PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Residential Buildings: Safety Remediation - 15 September 2026 (Commons/Westminster Hall)

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the building safety remediation of residential buildings.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, and all right hon. and hon. Members for their participation.

More than nine years after Grenfell claimed all those lives, we must ask whether the system that is intended to protect residents and deliver the safety and security they deserve is truly working. There has been progress. The Building Safety Act 2022, the Building Safety Regulator and remediation funding have strengthened our collective national response, but legislation must lead to safer homes, funding must lead to completed works and residents must be able to move forward with their lives.

Today, I will address three interconnected issues: the protection of residents during remediation, the operation of PAS 9980 and the competence of those making critical safety decisions, and the position of non-qualifying leaseholders. I will begin by drawing on an experience directly connected to my constituency. Surrey Heath is, by any definition, a semi-rural consistency, where one would not necessarily have expected this issue to rear its head, yet the correspondence reaching my office from Camberley, our principal market town, shows how deeply the problem affects ordinary households across the UK. We must judge the system by the experience of the residents who depend on it. At Dorchester Court, one of my constituents has lived in their shared ownership home for 20 years. They are unwell, unemployed and at risk of losing that home. They need to sell, but unresolved building safety and EWS1 issues have taken that choice away.

Another resident has lost two prospective buyers because lenders would not offer mortgages on that property. Cala Homes, the original developer, has accepted full responsibility for life-critical remediation, but residents say that they still have no clear timetable for those works to be delivered or completed. Accepting responsibility is only the beginning. Until the required work is completed, residents remain trapped. It is a repeat pattern across the country. People need to move because of illness, unemployment, caring responsibilities or just simple changes in family circumstances. Their lives cannot be placed on hold indefinitely while developers, building owners and managing agents decide what happens next.

I can think of at least two buildings in my constituency that have been determined urgent life-critical but cannot be remediated because of delays in getting the certificates they need from the Building Safety Regulator. That leaves residents facing large insurance costs, unable to sell, and stuck with damp and mould and a whole range of other issues. Does the hon. Member agree that the Building Safety Regulator needs the resources so that residents are not left trapped in their homes for years?

I am incredibly grateful to the hon. Lady, who I know represents a Bournemouth seat. I have exactly the same issues in my constituency. Reports and certification are not being received in time, often frustrating sales and driving things like insurance premiums in the long term. Residents’ lives cannot be placed on hold indefinitely while those who have the whip hand decide what happens next.

The problems do not end when remediation begins. At North Court, another development in Camberley, residents undergoing remediation through the Metropolitan Thames Valley housing association have reported restricted daylight and ventilation, broken windows and water leaks. Those issues are challenging at the best of times, but almost unbearable during a long, hot summer like the one we have just had, when temperatures inside properties regularly reached 40ºC.

Some residents have described deteriorating mental health and feeling increasingly insecure in their own homes. Scaffolding, sheeting, noise and disruption may be unavoidable for a time, but poor communication, unresolved damage and unhealthy living conditions are not acceptable. Clear information, prompt repairs and credible completion dates should be basic expectations throughout the remediation process. I ask the Minister to outline how residents will be protected during remediation works, especially during hot summer periods and cold winters.

I am struck that the hon. Member used the phrase “collective national response” to start his remarks. As a Scottish MP, I am conscious that this is a UK-wide endeavour, but four different Governments could be looking at it. If work is accelerated in one part, pressure can be put on the resources available in another. Does the hon. Member agree that the collective national response has to be considered in a UK sense, not just under the relevant Department in Westminster?

The Public Accounts Committee looked at this issue on 21 March 2025. One of our conclusions was:

“Given the lack of progress to date and the remaining challenges ahead, we are sceptical about the adequacy and achievability of MHCLG’s Remediation Acceleration Plan.”

Does the hon. Member share that scepticism?

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that one main handbrake to remediation is national resourcing. There are simply not enough fire safety engineers or specialist companies that can do this remediation work on a fast timescale. That problem exists not only between Scotland and England but within the English regions. I entirely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point that a co-ordinated national solution is the best response we could hope for for our residents, so that the work is undertaken in a timely and efficient manner.

My second question for the Minister relates to that topic. How will those responsible be held to enforceable timetables, so that residents have certainty and transparency from companies completing the remediation works? The examples I have cited concern the pace and conditions of remediation but, before any work begins, someone must decide what work is required.

That brings me to PAS 9980, the framework used to assess fire risks in the external walls of existing residential buildings. The Government have committed to making the standard mandatory for relevant external wall fire risk assessments, but its interpretation will influence the work that is carried out, the funding available and the conditions in which residents are expected to live. A proportionate approach is sensible. Assessors should consider the building as a whole, including its materials, construction and wider fire safety arrangements.

The work undertaken should reflect the risk that the building actually presents, but that approach relies heavily on professional and subjective judgment. Residents need confidence that those judgments are competent, consistent, transparent and properly scrutinised. When assessments of the same building reach different conclusions, remediation can be delayed, funding becomes harder to secure, lenders lose confidence and residents are left wondering whose judgment they can ultimately trust.

There is a particular concern where combustible materials, which would not be permitted on comparable new buildings, are allowed to remain on existing homes. An assessment may conclude that the immediate risk to life is tolerable, but residents could still face higher insurance premiums, difficulty securing a mortgage and a reduction in the value of their property. They may be told that their building meets the required standard, while continuing to feel unsafe and financially trapped.

Royal Artillery Quays clearly illustrates this problem. At this point, I pay tribute to Steve Day, who has been a doughty campaigner for that development and its residents. Many hon. Members might have heard directly from him. Royal Artillery Quays is a large, private residential development in Thamesmead, built by Barratt Homes in 2002, and home to around 1,000 residents. Barratt Homes’s proposed approach there, assessed under PAS 9980, would leave some combustible panels in place, on the basis that the remaining risk is tolerable.

Residents—not unreasonably—remain concerned both about the safety of that approach and its financial consequences. They report that annual service charges have risen from £3,000 to £6,000, with much of that increase linked to insurance. That phenomenon is confirmed by the Association of British Insurers, which in October 2025 reported that buildings remediated only to PAS 9980 may face persistently higher premiums than those remediated to a higher standard. In other words, residents will be paying higher insurance premiums in perpetuity because of decisions that were made not just by this Government but by developers in the past. Some of those residents cannot sell without accepting a substantial reduction in the value of their home. Residents have drawn my attention to a fire safety engineering report that states that leaving the panels in place is

“not the most appropriate fire engineering solution”

for that building. Already there is contestation between the different approaches recommended. Where does that leave residents? The reliability of these decisions ultimately depends on the subjective competence of the people making them.

Will the Minister tell us whether the Government will publish the findings of their audits and reviews of the application of PAS 9980, and what steps are being taken to ensure greater consistency in its use? Where PAS 9980 assessments result in combustible materials remaining in place, how will the consequential impacts on insurance premiums, mortgage availability and property values be assessed and communicated to residents?

The hon. Member talked about publication of the audit, with which I hope everyone will agree. Does he agree that it should be shared across the nations of the UK in order that all our Executives—the Parliaments in Scotland and Wales and the Executive in Northern Ireland—can take action where that is appropriate?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He parallels the case made by the hon. Member for Stirling and Strathallan (Chris Kane). There has to be a national-level approach, and I hope that the Government will share information with the devolved Administrations in all parts of the United Kingdom and with all Members of this House so that we can adequately support the affected residents, who are certainly not just in England.

The experience with the separate EWS1 process shows what happens when confidence in these professionals breaks down. One Surrey Heath constituent accepted an offer on their apartment for £260,000. That was for a flat originally bought for £316,000. They were prepared to accept a loss of £56,000 simply to move forward with their life, but even then the sale collapsed, because the buyer could not obtain a mortgage after lenders stopped accepting the building’s EWS1 form, which had been signed by the now notorious Adam Kiziak of Tri Fire Ltd. The Institution of Fire Engineers suspended Mr Kiziak’s membership and registration in 2024, following findings under its disciplinary process. It announced his expulsion on 5 March 2025, following even more complaints. Also in March 2025, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), I met the then Building Safety Minister to raise concerns about Mr Kiziak and his behaviour.

My office has identified at least nine EWS1 forms issued through Tri Fire in Camberley alone that have subsequently been rejected by lenders. That is why independent verification is essential, including where an earlier assessment concluded that no remediation was required, because we now know that Adam Kiziak was faking EWS1 forms, suggesting that buildings were entirely safe when they in fact contained combustible material.

The consequences of failure in this area can be immediate. At the Courtyard in Camberley, a couple reported receiving five EWS1 forms that were not accepted before a sixth finally satisfied the relevant requirements. That delay pushed their purchase beyond the stamp duty deadline and left them with an additional bill of nearly £4,500. They had no control over the assessment process, yet bore the cost when it failed. When does the Minister expect statutory regulation of fire engineers to be introduced? Given the degree of subjectivity in PAS 9980 assessments and the potentially life-changing costs passed on to residents, how can leaseholders have confidence in a system that lacks a fully regulated profession?

Failures in assessment can impose substantial costs. The next question is who should be expected to pay them. The Building Safety Act introduced welcome protections and ensured that many leaseholders would no longer be expected to meet the cost of failures that they did not cause. Some non-qualifying leaseholders may also receive support because of their landlord’s responsibility, a developer commitment or the funding arrangements that apply to their building. However, significant gaps remain.

Once a lease is classified as non-qualifying, that status can remain attached to it when the property is sold. Someone buying their first and only home can therefore inherit the consequences of the previous owner’s circumstances and become exposed to significant remediation costs. They had no involvement in the original construction and have no responsibility for the defects, yet under the current system, they can still be left with the bill.

On 10 April 2025, in response to a written question, the then Building Safety Minister said the Government was looking closely at how to

“sunset the ‘in perpetuity’ status of leases which do not qualify for the leaseholder protections.”

Can the Minister update us on that work, and will the Government bring forward proposals to protect those who bought what they reasonably believed would be a safe and secure home?

The Government’s promised remediation Bill provides an opportunity to resolve outstanding problems and turn commitments into delivery. Under their plans, by the end of 2029, buildings over 18 metres should be remediated and buildings from 11 metres to 18 metres should be remediated or firmly scheduled, with 2031 the intended final completion point. Those ambitions are absolutely welcome, but meeting them will require accurate building data, secure funding, skilled contractors, effective independent inspection and, as we have heard today, proper resourcing for agencies across the United Kingdom. It will require costs to be recovered from those responsible, including developers and construction product manufacturers.

Residents have already spent years waiting. Deadlines will mean little unless they are enforceable and backed up by the capacity required to meet them. When will those duties become legally enforceable, and how will the Government ensure that the funding, workforce and regulatory capacity are in place to deliver it?

The lesson of Grenfell is that building safety depends on the whole system working: sound regulation, competent professionals, effective oversight and accountability when things go wrong. When that system fails, danger can remain unaddressed and residents can be left trapped in homes they cannot sell and paying costs they cannot control. Behind every assessment, funding decision and remediation timetable is someone trying to protect their family, preserve their savings or move on to the next stage of their lives.

The bereaved and the survivors of Grenfell deserve justice, and my constituents in Surrey Heath and constituents across the country deserve safe homes and confidence in those entrusted to protect them. More than nine years on, we must take every reasonable step to prevent another loss of life and ensure that those still living with the consequences of this crisis can finally move forward.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison, and a delight to be called first. I congratulate the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) on securing this important debate. It is an important opportunity for me to raise with the Minister the many issues that my constituents are facing, which are similar to those that the hon. Member has just described. I welcome the Minister to her place as well. In having this debate, we remember all the victims and survivors of Grenfell.

I also thank all the people across the country who have been campaigning on cladding. I have talked about cladding many times and yet we are still here; that is my frustration. I thank the previous Minister for Building Safety, my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), for her work on the remediation Bill. The Bill will place stronger legal duties on landlords and freeholders to remediate unsafe cladding and other fire safety defects within clear timeframes. That is very welcome. I am also grateful to her for meeting with me to discuss a number of long-running cases that I face in Putney, and I am glad that the new Minister will continue that important work.

I welcome the work of the remediation enforcement unit, the leadership of Lord Roe, and the work of the Building Safety Regulator, but I do not know why they are causing so many delays. I understand that 69 people work for the remediation unit and 500 people work for the Building Safety Regulator. I ask the Minister to look into their work and find out why they are not able to move so many developments ahead at the pace needed. There are long delays, a lack of clear guidance and a lack of connection between the different bodies involved, as I will demonstrate.

I would like to draw the Minister’s attention to several developments that are covered by the developer remediation contract with major developers such as Barratt Redrow and Taylor Wimpey. Despite those contractual commitments, many residents in those developments continue to face lengthy delays before remediation works, which have been agreed and funded, can begin or be completed. In some cases, fire safety remediation has been delayed because structural defects need to be addressed first—if there are problems with the cladding, that often comes with problems with the entire building. In other cases, residents are waiting for final fire risk assessments, EWS1 forms, remediation plans, contractor appointments, updated certifications, smoke extraction systems or the installation of cavity barriers. In all those cases, it is the people in the building who have to chase things up.

One development in my constituency has been waiting for Network Rail to give permission for rear elevation works. Network Rail did not respond to the many repeated efforts by the project team to obtain the permission, so a specialist contractor had to be hired just to get a response, which added a lot of cost for leaseholders.

In another case, many defects have been found at the same time in the buildings of a really large development. Hundreds of families have moved out and moved back, and they have just been told that they will all have to move out again in a rota system, all while fighting for remediation. They have been worried about the safety of their building—they had a waking watch and then they did not—and they cannot sell their homes if they want to, so they cannot get on with their lives. The impact on all those residents of six years of fighting is unacceptable. They cannot sell or remortgage their homes, and they live in uncertainty about when their buildings will finally be made safe.

This is affecting social housing tenants too. For some badly affected social housing in Wandsworth, specifically the Eliot and Wentworth blocks in Wandsworth town, tenants have been waiting for the Building Safety Regulator to give the go-ahead. They cannot have essential kitchen and heating system replacements or other work in the building done until the cladding remediation is completed. The council submitted the application on 31 March. The Building Safety Regulator’s statutory response time for works to existing higher-risk buildings is eight weeks, but it immediately asked for an extension, which is worrying in itself. Here we are in September, and the council is still waiting for a response. The works will take 18 to 24 months. The blocks are in serious need of that repair and the other repairs they are waiting for.

Although I recognise that developers have obligations under the developer remediation contract, my constituents are understandably asking what more can be done by the unit, by Ministers and by the Building Safety Regulator when progress stalls for different reasons. The challenge is not whether a developer has signed up to a contract, but how quickly remediation can move through the assessment, approval and delivery stages, especially when there are other bodies involved.

To conclude, can the Minister explain how the Government intend to support and expedite remediation at developments already covered by the developer remediation contract? What steps can be taken to remove barriers that delay works, to speed up assessments and approvals, and to ensure that developers deliver at pace? The new legislation is very welcome, but leaseholders trapped in affected buildings need to know that existing remediation programmes will also be accelerated. They deserve not only stronger rules for the future in the upcoming Bill, but urgent action on the buildings that have already waited far too long for remediation to be completed.

Order. Many colleagues want to speak and we have limited time. Front Benchers will be called at 10.28 am, so I suggest everyone takes four or five minutes for speeches.

I thank the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for securing this debate and for the excellent way that he presented the case. This issue causes unbelievable levels of stress for many of our constituents.

We should briefly contrast the complications of getting remedial action to bring about safety and security for our constituents in multiple-ownership private sector developments with the relative speed and efficiency with which local authorities dealt with the problem of cladding after Grenfell. My own borough of Islington surveyed every property immediately, discovered unknown suspect cladding in a couple of places, and got on with it straight away. The issue was resolved very quickly. That was in 2018, but here we are, eight years later, and I have a considerable number of leasehold properties that have been built over the last 20 years or so where the residents, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath pointed out, want to move on but cannot move or sell, and are paying massive insurance costs.

I say to the Minister that the excessive insurance costs many residents are having to pay are not their fault. The problem should absolutely not be their responsibility; it should be the responsibility of the developers that caused it in the first place. If those developers no longer exist or are not prepared to pay, surely the default position should be that the Government as a whole are prepared to pick up that compensation. People are getting deeply into debt just to insure their own flat, but at the same time cannot move on.

I want to make some quick points about local issues that I have raised many times with the Government. The first is about the Drayton Park development. I thank the Minister and her predecessors for at last getting to a situation where Government funding has been approved for Galliard Homes to help cover part of the fire remediation costs. I would be grateful if the Minister could assure me how quickly that work will now be completed. It has been subject to endless correspondence between my office, the local authority and many others just to try and get that remedial work done for the properties on Drayton Park in my constituency.

Secondly, there are the works that need to be done for Newlon Housing on the Queensland Road site, which is adjacent to the Arsenal football ground. Remediation works have been delayed, apparently mostly because of delays and complications created by Newlon. Again, I have raised this directly with the Minister and her predecessors, and I would be grateful if she could assure me that that work will now be done. Many lease extensions have been granted over the years, but the complication is that the people living there have not seen the work done. Now their lease is being eaten up as the years go by, and the value of the place is reducing, so they are losing out in lots of ways. That leads on to the wider issue of leasehold reform, but that is not the subject of today’s debate.

The final issue I want to raise is one that I have raised many times in the past, and I am quite unclear where we have reached on it. At Highbury Gardens, where Aviva is the head lessor, there was an issue about wooden railings on balconies that were deemed to be a fire risk. That issue has gone on for a very long time, and once again, the residents are stuck without any certainty about their future.

I will not take much more time, but I will just say that we have a responsibility to get this done quickly. When the fire happened at Grenfell, an enormous shock was felt all over the country. Everything that happened at Grenfell was disgusting and disgraceful—we know that, and we do not want another Grenfell anywhere else. Local authorities have managed, by and large, to get the issue sorted out, but it is the miasma of insurance companies, leaseholders, ultimate freeholders, developers that disappear and go bust, and fire safety engineers who are in short supply or, in many places, non-existent that is the problem. At the end of the day, all the stress lands on our constituents. That is not right or fair and we need to get it sorted.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I warmly welcome the Minister to her post. I had meetings with most of her predecessors. I do not need to keep having meetings; I just hope that she takes up the points we have raised.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) on laying out the issues so clearly—as a result, I have cut my speech in half. Sadly, it is a bit like “Groundhog Day”: we have all raised these issues before. The peroration of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) summarised the complexity that the Minister and the Government have to grapple with. It is not just the Government who are part of this challenge, but they have to be part of the solution.

I will not name any of the developments that I am talking about, because my residents are very concerned about being blighted. There have been some improvements. The Building Safety Regulator is getting better and the delays have reduced, but as well as dealing with historical issues, it has to work with new developments. Hackney council has a good track record of building council housing, but some of it has been delayed by the Building Safety Regulator. I understand that the delays have now reduced substantially, but I hope the Minister will look closely at that issue in her new role to make sure the Building Safety Regulator is working as efficiently as possible.

Skills remain a big issue, and there has been a woeful lack of activity. Some of us were here in 2018 talking about training fire safety engineers. It takes three years to train them, and if anyone had done that then, we would be in a much better place now.

I also wish to mention mortgageability. As recently as 3 September, I had a letter from Baroness Blake of Leeds, repeating what I have had from Ministers of different parties over time: that there are 10 mortgage companies that will lend on property with dangerous cladding. I point that out to constituents and keep referring them to the 10 companies, but there is always a reason why it cannot happen. Those companies obviously have criteria that are often not met. If the Government are routinely sending out that sort of information, it needs to be absolutely accurate.

Insurance is a huge and ongoing problem. For two developments in my constituency, only one insurer took part in the insurance tender process—insurers are just pulling out. The Treasury Committee is keen to look at that issue, but there is a real role for the Government to play. I spoke to the Minister’s predecessors in the previous Government, but this nut has not yet been cracked. I think I speak for every Member in this Chamber when I say that we would be happy to put our weight and effort behind it to help the Minister tackle the issues with insurance companies. We cannot have properties that are effectively uninsurable and bankrupting our residents. As the right hon. Member for Islington North said, people are going into debt to pay their insurance premiums, and that is before they have a claim to make.

The lack of skilled contractors was first raised back in 2020 in a Public Accounts Committee report, when I was Chair of that Committee. We asked for work to be done, but nothing has happened.

The hon. Member for Surrey Heath spoke about tolerability. I have a very expert constituent who came to my advice surgery this summer. I am very happy to introduce the Minister to him. He has written to me and the Department a number of times, and we have had a number of exchanges about the changes in British standards since Grenfell, and specifically about building materials. Instead of having set standards, fire safety is now done on measures of tolerability. He says that there is now a scale of standards, depending on the individual who does the fire safety assessment. That is why, after the Adam Kiziak affair, in which a number of EWS1—external wall system fire review—forms were forged, other people qualified to do the EWS1 certificates came to different conclusions. Two buildings in Hackney that were tolerable were then said to have issues that require remediation.

My constituent said that insurance has become so expensive because the insurers are not certain about the standards, which will no doubt have an impact on mortgage lenders, too. The issue needs to be resolved. I say with respect to the Minister that the solution must be much more fundamental than the Government getting people in, banging heads together and saying, “Sort it out.” This is fundamental to why Grenfell happened in the first place. It was the biggest public safety failure in several generations.

The Department’s permanent secretary at the time spoke to several of her predecessors to find out who could have seen it coming. Changes happened here, there and everywhere, and no one saw what the cumulative impact would be on Grenfell—obviously, there were also other shocking aspects of the Grenfell situation. This is an opportunity for the Minister, who is a very capable woman—we are all delighted to see her in her post—to tackle this issue once and for all. It may not help our residents immediately, but it has to work for the future.

I have several simple asks. Will the Minister get working on the mortgage lender issue and make sure that we are sending out accurate information? Will she work with mortgage lenders not just to get them to sign up to a list saying that they support lending but to be really clear about the criteria that will allow them to lend? Will she look again at insurance and skills, and will she please tackle the issue of tolerability?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton), for securing this debate.

In my Woking constituency, residents have been the direct victims of construction failures. The Victoria Square development, a new shopping centre with two residential towers and another tower containing a hotel, is a glaring example. It was all built by Sir Robert McAlpine. This development was meant to help my town grow and ensure that we can build new homes and grow our economy. Instead, it has put Woking on the map for all the wrong reasons.

The original opening date was meant to be October 2020. However, after cladding failures, it opened at Halloween 2024, and it has continued to be a horror ever since. Cladding panels fell off after the hotel opened, leading to road closures that disrupted local businesses and massively inconvenienced residents in their day-to-day lives. This was next to the town’s main road, an A road. One time the road was closed after being open for just 11 days, because another panel had fallen off.

The road was closed during Christmas, and we all know how important that time of year is for businesses. I asked town centre residents and businesses to tell me how this impacted them. One family-owned restaurant told me its bookings had dropped, and unfortunately it had to cut staff hours. A carers agency said its staff were constantly being delayed in delivering necessary care to vulnerable people, all because Sir Robert McAlpine did not build the building properly in the first place.

Thankfully, the road has now reopened and the cladding panels have now, only recently, been properly secured. Under the common law of negligence, according to the Chartered Institute of Building, purely economic losses are just not recoverable. However, this could be included under contract law. Why is that not standard practice for building projects? Will the Minister and her Department look at making it standard practice as part of forthcoming legislation?

Just a stone’s throw from Victoria Square is another building safety issue in Woking. The Eastgate building has sat abandoned since late 2023, when over 100 residents were evacuated after a report identified significant structural defects. It has been years since then, and the developer says the building is safe. The owner says otherwise. After I got involved last year, independent testing was carried out. Although the testing was completed many months ago, the results still have not been released. There is no way that both sides can be right in this situation. I do not know what they are hiding, but this needs to be resolved immediately. Residents deserve to know what is going on. Does the Minister agree with me that the results of the testing need to be released immediately and that one of the parties must admit it is wrong, whether that means residents being allowed back in and an explanation of why the original structural testing was wrong or the developer needing to rebuild Eastgate and pay compensation?

These two examples from my Woking constituency show the pressing need for stricter oversight, stronger retrospective enforcement and clear accountability for those that are responsible. We live in a country where a university degree is needed to become a lawyer or a teacher, and maybe two to be accredited, so it is shocking that I could go to B&Q, buy some materials and become a cowboy builder tomorrow, without a licence. The construction industry is an unregulated wild west. I know the Federation of Master Builders has been calling on the Government to introduce mandatory licensing and testing for UK construction firms. Does the Minister agree, and will the Government include it in forthcoming legislation? I urge the Government to listen.

Will the hon. Member give way?

I had better not, given the timings.

I urge the Government to listen to Members present and take the necessary steps to deliver the building safety and accountability that people back home in Woking, and across the country, deserve.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this important debate, and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for so ably setting out the issues that our constituents face.

Dartford, perhaps unlike many city centre constituencies, is not necessarily somewhere that would be associated with high levels of building safety problems, but we continue to see issues, including new and previously unidentified ones. The key point I want to make is about the length of time it continues to take to resolve these issues. When I was first elected in 2024, I was contacted by residents of a set of four blocks at Ingress Park in Greenhithe who had a long-standing fire safety issue, first identified as far back as 2019, when it was found that flats had combustible material in the balconies and inadequate firebreaks. Frighteningly for residents, there was even a fire on the site in 2023, which left four people injured, bringing home the need to get the building sorted.

I have supported residents over the last two years, bringing together the developer and the managing agents to try to overcome the various obstacles to getting the works done. It was honestly with a sense of relief that I visited the buildings last week to see that the work was finally under way, with an end in sight to the cost and uncertainty with which residents had been living. From today’s contributions and the conversations I have had with other MPs, I think this case is indicative of how these cases can drag on for years, even when the developer has identified the need for remediation works and agreed to fund them.

The second issue that I want to raise is that I am fairly astonished by the fact that we are still continuing to discover new issues. Partly, that is due to the now well publicised issues with fire safety surveys undertaken by, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) and others have mentioned, Tri Fire and Adam Kiziak, who was expelled by the Institution of Fire Engineers. One instance that brings home to me the seriousness of this is Heron Court in Ebbsfleet in my constituency, where residents have recently had a waking watch imposed upon them by managing agents FirstPort, who obviously receive much attention in this place, and who once again have taken action without the agreement of the residents or builders.

Two of the four blocks at Heron Court are very slightly over 11 metres in height, and therefore in scope of the Building Safety Act. In this instance, there is a dispute between FirstPort, the managing agents, and Taylor Wimpey, the developer, about the fire safety report that has been undertaken, with one party not happy with it. Negotiations on access for a further inspection have been ongoing since the start of the year to try to clarify what work needs to be undertaken, which has left the building’s leaseholders facing a bill for the 24-hour waking watch, while having no levers to bring the other parties together to move the issue forward.

I have asked to meet FirstPort and the developer in the coming weeks to try to find a way forward and seek assurances that leaseholders will not be hit with the costs of the waking watch. Particularly surprising is that some of the new issues occurring are, I think, in buildings built well after the terrible events at Grenfell in 2017, when lessons should really have been learned, so I hope that when the Minister responds—I welcome her to her place—she will be able to confirm that it remains the case that leaseholders should not be bearing the costs of these waking watches.

Order. We are going to struggle to get everybody in, so brevity, please, colleagues.

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for securing the debate. He often brings vital debates to Westminster Hall, and I am always glad to come along and support him in his requests. I welcome the Minister to her place. She is a busy lady. She responded to the Adjournment debate last night, and as if she never slept, she is back in Westminster Hall this morning. We wish her well in her role.

Building safety remediation is required to fix serious safety defects in residential buildings where those defects could put residents at risk. At the end of July ’26, more than 4,500 residential buildings in England measuring 11 metres or more in height had been identified as having unsafe cladding that requires remediation. The figure had increased by some 228 in just one month, so there is a growing problem, unfortunately. That demonstrates that the demand for essential remediation works is continuing to outpace the rate at which works are being completed.

We need to remember that behind those stats are real people. Sometimes we think about the buildings, but what matters is what happens to the people living day to day in them with constant uncertainty about the safety of their own home. The pressure and the stress are almost overwhelming. Many report facing significant financial pressures due to insurance premiums and difficulties in selling their property. We have seen reports of some leaseholders in London losing around £100,000 on the value of their flat as a result of a five-year delay in remediation plans and works.

Following the tragedy at Grenfell Tower, we have seen the potential for fatal consequences because of failures and delays in building safety remediation, and I believe that lessons must be learned from that. I will quickly give a Northern Ireland perspective. More than £2 million has been paid to managing agents under the cladding safety scheme. However, despite that support, hundreds of people in Belfast are still living in high-rise buildings with cladding that has raised serious fire safety concerns, including buildings that contain some of the very same material that caused the Grenfell tragedy. I understand that it is early days for the Minister in her role, but has she had the opportunity to talk to the relevant Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly to give them details of what is being done here in Westminster, perhaps to help us to do things better back home?

While the overall number of high-rise residential buildings in Northern Ireland is relatively small compared with other parts of the United Kingdom, that cannot mean that the standard of protection afforded to residents in Northern Ireland should be any lower. Every resident deserves to know that their home is safe, regardless of where they live. Does the Minister therefore agree that more must be done to accelerate the remediation of unsafe cladding in Northern Ireland and to ensure that residents are supported throughout the process?

I am coming to the end of my remarks, Dr Murrison; I am very conscious of your comments about time. Residents deserve safe and secure homes. They should not be left in limbo, facing rising costs and uncertainty while they wait for the building they call home to be made safe. It just is not fair.

Commendably brief—thank you very much indeed.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison, and I thank the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for securing the debate. As you requested, Dr Murrison, I will keep my comments brief.

I want to put on the record that I was silver team, accountability, at Mace for this area in my portfolio, and it was my colleague Sam Kennedy who took on the delivery of that. I am sure that her work has made buildings safer in the long term. I want to make sure that her work is recognised, because I forgot to do so the last time that I spoke here on this topic.

The Building Safety Regulator was a serious bottleneck. After we spoke about this issue before, I could not go to a single panel event or roundtable, or open my LinkedIn account, without seeing complaints about the BSR and its performance, but the performance change has been substantial under Lord Roe and Charlie Pugsley. Given that the BSR is a public sector organisation that has changed so quickly, I do not think that we can have this debate without recognising the substantial change that they have made to the BSR, as the performance stats show. But as colleagues have mentioned, there are still areas to improve, so rather than focusing on what is happening now, I will focus on what I think will come next.

There are two big issues for the Department to focus on. First, there is the implementation of the building safety levy. In Scotland, the scheme has already been paused, because of concerns over its viability and how it can be implemented in such a complex system. For England, the Department needs to look at that with regard to bringing forward the remediation Bill. How does the implementation of that levy apply and does it impact on us delivering the homes that we need? Is it the solution now in a reformed system?

The main thing I will talk about, however, is the remediation Bill itself, which has yet to be introduced. I hope that it will contain a number of measures to address some of the issues that colleagues have talked about. First, there is the issue of enforcement deadlines—moving from targets set for the remediation plan to enforceable targets, with the enforcement unit properly equipped to deliver them.

There must also be a clear answer on buildings under 11 metres. I welcome the Government’s extension of funding to buildings under 11 metres, but I understand that the funding pot is constrained by budget, rather than addressing the scale of the problem. Much more collection of evidence is needed to understand the amount of money that is needed to ensure that no building in the UK is unsafe.

There must be a resolution for non-qualifying leaseholders, who have been excluded for years now and, across our constituencies, still face large bills. We must also address the challenge of defect liability periods, because there has been consultation on expanding to 15 or 30 years. That sounds great for a principal developer or contractor, but it is not mirrored in the Defective Premises Act 1972 and how that rolls through the supply chain.

Unfortunately, the big two big winners from the process have been the legal and the insurance professions. I have heard countless stories of contractors who have been encouraged to secure additional professional indemnity insurance to pay for building safety work, only then to be caught out by the insurers using every single technical loophole they can to avoid paying. Ultimately, that means there are buildings and homes across the country that are ready to be lived in that cannot be insured because of the actions of the insurance sector. Contractors are failing; we are seeing an increasing number of collapses among contractors in the construction sector.

Certainly, the big winners from all this have been the lawyers. I have unfortunately heard of schemes where the legal fees outweigh the cost of remediation. Something must be done by the Government to address such ambulance-chasing by some members of the legal profession, who are making millions out of a problem that homeowners inherited.

I thank the National Housing Federation, Real Estate:UK and many others across the sector who keep us informed, and I extend those thanks further down the chain, because without the stories shared by the contractors and suppliers who are working on this, we would not know the reality of trying to fix the problem day to day and the true scale of the challenges that we face. Does the Minister agree that alongside listening to trade bodies, leaseholders, freeholders and developers, we have to ensure that we are down in the supply chain, talking to suppliers and installers to understand what it is like on the ground?

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Murrison. I thank the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for securing the debate, and introducing it ever so comprehensively and well.

One of the first emails I received when I was elected in 2024 was from Tillicoultry residents who had been told that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete was present in their roofs. I remember being really moved by how those people have been affected in so many different ways. They have experienced immense stress and uncertainty at being evacuated at short notice. Three years later, they are still separated from their personal possessions: family heirlooms passed down through generations, photo albums, souvenirs and jewellery—items that cannot have a financial price put on them. Some people have had to move to temporary accommodation, such as hotels or rented properties that will never feel like home. The feeling of being unable to put down roots has taken a toll on their mental health, and having to still pay mortgages on uninhabitable properties has taken a toll on their financial health.

These people’s lives have been turned upside down, but the most heartbreaking and scandalous part of their story is them feeling like they have been ignored. Confusion over repairs and the cost of them has been a hallmark of years of substandard communication from the council. Homeowners have struggled to get responses to emails or phone calls about their ongoing situation, meaning that people have been unable to make informed decisions—and these are huge decisions to make. Some homeowners have ended up selling their property at a vastly reduced price just to get it all over and done with in an attempt to move on with their life.

After a recent meeting at the start of this month, the council accepted that information in some instances could have been presented more clearly. That was welcomed, but it is not enough. I have to say that the SNP administration that run the council need to reflect on the lack of leadership displayed during this whole sorry saga. Both the council leader and the local Clackmannanshire and Dunblane MSP, who is deputy leader of the Scottish National party no less, have been found utterly wanting. They have been so ineffective at getting the Scottish Government to step up and do the right thing for Tillicoultry residents.

The SNP Government have utterly abandoned Tillicoultry residents. It is a disgrace that it took two years for the Cabinet Secretary for Housing to meet with the residents, and the outcome of that meeting was a dereliction of duty. Instead of taking meaningful action to sort this mess out, they just wanted to blame Westminster, but the Tillicoultry residents know that housing is a wholly devolved matter. This is the Scottish Government’s responsibility. The Tillicoultry RAAC residents just want the council and the Scottish Government to treat them with empathy, compassion and fairness. That is not too much to ask. These people are in their hour of need.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) on securing today’s important debate and setting out the issue so clearly. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) on all the hard work he is doing to deal with the Halloween horror of panels falling in the town centre.

I pay tribute to the 72 victims of the Grenfell disaster. No debate should pass without recognising how grotesquely they were failed by the systems that were meant to protect them. Let us not forget what the public inquiry panel, chaired by the judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, said in its epic report on the disaster. On building inspectors, it said:

“We have concluded that the conflict between the regulatory function of building control and the pressures of commercial interests prevents a system of that kind from effectively serving the public interest.”

Similarly, it said that the Building Research Establishment

“sacrificed rigorous application of principle to its commercial interests.”

I will return to commercial interests shortly.

The remediation Bill announced in the King’s Speech is expected to make it a legal requirement that every fire risk appraisal of external walls be carried out according to the publicly available specification, or PAS 9980, standard produced by the British Standards Institution. That document decides whether, by law, a leaseholder’s building requires remediation or is considered safe.

The final version of that document has only just been published, but the draft that went out to consultation should worry us and every leaseholder in the country, and we need to know whether its deficiencies have been fixed. First, it says:

“Failure of a building to meet the benchmarks given in building regulations...at the time when the building was built, should not be used as the sole basis for determining the outcome of the FRAEW.”

That means that a building can still pass the PAS 9980 test even if it is proven not to have complied with the building regulations in force when it was built. The fire safety order manages fire safety in occupied buildings on the assumption that they met the building regulations when they were built. The remediation regime should require the same standard that developers should have met when constructing the building, and that others were, and continue to be, required to meet when constructing buildings.

What is remediation for if not to make buildings meet the standards they should always have met? Frankly, what is the point of having building regulations for leaseholders in this position if they are not enforced in such clear circumstances? Can the Minister reassure leaseholders that the newly published standard requires the remediation of failures to comply with the building regulations that were in force at the time of construction? Such questions also point to worrying failures to enforce building regulations more generally, far beyond fire safety, which could lead to an unfolding tide of undiscovered construction failings.

After what we have heard from Sir Martin Moore-Bick and the panel in the Grenfell public inquiry report, any notion that the profit motive has a continuing role in building inspection following those tragic events is unacceptable and cannot be sustained. I am disappointed that the building control independent panel has recommended the continuation of private sector, and therefore profit-seeking, roles in building inspection. That is what got us into this mess; it will not get us out of it. The Liberal Democrats are calling for building control services to be in-house in local or regional authorities, or otherwise not for profit.

As we have heard, the second deficiency in PAS 9980 is the gap between “tolerable” and “low”. Where an appraisal finds a tolerable risk, the draft allows for the work that is needed to bring that risk down to low to be delayed. The commentary on clause 7 suggests

“recommending upgrading the performance of external wall components if/when there is any refurbishment of the external walls in future.”

If and when is not good enough for families who have to live in unsafe homes and with the knowledge that their external walls contain flammable material, sometimes including materials that are more flammable than that used on Grenfell Tower. The leaseholder pays for that wait in insurance premiums, mortgage difficulties and living in a building that is only partially safe. For too many, it also renders useless the leaseholder protections in the Building Safety Act, as they apply to unsafe cladding, and this cladding is not considered unsafe.

If components are found to pose a tolerable risk, are they unsafe? Why should they not be removed to reduce the risk to low? We have heard about the challenge of getting insurance; if buildings were remediated to the standard to which they should have been built in the first place and all flammable materials were removed, residents would not have any problem in getting insurance. Developers cannot be asked to come back to finish the job under those circumstances, because the developer remediation contract only requires a building to be brought up to the “tolerable” standard. Can the Minister confirm whether the newly published standard requires all the work needed to reach a low-risk outcome to be undertaken at the same time?

These are not technical quibbles. The Department’s own figures, published in August, show that of the 4,600 buildings being monitored, only 1,800 have completed remediation, and over 2,000 of the 4,600 required remediations have not even been started, meaning. That means that in 46% of buildings with unsafe cladding no work has begun—nine years on from Grenfell, as other Members have pointed out—and the Department estimates that somewhere between 1,100 and 2,600 more buildings are in scope but have not yet been identified.

Meanwhile, leaseholders continue to struggle under the cladding crisis, buying properties that they believed met safety standards but that they now realise do not, and are suffering huge increases in premiums and so on. Many developers and building owners have passed on the cost of remediation work to tenants and leaseholders, putting many of them, quite unfairly, in serious financial peril. The Liberal Democrats, following the policy passed by our conference last year on the great property rip-off, are therefore calling for the removal of all such flammable cladding, whether above or below 11 metres, as soon as possible and without tenants or leaseholders, including non-qualifying leaseholders, having to pay.

After all, those who bought leases placed their trust in the private companies and regulatory bodies that let them down. The fault was not theirs. Solicitors’ searches would have shown that buildings had not met building regulations. Homeowners were misled, and it was not their fault. They should not have to pay a penny towards that work. That is why my noble Friend Baroness Pinnock’s Leaseholder Remediation (Building Safety) Bill, which had its Second Reading in the other place on Friday, would protect leaseholders in buildings of any height and would put developers, contractors and manufacturers on the hook for the cost.

In conclusion, I ask the Minister six things. Will she set out the changes between the consultation draft and the recent version of PAS 9980, which was published the other day? Will she make it clear that a building that has been found to fail the building regulations that were in force when it was built must be remediated back to the building regulations standard, and that the work needed to reach a low-risk outcome should be done once, not deferred to some future refurbishment? Will leaseholder protections be extended to every leaseholder in every defective building, including the hundreds of thousands excluded from the building safety regime? Will the Government commit to driving profit-making commercial interest out of every part of building control inspections and official product testing certifications, and to making physical inspections the norm once again in every development? What more will the Government do to end delays at the Building Safety Regulator? Finally, will the Government confirm that the remediation Bill will provide for cladding manufacturers to be pursued for their share of the costs of remediation, which they have at least partly caused?

We welcomed the legally enforceable duty to remediate on pain of criminal sanction, and we still do, but a duty to remediate is only as good as the standard against which it is measured. Commercial interest should have no place in policing commercial projects for safety and building regulations. Residents in Taunton and Wellington, in London and across the country deserve nothing less. Above all, the victims of the terrible and avoidable disaster at Grenfell deserve justice.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for securing this important debate.

I thank all hon. Members who are here this morning. Nine years on, a number of them have rightly raised the tragic incident at Grenfell Tower. As a London MP, I vividly remember the night of 14 June 2017. My son had been born a week earlier, on 7 June. Watching TV throughout the night was like watching a horror film with flames and black pieces, not knowing that the black pieces coming out of the building were people jumping. It is right that this House is united in continuing to scrutinise the pace of remediation and the support available to those affected.

Many residents across the country have lived with uncertainty about the safety of their homes, their financial security and their ability to move on with their lives. We recognise the impact that building safety can have not only on people’s homes, but on their wellbeing and peace of mind. Nine years on from Grenfell, we have to be honest and say that there can be no justification for unsafe buildings remaining unaddressed. Although significant progress has been made, more than 4,000 buildings have been identified as requiring remediation, and too many residents continue to face the consequences of failures that they did not cause.

That is why this Government are committed to speeding up remediation, ensuring that those responsible bear the cost of making buildings safer, and strengthening protections for leaseholders and residents. Our objective is clear: to remove barriers to remediation, speed up delivery and ensure that people can feel safe and secure in their home. Since the launch of the remediation acceleration plan, more than 420 additional buildings over 11 metres have completed cladding remediation through the Government-funded scheme and the developer remediation contract, meaning that some 35,000 more residents are now living in safer homes. The Government have approved £2.1 billion of funding for cladding remediation since the plan was launched and have committed to more than £1 billion to accelerate remediation in the social housing sector.

But we recognise that further action is needed. We are considering how we can go further to protect residents, particularly those who fall outside existing protections, and to ensure that no responsible party can avoid its obligations. That is why we will build on the foundations established by the Building Safety Act through the forthcoming remediation Bill and our wider programme of building safety reforms.

The Bill will provide greater clarity and certainty about which buildings require remediation and the standards that must be met. It will strengthen regulators’ ability to check delay and non-compliance. It will improve routes to recover remediation costs from those responsible and ensure that residents have a pathway to remediation even where responsible entities fail to act or are unable to meet their obligations. Taken together, these reforms will strengthen accountability across the system and help to ensure that buildings are made safer faster.

I turn to some specific issues raised during the debate. The hon. Members for Surrey Heath and for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) raised the issue of PAS 9980. As hon. Members will know, PAS 9980 was developed by the British Standards Institution. The Government sponsored the BSI to review and update it to ensure that it remains fit for purpose and captures best practice, looking at the learnings since it was introduced in 2022.

As the hon. Member for Surrey Heath outlined, the BSI published an update to PAS 9980 yesterday. I do not agree with the hon. Member’s characterisation. PAS 9980 provides an industry-wide accepted methodology to enable qualified and experienced assessors to undertake the fire risk appraisal of external walls. It provides a consistent and proportionate building-specific approach to risk assessments and helps to achieve the right solutions for each building, keeping residents safe while preventing unnecessary and disruptive works. As the update highlights, it has improved the clarity of the structure and usability of PAS 9980, with the aim of achieving greater transparency and consistency by assessors. It does not, however, materially change how risks are assessed, so fire risk appraisals of external walls undertaken using a previous version of PAS 9980 will remain valid. Government remediation programmes require that fire risk appraisals of external walls be undertaken using this methodology.

To further safeguard quality and ensure consistency in assessments, the remediation Bill will mandate how external wall assessments are carried out, to align with our best practice remediation programmes and ensure a nationally consistent approach to remediation work. It will also establish mandatory auditing of fire risk appraisals of external walls in law. This requirement will reinforce trust in both the assessors and the outcomes. I hope that that helps to reassure hon. Members.

Several right hon. and hon. Members rightly mentioned the issue of fire risk assessors. Fire risk assessors perform a critical safety role, and it is essential that they are fully compliant and competent. We have therefore accepted the full recommendation in the Grenfell Tower inquiry phase 2 report for mandatory certifications of fire risk assessors. To meet the recommendation, we intend to bring into law mandatory compliance requirements for fire risk assessors to perform that vital role, subject to parliamentary approval and timescale.

I welcome that step, but what the Minister says suggests it is some way off. Can she give some indication of the timescale for getting mandatory licensing in place?

I agree that many people will continue to question when the fire risk assessors will be in place. The Government recently launched a public consultation on the proposal to establish a fire risk assessor profession with consistently high levels of competency, whereby trust is rebuilt and a strong and diverse pipeline of talent comes forward to ensure that fire safety standards are met. We are currently analysing all the consultation responses, and the Government will publish a full response later this autumn, so hopefully my hon. Friend will not have to wait much longer.

We recognise the additional pressures on building control and fire engineer capacity across the country. We have established the independent building control panel and the fire engineers advisory panel to examine the issues and provide recommendations on strengthening the system. The Government are committed to working with the BSR on long-term reform and exploring options for a more efficient building control system. Any future changes will be developed in consultation with the industry and other stakeholders.

We all want to see stronger and better building control, but local authorities have been hollowed out. We have lost a lot of experienced planners and there is not always a pipeline coming through with the necessary experience. Can we lobby the Treasury for support for local government in that respect?

My hon. Friend will know that I will definitely continue to lobby Treasury colleagues very hard, and any help from colleagues around the House will be helpful. In the meantime, the current system includes a new initiative looking at digital building control programmes. I can confirm that over £45 million has been invested in growing the workforce to help to address the key issue of capacity, streamline the process and support development. More is coming, but a lot more needs to come through the pipeline.

A number of Members, including the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, mentioned the key issue of building insurance and the continuing financial strain felt by so many innocent leaseholders. They see their insurance premiums going through the roof, in some cases paying more than for their mortgages. In the remediation acceleration plan, the Government have committed to working with the insurance industry to explore options to address the insurance challenges faced by residents living in buildings that are undergoing remediation.

To strengthen the evidence base, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government launched the remediation programme insurance survey, a UK-wide survey of buildings in Government remediation programmes. The findings, first published in July 2026, provide the most comprehensive dataset collected to date on insurance costs, premiums and claims and remediation status across more than 2,000 buildings undergoing remediation. The evidence is informing ongoing engagement with insurers and wider work to understand how insurance costs can better reflect improvements in building safety as remediation progresses. The Financial Conduct Authority is undertaking a short and focused review of the multi-occupancy building insurance market, and the findings will strengthen the evidence base on the next steps.

The Government are also undertaking action to improve transparency and fairness in residential building insurance. We are proceeding with secondary legislation to prevent insurance commissions, which can be opaque and excessive, from being passed on by freeholders and managing agents as freeholders’ expenses, and to replace such arrangements with fair and transparent permitted insurance payments with a fee structure. Alongside that, we will introduce through secondary legislation a new transparency requirement for building insurance, including in respect of the disclosure of the relationships and financial arrangements among landlords, managing agents, brokers and insurers.

I am pleased to hear what the Minister just said about looking at the fairness of the whole market for insurance, but the immediate issue is that many of our constituents have for several years paid exorbitant and very excessive insurance costs. This is not their responsibility or fault—they did not install the dangerous cladding or fail to inspect properly. They deserve compensation from the insurance industry for what they have been through, and if that is not forthcoming, the Government should have a default position of backing it up. Our constituents have suffered grievously through this problem.

I thank the right hon. Member for raising that point. He highlighted examples of various developments in his constituency, including Drayton Park and Highbury Gardens, underlining the fact that innocent leaseholders have continued to pay exorbitant fees for many years. It is really important that we get to grips with this, especially for new buildings. I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning will be discussing the matter in respect of the national planning policy framework and some other areas, and I will continue to discuss it as well. On the specific issue of backdating, it is important for us to look at clear insurance procurement—the pricing, the cover, the prescribed timeframes for providing information and the mechanism for challenging any future delays.

Together, the measures the Government have outlined are intended to improve transparency, strengthen accountability and help to ensure that residents have a clearer understanding of insurance costs. There is a lot of jargon and hidden figures. We need to make sure that the costs are clear and that when residents challenge them, they get the right information back so that they can assess what they are being asked to pay for.

I thank the Minister for her answers; she is giving a comprehensive and detailed response, as I knew she would. Ever mindful that she has been in place for only a short time, I have a specific question about what is happening here compared with the situation back home. We have an outstanding problem with many properties in Belfast. It would be helpful if we were able, perhaps through the Minister, to engage with the Northern Ireland Assembly, and in particular the relevant Minister there, to ensure that what is learned here can be passed on to those back home in the Assembly.

I thank the hon. Member for raising a valid point about what lessons can be learned from what happens in the UK. As he has outlined, buildings right across the UK need to be safe. Every home needs to be safe; it does not matter where a person lives. I am very open to looking at areas of best practice, which we can share as we develop legislation.

Several Members, including the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, outlined the big issue with EWS1 forms, which has caused many homeowners a great deal of stress. The Government recognise the difficulties in selling and remortgaging homes, and the concerns for residents living in buildings impacted by building safety issues. We have continued to work with major mortgage lenders to improve access to lending for affected buildings and support the functioning of the housing market while remediation progresses.

The hon. Gentleman referred to concerns about the validity of certain EWS1 forms. I can confirm that my Department is aware of those concerns, which relate to a fire engineer who was removed from his professional accrediting body and is, as I understand it, no longer operating in the field. Although I cannot comment on individual cases, it is important to reiterate that the EWS1 form is not an official Government form but an industry tool used by lenders and valuers to help them to understand the remediation status of participating buildings.

My officials continue to engage with the mortgage lending industry to encourage it to take a proportionate approach when using EWS1 forms. The Government consider that lenders should be moving away from the forms, but there is still an over-reliance on them. The hon. Gentleman highlighted an additional bill of £4,500 because of the delay in getting an EWS1 form. We understand that EWS1 forms continue to be used by individual lenders, and the Government will continue to stress loudly that lenders should move away from that requirement.

A number of Members highlighted the issue of cost and who pays for historical remediation. The Building Safety Act puts the responsibility for undertaking, and in most cases paying for, remediation on the building’s landlords, while making it very clear that developers must pay to fix buildings that they have developed or refurbished even if they no longer own them. Courts have new powers to extend liability to associated companies, thereby stopping complex corporate structures being used to dodge responsibility. This was not fair and took a mental toll on many homeowners.

Where a developer cannot be identified or has not yet agreed to pay, public funding is available to address life-threatening cladding risk on residential buildings over 11 metres high, so that no leaseholder in those buildings will face cladding remediation costs. Many holders of qualifying leases are protected in full from non-cladding and interim measures—for example, where the landlord or its group meets the contribution condition or where the property value is below the set threshold.

Other qualifying leaseholders have their costs firmly capped and spread over 10 years, with costs already paid out since 28 June 2017 counting towards the cap. For obvious reasons, in Greater London the cap is £15,000 and across the country it is £10,000. That rises to £50,000 for properties valued between £1 million and £2 million, and to £100,000 for properties valued at more than £2 million.

The hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington mentioned the building safety levy, which will come into force on 1 October and will raise funds to pay for the remediation of cladding on residential buildings where the developer cannot be held responsible or identified. That is a key element for ensuring trust.

Under the work started by the previous Government, 53 developers signed the developer-led remediation contract with the Government. The contract covers more than 2,000 buildings in England that are over 11 metres high and have life-critical fire safety defects. Developers have contributed and committed to pay or fix the matter, at a cost of around £4.2 billion. Any developer that fails to comply with the remediation obligations faces significant commercial consequences, including the imposition of statutory prohibitions, effectively preventing them from building new homes in England. We expect all developers to accelerate their remediation work without compromising safety.

That is very positive, but of course those are the developers that are willing to engage, and many of them are not. I recently spoke to Carl Harris from Teesside who suffered life-changing injuries when a wall collapsed on him. He has been trying to engage the sector with an innovation he has developed to prevent unfinished walls from collapsing. What more can the Government do to encourage developers who are not already involved to innovate and protect workers and residents?

rose—

Minister, please allow a couple of minutes for the winding-up speech.

As of April 2026, developers had assessed whether remediation work was required in 94% of their buildings. Despite the progress, there is still a lot to do. Some developers are behind that stretch target and we will continue to engage with them.

The Government remain firmly committed to building a safety regime that is robust, proportionate and protects residents while enabling the delivery of much-needed homes. We have listened to concerns and have already taken decisive steps to strengthen the regulator’s capacity, improve its processes and ensure it is fit for purpose. We will continue to work with the industry, residents and Parliament to ensure that the regulation delivers effectively.

I am grateful for all the points Members have raised and will come back to them on any points I have not addressed, especially where they raised individual constituency cases. I look forward to the ongoing dialogue as we continue to address this really important issue.

I hope that every right hon. and hon. Member who participated in the debate accepts my thanks for their excellent contributions. I thank the Front-Bench spokespeople and the Minister, who is new to her role.

To pick up on one thing, the Minister said—forgive me for paraphrasing; I was writing it down as she spoke—that “no responsible party” in this whole scenario should be able to derogate, or words to that effect, from their obligations. I will leave her with one thought: the risk of PAS 9980 is that it allows those responsible to do exactly that—to be absolved of their responsibility. The defects that were built at the point of construction will be retained because of the new risk-based approach. The responsibility then falls on the purses of our constituents, because they will pay higher insurance costs in perpetuity. I know the Minister is new to her role—

Order.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).