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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what support he is making available to leaseholders who have incurred significant costs to improve fire safety as an interim measure before flammable cladding is removed from their properties.

Interim measures such as waking watch should only ever be short term and are not a substitute for remediation. The only way to make buildings safe and to remove the need for interim measures is to remove unsafe cladding as quickly as possible. That is why we are prioritising £1.6 billion public subsidy on remediation of unsafe cladding. The Minister of State for Fire, Lord Greenhalgh, is investigating what can be done to reduce the cost of waking watch for buildings that currently have them in place. This includes ensuring that waking watch costs are transparent so that leaseholders and others who commission these services can ensure that costs are reasonable. Lord Greenhalgh is meeting regularly with representatives of leaseholders affected by cladding issues to consider their views and to update them on progress.