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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many of the cladding samples that failed safety tests were not compliant with building regulations for buildings higher than 18 metres.

The Department’s view is that external walls in a tower block can meet the Building Regulations requirement for resisting fire spread in two ways. The first is for each individual component of the wall to be of limited combustibility, and to each meet set standards. The second is to ensure that all the combined elements of a wall, when tested as a whole system, have sufficient fire spread resistance to meet a set standard.

We are currently undertaking further testing of whole external wall systems to determine whether they would have sufficient fire spread resistance. We will release further details when the findings are available.