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

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Gibson]

Q Will that not be an issue where our current control or regulation of fire assessors varies? Previous witnesses have mentioned that different fire assessors come to different conclusions. The insurance industry will therefore not have confidence that the assessment made is robust, on the grounds that the word “tolerable” is not easy to measure.

Kate Green: I share that concern. The Government will need to ensure that the fire risk assessments and the decisions of fire risk assessors are robust and consistent. Otherwise, there are avenues open for people to game the system or to obtain an assessment that is more favourable to their own interests.

There is a risk there, and I hope that in the course of the passage of the Bill the Government will think about how they can ensure that that fire risk assessment PAS 9980 framework is fully robust and can give full assurance to residents.

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield Hallam) (Lab)]

Q As a northern MP, I think it is important that we understand the role of mayoral strategic authorities and what part they will play in speeding up the pace of the cladding remediation with the new duties under the Bill. Do you feel that they will help to speed up the process that we currently find ourselves in?

Kate Green: I think that the mayoral combined authority has had and can continue to have a role in helping to speed up the process. In Greater Manchester, shortly after the appalling fire in Grenfell Tower in 2017, the then mayor established a high-rise taskforce, chaired by Paul Dennett, the Salford city council mayor. Paul now chairs a high-rise oversight group where we are able to convene local authorities and the Greater Manchester fire and rescue service. Homes England attends, as do the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, housing providers, developers and residents. They can all be convened around one remediation programme.

Of course you will know, as members of the Committee, that we and other mayoral combined authorities published our local remediation acceleration plans in recent months. Those plans are the articulation of the whole-system approach that I think mayors and mayoral combined authorities can help to put in place. We have been able to use our plan to do a number of things, including, obviously, to understand more clearly what buildings are affected in Greater Manchester and what the nature of the risk is in each of those buildings. We have been able to be close to and very fully engaged with our residents, and to ensure that a residents-first focus sits at the heart of the work that we are doing in Greater Manchester and the work that we want to see nationally.

We have been able to bring the social housing partners to the table, which has been exceptionally useful in considering how we get social properties remediated and how we can work with our social housing providers in Greater Manchester to do that as swiftly and as effectively as possible. We can escalate matters when they become stalled. We have also been able to lobby Government; I think it has been helpful that Greater Manchester has been able to present a concerted voice to successive Governments for funding and for action—now resulting in this legislation.

There is a lot more that we hope to do with our local remediation acceleration plan in the coming months and years, and at the heart of that will be resident engagement. Our residents continue to live with a very significant impact on their mental health and their financial position, and in many cases with continuing uncertainty about when their buildings will be fully remediated. I see the work that we are able to do as a mayoral combined authority, maintaining the spotlight on the lived experience of our residents and reflecting that back both into the action that we can take and into the action that we ask national Government to take, as being crucial.

The final thing I will say, given that I have the very specific role of oversight of the fire and rescue service, is that in Greater Manchester we have been able to prioritise having the right capacity in the Greater Manchester fire and rescue service to support the regulatory regime—the inspection and enforcement programmes that are required. That work, and the oversight of the implementation of all the recommendations that came out of the two Grenfell Tower inquiry reports, is being taken forward. We can oversee all that through a series of governance structures that are led by our chief fire officer. One of the things that mayoral combined authorities are in a very useful position to do is to draw all those different players in a geography together.

[Peter Fortune]

Q You talked about the financial protection for residents. Do you think the Bill does enough to protect them from unreasonable service charge increases, and is there a sufficient vehicle in the Bill to enable them to challenge, question or appeal increases that they consider unreasonable?

Kate Green: On right to manage and resident management companies—although obviously we are also concerned that all charges are eventually at risk of being passed through to residents—the first thing I would say is that they are already experiencing quite significant financial burdens, because they are unremunerated for what is in many cases a substantial workload. Despite the welcome mitigations in the Bill, they also still ultimately face the risk of criminal sanctions, so we would certainly like attention to be given to that.

In terms of service charges, there are concerns around transparency; residents must be fully informed about the way in which service charges are made up. In my past life as a constituency MP, I think we saw that some professional commercial managing agents were more transparent than others. There needs to be that ability to ensure that the conduct of commercial managing agents is in the interests of residents—obviously they will be acting in the interests of their principal, but we should be very clear about their obligations on behalf of their principal to residents. Frankly, appeals are the last resort, are they not? What we actually want to see is a robust system, which ensures that service charges are fair and proportionate, and that no resident is required to pay, through their service charge or otherwise, for faults and defects in their building that are not of their making.