Katie Lam

I thank the Secretary of State for her remarks. All of us, across the House, agree on the fundamental need to resolve this issue. As she movingly said, the appalling fire at Grenfell Tower and the resultant loss of life were horrifying. I join her in paying tribute to the victims, survivors and their friends and family. We all agree that home is the place where people ought to feel safest. It is deeply concerning that so many people across the country still live in a home that has been rendered unsafe, and we welcome the Government’s desire to put that right. The Opposition have concerns about some of the Bill’s provisions, and about whether the proposed measures will definitely ensure that more people end up living in a safer home. I will set out some of those concerns. We look forward to working with the Government to improve the Bill however we can. Remediation of unsafe cladding is often slow because there are simply not enough qualified people to do the work. This point has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), but I will spend a moment on it. Every affected building needs a specialist assessment of its external walls, at a time when fire engineers and assessors are in short supply. Training new specialists takes years, yet the Bill does not lay out any particular plans for training those skilled professionals. Contractors face the same shortage of skilled labour and materials. Too often, owners who want to act cannot find anyone to carry out the work. Remediation is slow because the work is complicated and unpredictable. When old cladding is removed, contractors regularly find further defects, so the scope, cost and delays grow. On top of those practical difficulties, many of the buildings concerned are part-owned by their leaseholders. Remediation is also slow because when it comes to the practical implementation of the legal regime, the situation is fragmented. Implementation is managed building by building, and the responsibility is split between owners, managing agents, contractors and three overlapping regulators. Unsurprisingly, that drives up costs and drags out timelines, however willing the owners are. The Bill’s answer is to ask the three regulators to write a statement on how they will co-operate, which is not the same as getting the work done. We already have evidence that a legal obligation, such as the one proposed in the Bill, does not by itself guarantee timely remediation. Developers on the developer remediation contract, which the last Conservative Government implemented so that developers, not taxpayers, would cover the cost of remediation, are already bound by equivalent requirements, which is why the Bill exempts them. The Government’s figures show that developers have finished work on only a third of their buildings, and fewer than one in four of all their buildings with life-critical defects. Responding to the Public Accounts Committee, the National Fire Chiefs Council warned that limited workforce capacity was the primary bottleneck to remediation. The then NFCC chair, Mark Hardingham, put it best when he said that “we cannot enforce our way out of the cladding crisis.”