product or was clearly engaged in corporate malfeasance, they should be punished, and money should be recouped from them. But if they were acting honestly and following the rules at the time, that is a much more difficult circumstance.

When we are changing the standards, this becomes a Government burden and should in turn be funded from general taxation, if we think as a society, “These are changes we should make to buildings.” We do not want retrospective attempts to take back money from people who were following the rules, because that just leads to people not wanting to invest in the first place.

Oral Answers to Questions

James Asser Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I commend the fire services across Wales, England and Scotland, given the challenges they faced. I know that aerial support was needed in Wales, and we looked at that as part of the wildfire summit that we held. We will continue to work with them and that aerial support will be available across the UK so that people can use it when they need it.

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

A week ago, three blocks of flats in Canning Town underwent emergency evacuation after serious structural flaws were found. A further two blocks have subsequently been evacuated. With over 300 flats now evacuated, and no timeline or indication of when this will be resolved or when residents can return, this is causing a huge amount of distress and serious financial worry. Will my hon. Friends take whatever action they can to help resolve this appalling situation, with a particular eye on support for the families and businesses who have been displaced?

Commonhold and Leasehold Reform

James Asser Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

My hon. Friend has been an incredible champion for residential freeholders and leaseholders in his constituency. It is precisely because of ground rent increases of that scale that we are imposing, via this draft Bill, a maximum cash cap. I am more than happy to meet him to discuss the draft Bill and related matters.

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

I declare that I am a leaseholder. Correspondence from leaseholders in my constituency, which makes up a lot of my inbox, mentions poor service, rising charges and homes that they can no longer remortgage or sell, causing financial difficulty. They will very much welcome today’s announcement, but will the Minister reassure them that the Government will rise to all the challenges that they face, swing the balance of power back towards homeowners, and tackle the real problem of service charges, through which leaseholders are being fleeced for poor-quality services that are often not even delivered?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. His constituency is just over the river from mine, and is, in many ways, very similar. Day in, day out he will receive, as I do, complaints about service charge increases and onerous ground rent terms. That is precisely why we are taking action, in this Bill and elsewhere, to provide the kind of relief that he seeks for leaseholders. As I said, over the course of this Parliament we will end the system for good.

Contribution of Muslims to Communities

James Asser Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. Like him, I have a very diverse community, as he knows, because he was once a resident there. My seat in east London has long had, as east London has historically had, a reputation for communities working together and supporting one another.

My hon. Friend has talked about the age of politics that we live in—a time of populism. Siren populist voices would like us to think that community engagement has gone. Does he agree that the work of the diverse communities from different parts of the world, and particularly of those in the Muslim community, with how they engage themselves in business, charity and social life, shows that up to be the lie that it is?

[Dr Ahmed]

I wholeheartedly agree, and I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. In fact, the thrust of the conclusion of my speech will be how important social cohesion is. We must keep that at the forefront of our minds.

The rhetoric we see online has the ability, surreptitiously, to desensitise all of us, and that desensitisation is finding its way to places such at the dinner table, where it is becoming an increasingly acceptable form of conversation to indulge in anti-Muslim rhetoric. As it does so at those dinner tables, at Muslim dinner tables across the country people are questioning their place in this society. This trend should worry us all, because it undermines the fabric of our society, our cohesion and our identity as a country. We know from other forms of hatred that what starts with antisemitism or anti-Muslim hatred rarely stops there.

Temporary Accommodation

James Asser Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) for giving me the opportunity to contribute to his debate. I congratulate him on securing a debate on this extremely important topic. I agree with much of what he has said, and how he has highlighted the problem that we face.

My local authority of Newham faces an absolute crisis in temporary accommodation; the situation is one of the worst in the country. To give the House some indication of where we are, there are 6,700 households in temporary accommodation in Newham, which is more than in any other local authority. That number is growing by around 30 households a month. One in 20 homes in Newham is now temporary accommodation. The cost of temporary accommodation for next year will be £72 million, adding £31 million to the council’s budget overspend. Homeless applications this year are up by 26%, which adds to the borough’s waiting list—there are now 38,000 people waiting for housing.

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

While Chelmsford city council’s figures cannot match those given by the hon. Member, they are still stark. It is terrible to see how much they have changed over recent years. Does he agree that many councils around the country face this issue? In my constituency, the percentage of the council’s core spending that goes on temporary accommodation went up from 5.62% in 2020 to 24.44% in September 2024. The number of cases in 2020 was 256, but we are now looking at 500 cases. It is a massive increase that is very difficult for councils to cope with.

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[James Asser]

The hon. Lady makes a valuable point. The figures are hard to believe; sometimes I have to check that I have not misread them or added a zero. As she highlights, the issue affects councils across the country and seriously adds to their financial problems. This is clearly unaffordable and unsustainable, even in the short term. We desperately need support, so that we can deal with the impact on councils’ budgets; they face huge pressures already.

As the hon. Member for Eastbourne pointed out through the example of Kelly, his constituent who is in the Public Gallery, the issue is the impact on families. Since the cost of living crisis began, when the supply of temporary accommodation slumped and demand soared in my borough, my advice surgery has seen a massive increase in casework. People have come to see us who have been living for months in a hotel room—a perfectly decent hotel room for someone staying three or four days, but not for a family of four or five people for months on end. They are living in a single room without cooking facilities. The impact on the parents’ mental health and the children’s physical health and educational opportunities was really quite serious. It is difficult to deal with the sheer numbers.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I thank my hon. Friend and neighbour for giving way. I am old enough to remember when bed and breakfasts were commonly used for households who could not get permanent accommodation. That was rightly dealt with because it was a scourge on modern society. Does my hon. Friend agree that we are now slipping massively backwards because of the numbers he outlined, and that we need to find a quick solution, in order to support our constituents?

[James Asser]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. We have gone back from people in temporary accommodation living in flats to hotels being the only option. My council is desperately seeking alternative solutions, but the sheer scale of the problem makes that very difficult. As a fellow east London MP, the Minister will understand the problem and the issues that we face. I ask the Government to look urgently at financial support in the short term, so that we can try to deal with the immediate crisis, but we also need a long-term solution—a financial solution to help councils through these difficulties, and a long-term solution, a way to build social housing. My council is one of those pioneering the building of new social housing, but in the grand scheme of things, we are effectively talking penny packets, given the scale of the issue that we need to deal with.

I appreciate that we inherited this crisis. It has been exacerbated by the cost of living crisis, and seriously exacerbated by the difficulties that councils have faced as a result of the funding settlements that they have had over the past 10 years. They are juggling 10 years of austerity and the cost of these problems. However, it is a crisis that we have to deal with. I am confident that we can, but it is clearly something that we have to tackle as a matter of urgency, not just for the sake of our councils’ budgets, but to help the people who most need help.