Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether he has allocated funding to support professional bodies to increase the number of skilled professionals who can undertake external wall assessments.

The department is working with professional bodies to scale up capacity to carry out external wall system assessments. To speed up valuations where EWS1 forms are justified, the Government is providing nearly £700,000 funding to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors to train up to 2,000 more assessors in 2021. The department is also considering ways to ensure technical experts can continue to take on more challenging work.