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Hackitt legislation will be brought to parliament this year, government confirms
Legislation to implement a new post-Grenfell system of building regulations will be brought before parliament later this year, the government has confirmed.
In a statement to the House of Commons, housing secretary James Brokenshire said the bill to carry out the recommendations of Dame Judith Hackitt’s review of building regulations will be put to MPs in the next parliamentary session.
This confirmed Inside Housing’s exclusive story from last month, in which it was reported that the government would produce a draft bill in the winter.
If the rest of the timetable revealed by Inside Housing is followed, a vote will take place at some point in 2020/21, with a view to legislation being put in place in 2021.
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Mr Brokenshire told MPs: “We want to get this reform on to the statute book and make it happen. We have taken steps with the ban on combustible cladding.
“We have taken steps to see that action is advanced and that buildings are made safe and, indeed, we have taken steps with the remediation programme that is in place. Yes, there is absolutely more work to be done and I do not shrink from that.”
Last week the government published a consultation on this bill, confirming its intention to establish a new building safety regulator along with a range of other proposals on how to implement Dame Hackitt’s review.
Responding to Mr Brokenshire, Labour’s shadow housing secretary John Healey told parliament: “There has been over these two long years some progress, which we welcome and for which individual members and ministers, including the secretary of state, deserve some credit.
“But a national disaster on the scale of Grenfell Tower requires a national response on the same scale from the government. That has not happened.”
Labour yesterday called for owners of private blocks with Grenfell-style cladding to have their buildings confiscated if they did not take action.
Mr Brokenshire was speaking the day after a serious fire destroyed 20 flats in Barking, after spreading across timber ThermoWood balconies.
He confirmed in his statement that he has asked the Building Research Establishment, a building science organisation, to investigate the fire alongside the London Fire Brigade and he has asked for urgent advice from the government’s independent expert panel.
Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking, said in parliament: “Allegedly – and this is so shocking – that timber had not been treated.
“What I have been told is that the regulations are such that, because the building was only a six-storey building and therefore not 18 metres or higher, there was no necessity to have that sort of regulation – that is shocking. How on earth can that be possible in this day and age?”
