I have tricked the noble Lord, Lord Khan—I am responding to this one. First, we have not gone around counting every balcony in the country. Given that there are 7,500 medium-rise buildings and about 12,500 high-rises, we have other things to do with our time.
I met the devolved Administrations of Wales and Scotland today; we need to know roughly how many buildings require remediation and then do it as quickly and effectively as possible. There is some way of knowing that with high-rises, and through surveys we have a pretty good grip on the number of buildings where remediation may be required—it is actually very few—as well as mitigation. Increasingly, we want to see more innovation so that we can avoid costly remediation wherever possible.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, is very clever. I have been trying to distil amendments in up to three words—I have got it down to two on one occasion—and it would be easy to say that this is the “balcony” amendment, but I do not think it is. It is the “proportionality” amendment. It is fair to say that this was addressed when, on 10 January, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State set out some building safety reset principles. He said:
“We … need to ensure that we take a proportionate approach in building assessments overall … too many buildings … are declared unsafe, and … too many … have been seeking to profit from the current crisis.”—[Official Report, Commons, 10/1/21; col. 283.]
The noble Baroness was very eloquent in giving examples of precisely that—where, essentially, an industry is fuelled by trying to profit at the expense of leaseholders, very often, who do not have the shoulders to bear the costs being charged to them. That is why we are putting a number of protections for leaseholders in this Bill, for both cladding and non-cladding costs, which we have discussed in other groups, and the very strong principle that the polluter must pay wherever possible, as we discussed in an earlier group today.
The Government have taken three measures with regard to proportionality. It is important to reflect on them, because they are easily forgotten as we debate things. None is in this Bill; I will turn later to some things that are. First, we withdrew the consolidated advice note of January 2020; that was seen as a driver of decisions to remediate without thought on too many occasions, when it was not necessarily the right way to go. Secondly, after withdrawing the advice note, the publicly available specification was introduced, produced by the British Standards Institution; it will enable fire engineers and other experts to have a consistent and auditable assessment of risk—basically, grading whether something is high, medium or low—of the external wall systems, which sometimes include balconies and sometimes do not. That is an important tool to have to be able to start having sensible risk-based assessment of external wall systems.