Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill

Meg Hillier Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Angela Rayner)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Nine years ago, 72 people, 18 of them children, died in the Grenfell Tower tragedy. It was a deadly betrayal and a national tragedy that must never happen again. Let me start by remembering those who lost their lives and paying tribute to the bereaved families, the survivors and members of the Grenfell community.

In the time since, the community has campaigned to fix the building safety crisis exposed by the tragedy. That is why we are all here today—so that no one suffers as they have. A decent, safe and secure home is not too much to ask for, but for many it is still out of reach. Despite nine years passing since the Grenfell tragedy, up to 380,000 residents are still living in buildings with unsafe cladding. Every single one of them tells a story of someone unable to move on with their life, stuck in an unsafe home, unable to sell, and often unable to sleep at night. There are even stories of families evacuated without any guarantee of when they can return home. The mental and financial burden can become unbearable.

We have taken action, and we have accepted our responsibilities, but the truth is that others have not. There are still people and companies out there who are not acting quickly enough to make homes safe. Of the 4,724 buildings where unsafe cladding has been identified, work has been completed on only 1,849. Regulators have so far had to take enforcement action on over 900 buildings where those responsible were not taking their responsibilities seriously. As a Government, we will stand up for every leaseholder who is stuck in an unremediated flat, unable to move on with their lives and facing huge costs in the meantime.

When this Government came to power, the pace of remediation was unacceptably slow. That is why in December 2024 I announced the remediation acceleration plan—our blueprint to identify all buildings with unsafe cladding. We are now delivering on that plan, which means that buildings will be fixed faster and residents will be supported better.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I declare that I am a leaseholder whose home did have cladding, though happily that has now been resolved. I represent one of the largest concentrations of new builds with cladding, and there are serious issues, as the Secretary of State has begun to highlight. Back in 2020, the Public Accounts Committee issued a report about the need to improve skills and make more contractors available, so I appreciate the grip that she took of the situation in 2024 as Secretary of State. Will she flesh out a bit more what work she is doing with other Departments to ensure we get the necessary skilled workforce? That is one of the biggest factors that slows down my constituents’ getting the justice that they deserve.

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[Angela Rayner]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. Hopefully, as we go through the Bill she will see how we are changing the emphasis in particular to ensure that the buildings most at risk will be remediated first. As I said, we have given social housing providers access to Government funding schemes for the first time, investing over £1 billion to ensure that the most vulnerable residents have safe homes. We have also ended the binary approach to remediation funding based on building height.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I thank the Secretary of State for being so generous with her time. Picking up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby), a number of my constituents are stuck in blocks that are not high priority. They do not have as much cladding to be removed, but they are down the list because there are not enough skilled people to do the work—it is not always that the developers are dragging their heels; sometimes that is an issue as well. Therefore, for the sake of a small amount of work, their lives are on hold. They are unable to sell their properties and find it challenging to get a mortgage—all the issues that we know people are still facing, many years on. Could she take that away for the Department to revisit some of the priority issues and get some of those blocks that could be done quickly up the list?

[Angela Rayner]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I hope that in the passage of the Bill she will see we are hoping that we can do that piece of work, because we do understand the devastating impact on people’s lives.

All buildings are now considered based on the risk presented to those living in them. As part of that, we have announced targeted funding for buildings under 11 metres with the highest risk so that the cost of fixing cladding on those buildings does not fall on the leaseholders. We will always ensure that developers pay their fair share towards making buildings safe. We have already agreed stretched targets for developers to accelerate work to assess and remediate buildings and we will hold them to account on their progress.

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[Angela Rayner]

We are working on that. PAS 9980 is the established approach used across Government remediation programmes. It provides a robust and proportionate way of identifying the risk of fire spreading through a building’s external walls and the action needed to keep residents safe.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

Will my right hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Angela Rayner]

I will give way one last time.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

This is a rare opportunity to get direct answers from the Secretary of State in the House. That is not a reflection on her, but that is what we are here for. I have a constituent who is an expert on fire safety. We know that the Adam Kiziak forged EWS1 form has been a real issue, and that fire safety is now considered by measures of tolerability, rather than to the set standards. I raised that in a Westminster Hall debate with the Minister for Homelessness, because it is a real concern, and the Bill does not address all of it. Is that in the Secretary of State’s mind? Will she meet interested Members of Parliament—cross-party, because a number of us have this issue—and my very able constituent, Ian Abley, who is an expert on the matter, to discuss how we can future-proof the system? We cannot afford mistakes made as we try to solve the problems of the past.

[Angela Rayner]

My hon. Friend’s intervention shows that the remediation Bill is crucial to us meeting our ongoing challenges with the remediation acceleration plan. The relevant Minister will be happy to meet her to go through the specifics relating to fire safety and the regulations on that.

The Bill will help us complete the task of identifying all remaining buildings that require remediation. It will introduce a register of 11 to 18-metre buildings, giving Government a complete record for the first time of all medium-rise buildings in England. It will also mandate how external wall assessments are carried out, to ensure a nationally consistent approach to remediation. Also, for the first time, the Bill makes it indisputable that responsible entities have to remediate building safety defects with urgency through a new legal duty to remediate. They must take action now or risk severe consequences, including criminal charges where appropriate.

It is unacceptable that enforcement is too slow and penalties are too weak to compel those responsible to act. We will give regulators the tools that they need, including the ability to issue escalating financial penalties, and to pursue criminal prosecution in the worst cases. From now on, no building and no resident will be left behind. Our new remediation backstop will allow public bodies to step in and carry out remediation work themselves. That will mean that residents have a route to remediation, even when the responsible entity is determined to ignore its duty to keep residents safe.

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[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.

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[Joe Powell]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Residents who raised concerns were ignored, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea made a decision to cut costs that resulted in the contract that ended up being a major contributory factor in what happened. I have not had the chance to say this on the record, but I am pleased that one of the individuals involved in that is no longer at the Barnet tenant management organisation. That decision was wrong, and it has been corrected. I am glad that that has been done.

In short, in Victoria the government stepped in and put homeowners and residents first. In this country, the previous Government took a market-based approach that has comprehensively failed to deliver remediation in a timely way. Why? It is because, for too long, the British state has been too passive in the face of this problem, relying on private developers to come up with the answers while millions of people suffer the consequences. The British state’s response to the cladding scandal has exposed many of the weaknesses that this Government want to fix: unaccountable power, opaque ownership and a shirking of responsibility; penny-wise cost cutting that stores up massive costs in the future; and a lack of public control over the basics of life, including housing.

I hope that the Bill will contribute to that effort by creating more jeopardy for those delaying remediation and more options to finally fix every building that needs it, but the work to make buildings safe must continue even while we debate the Bill. Existing powers such as remediation orders and remediation contribution orders can be useful tools if Ministers provide a hands-on grip on the crisis by co-ordinating local remediation plans, creating national standards and ensuring that tomorrow’s Budget continues to fund the Department to get the work moving now. We need belatedly to shift to a “fix first and fast” model based on risk, as the Secretary of State said, leveraging all existing avenues to get work started.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I concur with my hon. Friend’s tribute to those who lost their lives in the Grenfell tragedy and to their loved ones. I remember the shock in this place when that tragedy happened.

I have a real concern about tolerability and how fire safety is assessed. This is something that built up over generations, and my hon. Friend gave a summary of it. Decisions on building safety were left to the wrong people; there was no outside inspection. Tolerability is a subjective standard, rather than a safe set of fixed standards. Does my hon. Friend have anything to say about that? We need to be clear as we go forward about fixing that problem and ensuring that it is not down to individuals. Some developers cherry-pick who will assess the building safety of a block, knowing that some people will pass it when others would be more rigorous. That is not an acceptable situation.

[Joe Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. At the very least, there needs to be independent scrutiny of these assessments so that people can feel reassured that someone is checking whether they pass muster. It should be about the whole of the building being made safe—I think the Secretary of State referred to that. Cladding defects are an extremely important component, but there are internal fire defects that also need to be assessed, which have contributed to rising costs.

I welcome the remediation backstop in the Bill that will give Homes England and local authorities the power to step in, but that should not only be a tool of last resort. It should be something that gets the system moving as quickly as possible, because leaseholders in particular have ended up shouldering the burden in recent years. To give one example—others have already spoken about leaseholders they represent—residents at Shaftesbury Place in Earl’s Court approached me in 2024 after receiving huge increases in their service charge, driven by a disputed fire risk assessment which led to a massive spike in insurance premiums for the building from £15,000 a year to £310,000. The following year it went to £375,000. For one leaseholder, their annual bill for the insurance went from £269 to £4,146.

The landlord, Notting Hill Genesis, which is in a shared ownership scheme, told leaseholders that the insurance rise was linked to a fire risk assessment that it had commissioned, but residents disputed it alongside the classification of the building as high-rise. In fact, it had even miscalculated the number of storeys in the building when it did the assessment, which obviously undermined confidence in that assessment. The Building Safety Regulator later agreed and removed the building from the high-rise register. Until recently, several residents were still receiving legal threats about the non-payment of those charges, causing them huge worry and anxiety—let alone their concerns about the value of their investment in the shared ownership scheme.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend is generous in giving way. The insurance issue is a big concern—it is something the Treasury Committee is looking into. Does he not agree that there is a problem with the industry? The premiums have gone up exponentially, and although there is an increased risk, the likelihood of it crystallising has not been proved to be as high as the insurance industry has said. Does my hon. Friend have any further thoughts on that?

[Joe Powell]

My experience from this case corroborates what my hon. Friend says. I met the Association of British Insurers, and the scheme it introduced subsequently kicked in and has in the last year brought down the buildings insurance, but only by about half—certainly not to anywhere near what it used to be. I hope that Ministers can look at insurance when thinking about protecting leaseholders from higher costs.

The end of the story for the building is that, following pressure from me and my team and from organisers in the building, Notting Hill Genesis has finally agreed to reimburse all the residents. It will repay the difference in the increase for the past several years. I thank Thomas, Hamid, Ian and all the other residents in that building for their work. That is just one example of what is happening in building after building across the country.

I welcome the Bill in the sense that it is an opportunity to fix some of the flaws left by the previous Government and to create a better system, including through the register, a consistent approach to external walls in fire risk assessments, and by listening to campaigners across the country, such as End Our Cladding Scandal, who have helped to give a voice to those most affected. I know that they will have the ear of the Secretary of State and Ministers as the Bill continues its passage.

Clearly, one element at the heart of the Bill is who should pay. I agree that it is high time that the construction product manufacturers who contributed to the cause of this crisis should pay towards resolving it. I really welcome part 5 of the Bill, which strengthens and extends provisions in the Building Safety Act on retrospective liability for cladding products, and the Secretary of State’s announcement today on the Government’s intention to go further. The Grenfell inquiry found that companies including Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex engaged in systematic dishonesty and deliberate manipulation of testing that misled buyers into thinking their products were safe. It is extraordinary that, aside from their payments into a civil settlement, these companies have not paid towards resolving a crisis of their making. In Arconic’s case, its civil settlement was overwhelmingly covered by its insurance and was dwarfed by the payment it made to its own shareholders in compensation.

It is clearly not right that leaseholders, taxpayers and even the developer levy should shoulder the bulk of the costs, while companies such as Arconic do not. That is yet another reason that they should be nowhere near public contracts and supply chains, especially while criminal investigations are ongoing. I know the Secretary of State is committed to working across Government to use every procurement power the Government have to ensure that that is not happening, and I will fully support her in that goal. I also look forward to the new system of construction products regulation being implemented, with consistent safety standards and a single products regulator under the Building Safety Regulator; that will make a big difference.

I am glad that protection from costs for leaseholders has been discussed in the Bill and the debate so far. They are not responsible for this crisis, yet they are the ones picking up the bill in far too many cases. I hope these new powers will give local remediation efforts such as the London Joint Remediation Partnership Board an extra tool to do the building-by-building analysis that cuts through the bureaucracy and delays to find a solution.

I am sure that the communities who have enfranchised their buildings or exercised right to manage will be really pleased to hear the announcement today on ensuring that they are protected. We want more leaseholders to take control of their buildings, appoint their own agents and run their own affairs. We will see more in the leasehold Bill soon, and it is right that the Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill should provide some consistency in protecting them, too.

The building safety crisis has become one of the defining symbols of state failure in the past decade. The entirely avoidable tragedy of Grenfell and the loss of 72 lives should have been a catalyst to making buildings safe as quickly as possible and recovering the costs later. Of course, if we had listened to the coroner after the Lakanal House fire in 2009, not only may it have been possible to prevent the Grenfell fire, but we could have put a halt to new build flats across the country being constructed with cladding that was putting lives at risk. Judge Frances Kirkham said then that approved document B of the building regulations concerning external fire spread, fire-resisting properties and cladding panels should be reviewed. That simply did not happen in the way it should have done, as the public inquiry found.

That missed opportunity is devastating for the Grenfell families but it is also devastating for everyone who bought a flat across the country in a building that could have been built or refurbished differently if that recommendation had been implemented. Think of the billions of pounds wasted that could have been invested in building more homes, including social and affordable homes. That is why I will continue to campaign for a national oversight mechanism to ensure that there is independent scrutiny of recommendations of inquests and inquiries, so that change actually happens. I am delighted that the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and the Minister are supportive of that effort, and I hope we can now make rapid progress towards setting it up.

The Prime Minister said something at the homelessness summit on Monday that really resonated with me: “names not numbers”. He was talking about how to best support people off the streets. We need a similar approach to this crisis. Behind every statistic is a family who are stuck, who cannot sell their home, who are worried about the value of their main asset and who have had to take on another job of chasing for answers about when the work will be finished, all while they suffer the anxiety of living in an unsafe building.

I hope today marks a shift in approach under a Government who I know are absolutely committed to doing all they can to end this scandal once and for all. The new tools in this Bill will certainly help, and the ones announced at the Dispatch Box today will help even further. With the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and the ministerial team providing the leadership that this crisis needs, I am sure we can right the wrongs of the previous approach and deliver the solutions that so many people across the country are crying out for.

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[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

As we remember the 72 victims of Grenfell and the many who are still waiting for justice, I know the Secretary of State and Members from across the whole House share the same commitment to do right by them, to ensure such a calamity never happens again, and to do better for all the leaseholders and residents living with unsafe cladding through no fault of their own.

We need a Bill that will, once and for all, make people’s homes not just safer but as safe as their residents have a right to expect them to be. The Liberal Democrats remain committed to getting the removal of unsafe cladding urgently and by a statutory deadline, to getting remediation to the right safety standard—the one that building regulations were uprated to post-Grenfell—and to residents not having to pay a penny towards fixing a crisis not of their own making. We will look at the amendments that have just been outlined, and we look forward studying them when they come forward. Sadly, as the Bill stands it does none of those things and, because of that, it is substandard and needs radical improvement.

On the plus side, let me be clear about the positive aspects of the Bill that we support. We support the legal duty for responsible entities to remediate, including the important extension of the duty in relation to buildings of 11 to 18 metres in height. We support the stronger intervention powers for housing authorities and the regulator against the blockers, such as through remediation management orders. We support making it easier to bring claims against cladding manufacturers, and we support requirements to have fire risk assessments of external walls and associated registers.

For those reasons, we have not gone as far as tabling a fatal amendment, despite the very serious flaws, as we see them. It would be wrong to deny support to any leaseholders or residents who without this Bill would get less help, but I call on the Government to consider seriously the degree to which the Bill is lacking. While I do not doubt the sincerity of the Secretary of State or the Bill, the Government need to think harder and bring forward amendments that are urgently needed to strengthen the Bill. In the stages that follow Second Reading, we will be suggesting and proposing changes, and working with the Government as constructively as we can to get the improvements that we believe are necessary.

Where does the Bill fall short? First and foremost, it enshrines into law the discredited publicly available specification 9980—PAS 9980—approach. As shown in clause 44, that will allow cladding of “tolerable” risk of combustion to remain on homes after they have been remediated. One may expect “tolerable” risk to be no more than the level of risk allowed in new buildings under the building regulations, as tightened up after Grenfell, but as the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) has already alluded to, it is not that standard. In this Bill, remediation will be only to a standard that a fire risk assessor decides is “tolerable”. We are talking about fire risk assessors paid by building owners, who are more likely than not to have commercial interests in doing as few works as possible to their building. While I am sure that most assessors are reliable professionals, given that the Grenfell inquiry report chaired by judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick cited “commercial interests” in this area of work as one of the contributory factors to the fire, is retaining commercial interests in the system of fire risk assessment, assessors and building inspectors a risk worth taking?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

The hon. Gentleman and I have common cause in this respect, and I rely on the expertise of my constituents in this matter. The PAS 9980 approach was not reassuring for insurers. There was a big problem with insurance anyway, but PAS 9980 does not solve it, because it does not give insurers the certainty they need to do the risk assessment. I am not here as an apologist for the insurance industry—in fact, there are many issues that we will be taking up with that industry—but this approach is not the answer. Given his level of deep expertise in this matter before he came to the place, what would the hon. Gentleman propose instead? Is there an amendment to the Bill that he and the Government could coalesce around and reach agreement on?

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Member is very kind—I am sure my experience is as great as many other Members of the House. I am coming to what we believe would be a preferable standard. Our approach is that these issues of “commercial interests” should be expunged from the Bill, and that the tolerability approach should be removed. We believe that existing homes and buildings should be remediated to meet the standard of fire safety required in the building regulations that were uprated in 2018, after Grenfell.