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

Lewis Cocking Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

Q My question is to Lord Roe and Mr Pugsley. As in other parts of the country, residents of affected buildings in Southampton—we have dozens in the city centre—have waited years with waking watches while developers and management companies wrangle over responsibility. When they finally get a submission into the BSR, in some cases they have waited up to 40 weeks. You mentioned some of the statistics on improvement, but is there anything in the Bill that will materially assist or hinder you in more swiftly turning around those remediation approvals?

Lord Roe: Those are two different things. I would not want to confuse necessary operational improvement with legislation to deal with bad actors. What you are talking about there is our responsibility to appropriately take a decision on what is sometimes a very complex situation, with thousands of pages to each application, while also operating in the context of a national lack of suitably skilled people to do facade engineering—also a particular point of risk. All I can do is point to the evidence, which shows that there was an unacceptable situation a year and a half ago when we came in: if you were one of those residents and had an application submitted into our system, you could wait up to a year or more. That was not okay and I have apologised for it repeatedly in other Committees.

We were charged to turn that around. I would argue—I have got to say this in defence of the team responsible—that we have done that, because we are now at 92% approval and with 20-week determination times. That will come down further, although maybe not by a lot—this is not about poor bureaucracy or a lack of emails or care anymore; it is about the engineering complexity of getting a building safe that has been built really badly.

The message to your constituents is first that we are super-available. Charlie and I get hundreds of emails into the inbox every week from people who often have rightful challenge—or sometimes do not. They will get a reply and response and, where necessary, we will unpick individual cases from the top of the BSR hierarchy down.

The point is that we can evidence the operational improvement. It is real and it is there in the figures. It is also there in the experience of both industry and many residents. We meet with all the campaigning groups almost weekly to gather intelligence, try and pick off poor actors and recognise where we are doing wrong and where there needs to be improvement in the system. I know, though, that is not going to be a comfort to people who are still trapped inside those blocks and who are under tremendous pressure. All I can tell them—I am sure many of them will be watching—is that we will be doing everything in our power to improve our system and force recalcitrant actors to do better. However, it is a complex problem that has been three decades-plus in the making.

Charlie Pugsley: One thing in the Bill is a duty to bring forward the assessment; that is something that we found in our remediation enforcement unit and have chased up. We work closely with Homes England and other partners. If that duty helps drive that forward, one part of the bigger puzzle will have been progressed and can help. But as Lord Roe says, there is no silver bullet; this is about a collective endeavour.

[Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Q The three witnesses who have spoken have supported the Bill; I appreciate that Helen has not yet been able to give her view. However, we can have the best Bill in the world in terms of remediation and sorting out the cladding issues across the country; my question is about whether there are enough people with the right qualifications and skills to carry out all the duties that this Bill will place on the industry.

Lord Roe: It is not just the duties inherent within the Bill; it is the skilled contractors on the other side of it. The answer is no. This problem was built over decades, across successive Governments of all colours who neglected to invest in construction skills. This is not a political point, but the reality is that there is a very significant national endeavour to correct that, led at Secretary of State level. However, it will take time to reverse. There is a very real problem, and this is part of the complexity.

The Bill is a good tool for enforcement, which we will use, but to be fair to applicants, if you cannot get a specialist scaffolder because none is available in your area, or you cannot find the right facade engineer, we need to be pragmatic about how we chase your application. Otherwise, we will potentially force applicants to engage with poor or unskilled contractors. There are hidden dangers within all of this. If I am honest, all of us are trying to fix the plane on the runway because this mess was created over a number of decades.

The skill shortage is quite profound on both the industry side and for us. We pay very good rates; we are a costs-recovered agency. We employ the same private engineers that the applicants will be trying to employ as well, because there is a small pool of specialists within this field. There is currently a lot of investment to build that capacity, but you do not train these people in one year—it is not like that.

My point is that this Bill is great, genuinely, and we will use it selectively against people where it is appropriate to do so. Before someone else gets to it, I should say that that is unlikely to be resident managed entities, because that would be punching down. That is not okay and we are well aware of that, but there is a much bigger operational problem, which we are all charged with helping to solve, along with the industry, because we will not solve the problem without it.

[Lewis Cocking]

Q Would it be fair to say, then, that you think the Government should be doing more to ensure that we have qualified people in this space?

Lord Roe: I am not saying they should do more. I am well aware of the work being done within the Construction Skills Mission Board. There is a huge endeavour. It is a massive joint industry piece as well. There is really good co-operation from industry and Government together, but they are trying to reverse-engineer a problem that was decades in the—[Interruption.] You might as well say that, Charlie—he is writing me notes. A good example would be the RBIs.

Charlie Pugsley: It is not for us to comment on behalf of the Government, but we are aware that funding has gone into registered building inspectors, for example, from the Government.

[Lewis Cocking]

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

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

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

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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