On 3 February 2025, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) held a two-part evidence session on the remediation of dangerous cladding and the government’s response to the “evolving cladding crisis”
Chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP welcomed officials and representatives during two oral evidence sessions and acknowledged the findings of its 2020 committee report, which “highlighted the slow progress in remediating high-rise buildings”. Alluding to the government’s newly announced remediation action plan, he cited a November 2024 National Audit Office (NAO) report that warned that 60% of buildings with dangerous cladding have yet to be identified and that “it may take another decade before all affected buildings are made safe”.
Panel 1 session
Keen to gain a clearer insight into the current experience of residents, the first oral evidence session saw Member of the Housing, Communities, and Local Government Committee Joe Powell MP ask End Our Cladding Scandal campaigner Giles Grover whether he was confident that the government’s new remediation commitments would deliver for residents. Grover responded that he was “not at all confident”, adding that the 2029 target announced by the government as part of its Remediation Acceleration Plan was “essentially meaningless to most people”.
He said: “Whether it is about non-qualifying leaseholders, non-cladding defects, shared ownership, or under-11-metre buildings—where there is a case-by-case approach that has failed—I do not know how I can be confident in a plan when the actual issues and the barriers to remediation have not been addressed.”
Grover noted that “a single front end” was needed for leaseholders and residents, namely “a single version of truth for all unsafe buildings that require remediation”. Local regulators were unable to enforce the developer contract, with resident management companies forced to put waking watches in place, which the developer was not obliged to pay for.
“How do we actually work all this? There is too much buck passing. There are too many blame games going round.”
Concerns shared by the panel were not just around money but also a lack of skills and training, with more required from the government to “provide the certainty of risk assessments for all buildings, of all heights and all defects, inside and outside”.
David O’Leary, Executive Director for the Home Builders Federation, noted: “The quality of the assessments is really important...The government have a panel of assessors, but only a third of those are chartered fire engineers. Only a third of those are the most experienced, well-qualified engineers, and many of our members would use only chartered fire engineers for their assessments. We have this shortfall, which the government could have been helping with over recent years, but we are still way behind the 8 ball.”
Councillor Adam Hug, Leader of Westminster City Council and Chair of the Local Infrastructure and Net Zero Board for the Local Government Association, also commented on the “limited pool of people” available:
“It takes several years to train a fire engineer or a surveyor, and they will maybe do a year or so in a local authority or whatever, and then potentially get snapped up by the private sector. That is exacerbated by the lack of long-term funding for local authorities to be able to plan and lock someone in place. If you get someone good, they will be snapped up.”
The discussion also moved onto the government's joint plan with developers regarding remediation costs. O’Leary added that a “huge pinch point” in applying for remediation scheme work was the Building Safety Regulator (BSR).
“Again, it is really frustrating that the Building Safety Regulator was legislated for three years ago, and we could foresee all of the challenges that were coming. It was ill-equipped when it was set up and established and began last year, and it does not seem to have improved since.”
He later admitted that some of the applications the BSR had to deal with were “complex” and that limited resources were adding to the backlog: “There is a lack of qualified people to do the work of the Building Safety Regulator, in the private sector, and public sector. This is not groundbreaking news for anyone. It will frustrate the government in many ways, not just on this issue but on their 1.5 million homes target.”
Clive Betts MP then asked Rhys Moore, Executive Director of Public Impact for the National Housing Federation, about remediation concerns for social housing providers. Moore responded that the impact on development in London had been “catastrophic”, down by 90%. He added that the current “design” of the Building Safety Fund “explicitly excludes social tenants from being able to access public support”.
He added: “What that means in reality is that about 90% of public funding has gone to private building owners to support remediation—that is non-ACM funding—and about 10% has gone to social landlords. We think that set-up is fundamentally unfair and deeply inefficient, and we think it is wrong, in that it prioritises tenure over risk: it directs funding to the type of tenure rather than the risk of a building.”
Panel 2 session
The second evidence session saw chair Sir Geoffrey and his committee quiz senior government officials on their progress in identifying buildings with dangerous cladding. Programme Director for the Cladding Safety Scheme (CSS) at Homes England, Helen Fisher explained that her team had been “trained to look at combustible materials” to create a full register of buildings, adding that there was also a ‘Tell us’ tool available in which leaseholders and residents could check whether their building was listed on the CSS website.
Richard Goodman, Director General for Safer and Greener Buildings, and SRO for Remediation Policy at the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government (MHCLG), added that £33 million was being put into the enforcement framework. Asked whether this was sufficient funding, Goodman said: “That will depend on the behaviour of freeholders. It is certainly true, for instance, that where we have had leading litigation, tribunal decisions have changed the dynamic of freeholders responding to buildings.”
He added that while this was an “important behavioural dynamic”, the framework was “not going to be enough on its own to fix the problem”.
“We have the commitment to legislate for a backstop date, for more severe penalties, for clearer and tighter assessment standards, and for more rigorous duties on building owners. You can take from that a recognition that that is where the framework does not currently go hard enough and that that is needed to make the acceleration plan work, but we are not waiting for legislation to come over the hill; we are doing everything we can with the tools we have, ahead of any changes to the law.”
The panel was then questioned about skills and capacity. Goodman noted that Homes England had worked to set up “state capacity” for fire assessors within the CSS to ensure that people could get access to assessments quickly. He noted that the panel was “currently under-utilised” and had also been extended to developers. He reiterated that they did “not see a shortfall there at the moment” and had “additional capacity” that could be utilised.
Raising the issue of the “passing of the buck between freeholders and developers” for remediation work, Ben Llewellyn, Director for Remediation Policy for MHCLG, said they were in the process of “setting up a formal dispute resolution process”.
“A process already exists where developers and freeholders have signed a contract of works between them; that is a requirement of the developer contract. But before they get to that stage, there can be disputes over the scope of the works. We want to provide a formal route by which the parties can reach an agreement. In advance of that, we have sought to arbitrate between parties. For example, we undertake an assessment, which both parties accept will be the final assessment, to broker a deal around the right scope of the works and allow for those works to go ahead, so it is not going to be ignored in the meantime.”
Nesil Caliskan MP then asked what efforts were underway to reduce the burden of increasing insurance costs on leaseholders. Goodman agreed that it was a “very serious problem”, with a department-commissioned Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) report of the high-rise buildings market showing “significant increases in prices—the price of premiums rising at twice the rate, so we are talking 200%—for residents in high-rise blocks”.
He said: “We are bringing forward statutory changes to ensure that freeholders’ fees and what freeholders can charge for arranging insurance are also capped and controlled, because the FCA found some terrible practices and passback there. I think it is fair to say that, while dents have been made, that problem is not resolved and there is more that we can do.”
“We think a risk-based standard is the right approach,” Goodman added, because “a risk-based standard applies in terms of structural safety, ageing buildings and subsidence; it is not unique to fire safety.”
He continued: “That standard is designed to avoid another terrible catastrophe. We have entrusted experts to give us guidance to ensure that that is the case. They are re-reviewing that, but we do not accept that there is a correlation between overall fire risk in the built environment and the nature of insurance premiums. It is simply not borne out in the number of fires there are and how many of them are catastrophic.”
Returning to the issue of whether there were enough skills to carry out the work needed, Healey added that £140 million had been put into a fund “to support training and development to produce an extra supply of labour to support the target”, but that MHCLG would “continue to look at what more we can do, and we will set out more of that in our housing strategy later this year.”
You can watch the two Committee sessions here.