Draft Building Safety Levy (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2026
House of Commons · General Committees · 7 Sep 2026 · 34 speeches · Official Report
The Committee consisted of the following Members:
Chair: Christine Jardine
† Amos, Gideon (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)
† Athwal, Jas (Ilford South) (Lab)
† Bacon, Gareth (Orpington) (Con)
† Bance, Antonia (Tipton and Wednesbury) (Lab)
† Charters, Mr Luke (York Outer) (Lab)
† Cocking, Lewis (Broxbourne) (Con)
† Collier, Jacob (Burton and Uttoxeter) (Lab)
† Eshalomi, Florence (Minister for Homelessness, Democracy, Communities and Faith)
Farron, Tim (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
† Fenton-Glynn, Josh (Calder Valley) (Lab)
† Kane, Mike (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
† Lamb, Peter (Crawley) (Lab)
† Long Bailey, Rebecca (Salford) (Lab)
† McCarthy, Kerry (Bristol East) (Lab)
† Simmonds, David (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
† Turner, Laurence (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)
† Wood, Mike (Kingswinford and South Staffordshire) (Con)
Jack Edwards, Committee Clerk
† attended the Committee
Second Delegated Legislation Committee
Monday 7 September 2026
[Christine Jardine in the Chair ]
Draft Building Safety Levy (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2026
I beg to move, That the Committee has considered the draft Building Safety Levy (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2026. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. The remediation of residential buildings with unsafe cladding in England is a priority for this Government. Nine years on from the Grenfell tragedy, there is no justification for any building to remain unsafe. Helping residents to feel safe in their homes and to move on from this issue is crucial work. The Government are committing £5.2 billion of taxpayers’ money to the costs of remediation, and the building safety levy is an essential part of the remediation funding package, which will protect leaseholders from costs and ensure that taxpayers are not further burdened. We estimate that the levy needs to raise £3.4 billion, likely over 10 years or more. The revenue target may be adjusted in accordance with the number of buildings requiring remediation and the costs of works. The levy regulations were made in November 2025 and will come into force on 1 October 2026. These draft amending regulations will clarify how the levy will work and are intended to come into force on 1 October. The levy will be charged on certain building control applications for new residential floorspace in England. It is important to note that developers have known about the levy since February 2021 and about its rates since March 2025, providing a significant lead-in period to plan for and incorporate the costs into their...
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine. I welcome the opportunity to sit opposite the Minister-I am pleased to be able to call her that-whom I congratulate on her appointment to the role. I warmly welcome her to her place and appreciate her remarks on the regulations. The Opposition stand alongside the Government-and, I am sure, with Members from across the House-in saying that building safety and remediation are critical tasks. We cannot be a world-leading economy or global power and still have citizens who live in-or, worse still, are trapped in-homes that have been rendered unsafe. People’s homes are the very places that they should feel safest. I therefore agree with the Minister on the need to make buildings safe, and I recognise that the building safety levy is intended to play a part in doing that. When assessing the regulations, we must consider the juncture at which we find ourselves. I was pleased to support plans for the Grenfell Tower Memorial earlier this year, and I welcomed the constructive tone adopted by Members from across the House and the value of the wider discussions about remediation and building safety during that debate. As the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed), highlighted in that debate, Government figures show that work to remove and replace unsafe aluminium composite material cladding-the type used for Grenfell Tower-has been completed for 91% of high-rise...
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine. I congratulate the Minister on her appointment and welcome her to her place. I rise to restate the Liberal Democrat commitment that no leaseholder who has found themselves subject to cladding remediation costs for which they were not responsible should shoulder those costs without access to remediation. We support these amendments to improve the 2025 regulations, but there is a bigger question about other buildings. High-risk buildings need to be addressed first, as the shadow Minister said, but there are none the less residents in buildings under 11 metres tall and in buildings whose standard does not meet PAS 9980:2022, which means that they continue to live in buildings with flammable cladding. Although that cladding would last an hour, so it is safer for them to escape, it is not a standard recognised by insurers, who expect buildings to be built to building regulations. Thousands of leaseholders are potentially in that position, and many of them cannot get insurance-except at very high cost-and cannot sell their properties. I invite the Minister to comment on how the funding towards the building safety regime can be widened beyond the levy, and to confirm that the Government will bring forward proposals in their remediation Bill to tackle the cladding manufacturers, which have been largely responsible for the crisis since it began.
I thank the Opposition for their positive contributions to this debate. In that spirit, we need to continue to work across parties to address this important issue. The shadow Minister asked about viability, a key issue that continues to come up. As he mentioned, we both serve as London MPs and see the impact across London and right across the country. It is important to recognise that the levy has been designed to minimise potential housing supply while also balancing the revenue required to make homes safe. The measures include variable rates to local authority levies and a 50% discount on developments on previously developed land, reflecting the additional costs of building on those sites. As I highlighted in my opening remarks, affordable housing is exempt from the levy, which should help to bring forward new housing supply. On average, the levy charge represents 1.1% of house prices on non-previously developed land, and 0.55% on previously developed land. It is therefore expected to have only a very small negative impact on supply. As I also mentioned, the levy was announced in 2021, so the sector has known about it for some time. We appreciate that many issues outside the sector and outside the Government’s control, whether locally, nationally or internationally, are having a big impact on developers, but it is important that they continue to price this work into the deals that they are doing.
I think the Minister misspoke. She said that the regulations had been designed to minimise housing supply. I am not sure that that is what she meant.
I thank the shadow Minister for highlighting that. I should have said that the levy has been designed to minimise potential housing supply impact. The shadow Minister asked whether the levy could have an impact on our ambitious target-rightly so-of reaching 1.5 million new homes. We continue to work closely with the housing market to look at supply. We are committed to working with the industry to ensure that homes continue to be built at pace. This issue comes up in my inbox, as it does for many hon. Members-it is not isolated to London. It is important that we build good-quality homes. The shadow Minister also highlighted the impact that the measures could have on innocent homeowners, who should not be burdened with the cost. I thank him for agreeing that the cost should not be placed on them. It is right that developers and house builders be responsible for it, in order to protect innocent homeowners. The Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington, highlighted an issue on which many of us have campaigned for many years: ensuring that innocent leaseholders and homeowners are not responsible for paying the levy. Many of them struggle with housing costs and the cost of living crisis on a day-to-day basis. It is important that developers have a way to fund the levy with no additional cost to the taxpayer. The Lib Dem spokesperson asked about properties that fall out of scope. We will continue to identify those properties and work with the sector to...
On a point of further clarification, I hope that the Minister agrees that one reason for broadening the scope of funding for the safety regime so that it includes cladding manufacturers is that in constituencies such as mine in Somerset, there are no high-rise buildings at all-indeed, most of Somerset has no high-rise buildings-but all the developers in Somerset will none the less pay for remediation in the big cities. None of us begrudges the importance of paying for that remediation, but I hope that that example illustrates the importance of widening the funding of the regime so that cladding manufacturers are required to contribute.
As I mentioned, we will keep under review the process and, importantly, the rates, and we will report back to the House every three years on those key areas. The building safety levy is essential to fund the remediation of historic building safety issues without further burdening residents and leaseholders. The draft amending regulations before the Committee are designed to support this work and make the levy work more efficiently, in accordance with our initial intention to support redevelopment of brownfield sites. They are intended to correct drafting and improve clarity and consistency of process for developers and local authorities, rather than alter the underlying policy design of the levy. The Government are committed to delivering 1.5 million homes in this Parliament to meet the country’s long-term housing needs and unlock growth. That mission must work in parallel with our commitment to remedy the building safety failures of the past. We expect the development industry to contribute to our work making buildings safe for those who live in them. I commend the regulations to the Committee. Question put and agreed to.
Committee rose.