Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill

Mike Reader Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mike Reader (Northampton South) (Lab)]

Next June will mark 10 years since the Grenfell fire. As many have said, at the end of August this year, more than 2,000 residential buildings still had unsafe building cladding, with remediation not yet started. Behind that figure are tens of thousands of people who cannot sell their homes, get mortgages or get affordable insurance, and many who cannot sleep at night. Those people did nothing wrong; they bought a home in good faith, and they have been left carrying the consequences of the failures of others. That is why I welcome this Bill and will support it throughout its passage. At its heart, the Bill is about responsibility: who must act, who must pay and who must be protected.

I will start with the question of who it is that must act. For too long, the system has relied on expectations and good will. Building owners have been asked, encouraged and cajoled to get on and fix the problem, but many have chosen simply not to act. When we debated remediation in Westminster Hall in September, I argued that we had to move from targets to duties and ensure that any duties we set are enforceable.

The Bill does just that: it puts a clear legal duty on those who are responsible for a building to fix it; it gives regulators real power, backed by real penalties; and, where an owner will not act, it will let the local authority step in and get the job done. For residents who have spent many years being passed from freeholder to managing agent to developer and back again, that clarity will matter enormously.

The Bill also tackles something that has quietly undermined progress for years. We have heard today about buildings that sit in the middle ground and are not quite high rise. We still do not know where all these buildings are or who really owns them. A register of mid-rise buildings and new powers to find out who sits behind a building’s ownership will mean that owners are no longer be able to hide behind complex structures. A problem cannot be fixed if it cannot be seen, and someone cannot be held to account if they cannot be found.

The Bill will protect leaseholders by making sure that when a building owner is penalised for failing to act, the bill for fixing the issue cannot be passed back to residents through their service charges. The people who are failing must pay, and the people who have been failed must be protected.

That brings me to the part of the Bill that I have shown a particular interest in: part 5 on construction product liability. So far, the cost of fixing this crisis has fallen on taxpayers and developers. More than £5 billion of public money has been committed to remediation, but the manufacturers who sold the products that are now being stripped off buildings across the country have contributed next to nothing. That cannot be right.

The last Government recognised those principles in the Building Safety Act, but we have to be honest and admit that under its provisions many manufacturers were not held to account, many of the legal hurdles were too high and the claims were too few. Too many manufacturers were able to sit back, confident that nobody could prove enough to make them pay.

This Bill changes that. It shifts the test away from narrow technicalities about whether a regulation was breached and towards the questions that matter: was the product unsafe in the way that it was actually used, and was it marketed in a misleading way? It gives the courts the power to look inside these companies so that we can see what they knew and when they knew it. It also makes sure that corporate structures cannot be used to put assets beyond reach.

There is a really simple principle here—that the polluter pays. That approach is guided by the adage, “Fix it first and fast”. Residents should not be waiting for companies to argue over the bill. Buildings must be made safe now; the fight over who pays should happen afterwards—maybe in court, between the companies responsible, but not on the doorsteps of the people living with the consequences.

I ask the Minister to keep one point in mind as the Bill goes into Committee. Liability has to flow properly through the supply chain and the interface with other regulations, such as the legislation on defective products. If we extend liability at the top of the supply chain but it does not carry further down to the façade contractor and their supply chain and suppliers, we risk loading main contractors with liability while those who supplied or made the products are able to escape. Getting liability right all the way through the supply chain is critical to whether the Bill delivers real money for remediation or simply moves the risk around.

The Bill is a big step forward but it is not the end of the job. I want to raise two areas where there is more to do. I really welcome the Secretary of State’s announcement today from the Dispatch Box on enfranchised and non-qualifying leaseholders. These are people who were excluded from protections that many other leaseholders enjoy, often for reasons such as the date on which they bought their flat. I look forward to amendments coming forward to help shape those provisions further.

The second area is the people who made hay from this crisis. There are two groups who have done very well from building safety issues: insurers and lawyers. I have heard many people talk about the challenges of getting insurance for a building, but I have also heard from contractors and developers. I have heard of contractors who were encouraged to take out professional indemnity cover for works, only to find insurers using every single technicality to avoid paying. When I worked at Mace, I sat on the silver team on building safety, and we were faced with the complexity of working out where our liability sat and how we dealt with our insurers. Dealing with the complexities of product liability as a main contractor was something that gave a lot of people many nights of headaches, and it is an area that I do not think we are completely finished with.

We risk seeing contractors collapse if we do not fix this. I mentioned lawyers as well, because I have heard stories where the legal fees for trying to fix cladding have vastly exceeded the actual cost of fixing the cladding itself. That cannot be right. It is a scandal within the scandal. The Bill rightly opens up a stronger route to recover costs for manufacturers. It does not yet start to address those who make money out of this crisis, but it does ensure that the Government deliver a route for redress, not another payday. Every pound should be spent on making homes safer, not on lawyers’ fees and insurers’ delaying tactics.

Let me end where I began. The Bill puts responsibility where it belongs and makes sure that we are protecting those who need protection. It builds on and strengthens the work of the previous Government, but it rebalances power so that we can fix this crisis once and for all. I support the Bill and hope that the whole House will work to ensure that it passes quickly through this place—we need to see it become legislation, not be stuck in Committee—so that we can end the crisis of dangerous buildings in our country once and for all, and end this nightmare for all.