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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment he has made of the (a) adequacy of capacity in the building industry to replace unsafe cladding and (b) potential effect on that capacity of levels of availability of professional indemnity insurance; and if he will make a statement.

a) From the outset of the Building Safety Programme, the Department has engaged industry to ensure sufficient capacity exists to meet demand and to have arrangements in place to address any blockages in the supply chain.

We are providing £600 million to speed up the removal of the most dangerous ACM cladding, making homes safer, quicker. We are also providing £1 billion to remove other forms of unsafe cladding.

Where funding alone has not been enough to increase the pace of remediation we have provided direct expert support to projects

b) Government is aware that some construction professionals, and fire safety professionals in particular, are struggling to obtain appropriate professional indemnity insurance (PII). Fire safety professionals must have adequate PII cover to be able to undertake their essential role in helping to remediate multi-storey residential buildings with unsafe cladding.

Government is engaging with the insurance industry to investigate solutions that improve the availability of PII for key professionals.