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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of funding available through the Building Safety Fund to meet (a) current and (b) future demand.

All eligible applications currently made to the Building Safety Fund will be funded. For any buildings that may have missed the original registration deadline we will be opening the next phase of the Building Safety Fund early this year and it will cover the costs of addressing fire safety risks caused by unsafe cladding on all eligible buildings.

It remains the building owner’s responsibility to address any fire safety issues in their buildings. Building owners should do all they can to make sure their buildings and residents are safe, without passing costs onto leaseholders or relying on taxpayer funding. In many cases, as we have seen for with the funding for the remediation of half of all private sector residential buildings with unsafe ACM cladding, building owners and freeholders or the original developer can meet the costs of remediating unsafe cladding from their own resources, by claiming on insurance policies or warranties, or taking legal action. It is incumbent on them to pursue those avenues. Where building owners apply for funding they are required to demonstrate they have taken all reasonable steps to recover the costs of replacing the unsafe non-ACM cladding from those responsible through insurance claims, warranties, legal action etc.