Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill

Katie Lam Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for her remarks. All of us, across the House, agree on the fundamental need to resolve this issue. As she movingly said, the appalling fire at Grenfell Tower and the resultant loss of life were horrifying. I join her in paying tribute to the victims, survivors and their friends and family.

We all agree that home is the place where people ought to feel safest. It is deeply concerning that so many people across the country still live in a home that has been rendered unsafe, and we welcome the Government’s desire to put that right. The Opposition have concerns about some of the Bill’s provisions, and about whether the proposed measures will definitely ensure that more people end up living in a safer home. I will set out some of those concerns. We look forward to working with the Government to improve the Bill however we can.

Remediation of unsafe cladding is often slow because there are simply not enough qualified people to do the work. This point has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), but I will spend a moment on it. Every affected building needs a specialist assessment of its external walls, at a time when fire engineers and assessors are in short supply. Training new specialists takes years, yet the Bill does not lay out any particular plans for training those skilled professionals. Contractors face the same shortage of skilled labour and materials. Too often, owners who want to act cannot find anyone to carry out the work.

Remediation is slow because the work is complicated and unpredictable. When old cladding is removed, contractors regularly find further defects, so the scope, cost and delays grow. On top of those practical difficulties, many of the buildings concerned are part-owned by their leaseholders.

Remediation is also slow because when it comes to the practical implementation of the legal regime, the situation is fragmented. Implementation is managed building by building, and the responsibility is split between owners, managing agents, contractors and three overlapping regulators. Unsurprisingly, that drives up costs and drags out timelines, however willing the owners are. The Bill’s answer is to ask the three regulators to write a statement on how they will co-operate, which is not the same as getting the work done.

We already have evidence that a legal obligation, such as the one proposed in the Bill, does not by itself guarantee timely remediation. Developers on the developer remediation contract, which the last Conservative Government implemented so that developers, not taxpayers, would cover the cost of remediation, are already bound by equivalent requirements, which is why the Bill exempts them. The Government’s figures show that developers have finished work on only a third of their buildings, and fewer than one in four of all their buildings with life-critical defects.

Responding to the Public Accounts Committee, the National Fire Chiefs Council warned that limited workforce capacity was the primary bottleneck to remediation. The then NFCC chair, Mark Hardingham, put it best when he said that

“we cannot enforce our way out of the cladding crisis.”

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I do not want to be party political—I think we all know that this was one of the biggest failures of regulation in many generations, and it has affected many people very badly—but this is a disappointment. I wonder if the hon. Lady can reflect, as she is new to her post and new in this Parliament, on how decisions sometimes need to be made early. James Brokenshire, a previous Secretary of State—sadly, he is no longer with us—made some bold decisions in the early days after Grenfell, but then there were delays in things like getting fire safety surveyors trained up, which takes three years. If those decisions had been made earlier, we would be in a better position now. In the spirit of trying to improve things, will she reflect on why those decisions were not made and why we need to back this Government Bill to make sure that we move as fast as we can?

[Katie Lam]

I think it is fair to say that there are all sorts of ways in which the response to this appalling event and the wider questions that it raised did not happen as quickly and was not as effective as we might have liked—otherwise, we would not still be discussing it today. What is important now is that we make sure that whatever plan we come up with together, as a Parliament, is as effective as it can be to make sure that people are living in the safest possible homes. That is our responsibility now.

It should not come as a surprise that legislating to make something true does not make it so. Passing a law that says that buildings must be fixed will not create a single new fire engineer. Rather than easing those practical bottlenecks, however, the Bill too often assumes that the main blocker to timely remediation is owners deliberately choosing not to act. Our fear is that, as drafted, the Bill may risk making the problem worse.

Under the Bill, every building must be assessed within a year, and every assessment that recommends work must be audited by Homes England, drawing on the same small pool of specialists. There are owners who obstruct, and they should face the full force of the law, but they are the exception, not the rule.

I say once again that I do not doubt that the intentions behind the Bill are noble, but we must always be careful that legislation, even when drafted with the best of intentions, does not produce unintended consequences. Perhaps the clearest risk of unintended consequences comes with the proposed new legal duty. Owners could face two years in prison or penalties of up to half a million pounds for deliberately failing to remediate as soon as reasonably practicable. Those standards—“deliberately” and “as soon as reasonably practicable”—are broad and subjective, particularly given the severity of the punishments prescribed by the Bill. Given that many of the decisions about whether owners have complied with the standards will fall to the regulator, can the Government be sure that due regard will be given to the real practical hurdles to remediation? What guidance will regulators get on what counts as “reasonably practicable”?

Doubtless the Government intend for these measures to be used only in the most extreme cases of deliberate obstruction or delay, but we must be incredibly careful when designing new legal duties and criminal penalties. Like it or not, these standards will hang over owners who are attempting to act in good faith, but who are constrained by the practical difficulty of remediation.

Likewise, opening up directors to personal prosecution on grounds of neglect risks generating unintended consequences. While directors’ liability for building safety is long established, the Bill goes much further. Have the Government assessed how many capable people will simply refuse to be named as directors on remediation compliance plans? What will it do to the cost of directors’ insurance? What impact will it have on the willingness of well-run management firms to get involved in residential property? How many will conclude that it is simply no longer worth the legal risk? Have the Government assessed whether the Bill will have an impact on access to directors’ insurance more broadly, and whether it could create a disincentive to involvement in residential property by well-run management firms?

Another point of concern derives from the Bill’s approach to group accountability for parent companies and firms that are deemed to exercise control. The Bill builds on powers in the 2022 Act, but extends them from recovering costs to imposing penalties for offences. The Government must do more to explain where this stops. In 2022, Parliament let a court or tribunal look through a company’s structure where it was just and equitable to do so. The Bill will allow a regulator to adopt quasi-judicial powers and enforce large penalties in doing so.

Limited liability is an important principle that, in its modern form, has endured in this country for more than a century and a half. It encourages investment and entrepreneurship. The erosion of limited liability that the Bill represents may set a worrying precedent. Until now, Parliament has qualified the principle only through the courts. The Bill qualifies the principle through regulators rather than judges. If that is acceptable in one sector, why not in others? Even if we confine ourselves to this sector, can the Government be sure that the erosion of limited liability will not create a direct deterrent to investment in large residential properties, including build to rent? Housing in this country is far too expensive for far too many people. People must be able to trust that their homes are safe, but they also need homes to buy or rent in the first place.

Another concerning legal precedent emerges from the Bill’s provisions on retrospective liability for product manufacturers. In 2022, the previous Government gave building owners a route to claim against the manufacturers of defective cladding. The Bill goes much further. It loosens the test itself, so that a product need only have contributed “more than trivially” to a building’s being unsafe. The Government must explain why the 2022 test was not enough. Complying with the regulations in force at the time will no longer be a defence; firms that followed the rules can no longer rely on having done so.

Nobody would deny the existence of bad actors—firms that have broken the rules or falsified evidence about their own compliance. Such firms have put people in danger, and some of the consequences have been unimaginably awful. They must be punished. However, there is no reason to believe that those firms would have complied had the legal standard been tougher. The point is that firms that break the rules are going to break the rules, no matter what they are. As is so often the case, the problem is one of enforcement. However, in an effort to tackle this non-compliant minority, the Bill extends retrospective liability well beyond what Parliament agreed in 2022—something that we must always be very cautious about doing. When firms or individuals cannot be sure that complying with the law today will ensure legal safety tomorrow, their behaviour can change. They may be more reluctant to enter the market in the first place, and will certainly be more reluctant to innovate. Insurers will price in that risk, and every new home will cost more to build.

As with so many aspects of the Bill, the Government, in attempting to achieve a noble aim, risk undermining important principles. The presumption against retrospective legislation, the principle of limited liability and the principle of clear legal tests are foundational to the way in which we have designed the law in this country. Of course, we can deviate from them—in our country, Parliament is sovereign and can make whatever law it chooses—but when we do deviate, we ought to ensure that we do so with a full appreciation of the facts and implications. It ought to happen only when we can see no other way to solve the problem at hand, and only when we are sure that new legislation, rather than better enforcement or efforts to ease practical bottlenecks, is the right course of action.

I reiterate my appreciation for the intention behind the Bill. That anybody should feel unsafe in their own home because of structural or material faults is a profoundly depressing state of affairs. However, we are concerned that, in pursuing this noble aim, the Government may not have given due regard to some of the unintended consequences of the solutions they propose. As the Bill progresses, we will probe all those points and more. We look forward to working, with the same noble aim, to improve the Bill however we can.

--- Later in debate ---

[Katie Lam]

I would like to acknowledge some of the Back-Bench contributions to the debate. The sheer volume and range of locations affected by unsafe cladding is remarkable and speaks to the scale of this terrible problem. We have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune), the right hon. Member for Leeds South (Hilary Benn), and the hon. Members for Ipswich (Jack Abbott), for Woking (Mr Forster), for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey), for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer), for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey), for Reading Central (Matt Rodda), for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum), for Putney (Fleur Anderson), for Harlow (Chris Vince), for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) and for Bournemouth West (Jessica Toale), who have all spoken of the challenges that their constituents have in dealing with that terrible problem.

We of course heard from the hon. Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell). It must be a great responsibility to be the Member of Parliament for so many victims and survivors of Grenfell tower in his constituency—an area that we both know well. I am sure that he feels that acutely. Some of his descriptions of rogue and dangerous activity were shocking.

As outlined in my opening remarks, those of us on the Opposition Benches share the fundamental aims of the Bill. We too believe that every building with unsafe cladding should be fixed—and fixed fast. The questions that the Opposition pose are not about the Bill’s aims, but about whether it will work in practice and whether the full implications of its provisions have been considered by the Government.

The evidence suggests that remediation is slow mainly because there are not enough capable professionals to do the work, because the work is hard and unpredictable, and because delivery is fragmented. Elements of that have been acknowledged by Members on both sides of the House. In our view, there is a risk that a Bill that creates new legal duties, deadlines and penalties, but not a single new assessor or contractor, may add more pressure on the system and risk making the problem worse.

As the Bill progresses, I hope that the Government will be able to answer some of the questions raised in this debate. First, on capacity, every building in scope of the Bill must be assessed within a year of commencement, and every assessment that recommends work must be audited by Homes England. What assessment have the Government made of whether there are enough qualified people to meet that deadline and, if there are not, what happens to owners who miss the deadline through no fault of their own?

Secondly, on the new legal duties and associated offences, owners could face up to two years in prison or a penalty of up to £500,000 for deliberately failing to remediate as soon as reasonably practicable. What guidance will the relevant regulators be given on what that means in cases where qualified professionals are simply not available? Can the Minister be sure that an owner who is trying in good faith to commence remediation, but cannot get the work done, will not be prosecuted?

Thirdly, on group accountability, in 2022 Parliament allowed a court or tribunal to look through a company structure when it was just and equitable to do so. The Bill hands a version of that power to regulators through the power to issue penalty notices. Why was the judicial route not enough? Fourthly, on manufacturer’s liability, the 2022 Act gave building owners a route to claim against those who made defective cladding. The Bill loosens that test, but why was the 2022 test not sufficient? Have the Government made any assessment of what that will do to insurance costs and the cost of building new homes?

There is also a great deal that we have not yet seen. Remediation management orders will be set out in guidance that has not yet been published. Councils are being given new duties, including the remediation backstop, with no clear sense yet of how they will be resourced. Parliament should see the detail before it can approve those powers. The Opposition intend to table amendments in Committee to test each of those points, and we look forward to continuing that discussion with our shared ultimate aim in mind.