Mr Clive Betts
MP for Sheffield South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“I wholeheartedly welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement, both its content and its tone. I would like to ask about his discussions with our colleagues and allies in other countries who are looking to implement similar sanctions.”
“I offer two congratulations: first, to my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour, the First Secretary, on her well-deserved promotion—I am sure she will do an excellent job. Secondly, I congratulate her and the Prime Minister for their real commitment to devolution, which I have wanted to see for an awfully long time.”
“I apologise for the fact that—as I have explained to you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will have to leave straight after my question to chair Westminster Hall. I thank my right hon. Friend for doing this very challenging piece of work. I think that the theme of fairness, for the people who need benefits and for taxpayers, is right.”
“On the other hand, so many constituents with really serious conditions get turned down for PIP, and can get it only if they struggle through the appeal system, sometimes without any help at all. So the system is not fair to anyone at present.”
“When the previous Government let the contract, we were in a situation in which procurement could not properly take account of the past record of companies, and I understand that the Government have now changed that.”
“I will dive very deeply into the question, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Chair of the Committee sends his apologies for his absence; he is presently in a Committee meeting.”
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“Whatever system we have, there has to be a proper appeals system that works expeditiously for the benefit of the appellant and local authorities. A number of issues still need to be considered, but the principle behind this small Bill is a good one that should be supported.”
“That would take the pressure off those elements of business, particularly high street shops, which are most under pressure. That still needs to be looked at. Finally, appeals are still a problem. We hear that local authorities are holding reserves for very obvious reasons. We have changed the system and we now have a check and challenge. We have been told that it is discouraging businesses from appealing, so there is that disadvantage, compared with having lots of appeals that were bogging down the system. Fundamentally, the evidence showed that the valuation office is understaffed and under-resourced to deal with appeals. That came up in the Treasury Committee inquiry. I hope Ministers will look at that.”
“Amyas Morse, the then Comptroller and Auditor General, made the point to the Committee that simply having a system based on another age and on floor space was taking no account of the changes happening now in modern society. That was not sustainable in the long term and there had to be change. There could be a complete comprehensive review, moving to a completely different system of raising money from businesses. That is one way. I still think it is hard to avoid taxation on physical buildings and that they are probably a good basis for a system, but there has be some reform and some addition. The Select Committee’s inquiry into the high street recommended that we look at a number of alternatives, including the potential for an online sales tax.”
“Will it have any impact particularly on the issue of resets within the system? Presumably not, particularly if a rolling reset is done. I presume that would be covered and would not be affected, but it would be helpful to have reassurance on that. I echo the point made by my friend the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman). All the evidence we have heard, in our high street inquiry and the business rate retention inquiry—I am currently a guest on the Treasury Committee inquiry into business rates—shows that we just cannot carry on not recognising the change of circumstances, particularly with regard to the high street and 20% of sales now being done online, which is the highest percentage anywhere in the world. At some point, the system will have to change.”
“Any more frequently would be too much change too quickly, so three years is a reasonable compromise on which I think there is general agreement. I hope the Government really mean it and that we will have three years. In 2015, when we had five years, the valuation was postponed for two years. Why? It was because we were going to have a general election in 2015. That was the reason and everyone knows it. That meant seven years between revaluations, which created an even bigger problem with even bigger changes and a lot more difficulties, from which we are still suffering. Are there any implications for the business rate retention scheme? Presumably, the Government are still going ahead with the 75% figure. Is it going ahead from next year? We are still not quite sure, in these changed circumstances.”
“I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am the vice-president of the Local Government Association. I do not want to keep the Minister too long from his exciting bedtime reading, which he was telling us about in questions earlier. In principle, I accept what the Bill tries to do and I think it is a sensible move. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has conducted an inquiry into business rate retention and, more recently, the high street. The view generally has been that business rates should be revalued more often and that three years is a reasonable compromise. Five years is too long, because we get major changes in rating values that we then have to catch up with, and we then have dampening mechanisms, appeals and so on.”
“The Minister made a commitment that this will be reviewed later this year as part of the spending review. Does that mean that the spending review is going ahead this year?”
“Many of our recommendations have been accepted by the Minister, but I have pointed out some that have not; I hope she will give us an even more helpful response about those today.”
“The situation will not stand still. People will not reverse their shopping habits but carry on in very much the same direction, which will further undermine retail sales on the high street—it is bound to. In our report, however, we said that provided that everyone, including the Minister—who is present, while others are not, so we will direct this to her—considers and puts into place our recommendations, high streets and town centres can have a better future. That will require a shift from retail-focused activities to new purposes and uses that foster greater social interaction, community spirit and local identity. I am pleased to recommend the report. I hope that we can all work together to have it implemented.”
“I hope that they might have another think about looking at it, because it was raised with us on a number of occasions. There are challenges not merely for local government, but for central Government, retailers and landlords. We have said that there are real challenges. We can all see the challenges and problems on our high streets. We were worried and we said in our concluding remarks: “Unless…urgent action is taken, we fear that further deterioration, loss of visitors and dereliction may lead to some high streets and town centres disappearing altogether.” Given what has happened over the past 10 or 15 years, and if another 10 or 15 years are spent going in the same direction, we can see that happening. We cannot predict what lies ahead, but online sales have doubled in the past five years, so it is almost certain that they will grow.”
“They engage in BIDs and look at how they can improve their shopping facilities, while others just see them as a money-making venture. We saw examples of shops lying empty, but there was a long lease, so the landlord was just sitting there and getting the money in, and had no real incentive to go and find another tenant. There have to be changes in that respect. We asked the Government to review the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, and they say that they will look at whether that should be reviewed. That was a helpful response. However, we also asked the Government at least to consider how they might look again at upward-only rent reviews, and they said, “No, we’re not going to interfere in contracts between landlord and tenant.” We only asked them to look at that.”
“I mentioned that Stockton is doing interesting things, and I asked, “Is bringing all these ventures into Stockton centre really helping?” They said, “Yes, sort of, but when we asked some of our retailers how many more people they got through their shops, they said, ‘Not that many, because we close at 5.30.’” Retailers have to understand that they have to change their approach to suit the customer—that is really important. We heard other examples of retailers, even small ones, using social media to advise their regular customers of changes to products in their store. Landlords also have to get real. There are still landlords with completely unrealistic retail unit asset values on their books, based on rental values as they were 10 or 15 years ago. Some big retailers are proactive and engaged.”
“That is the big issue on which we really want to push Ministers, because at some point this is going to change, and we cannot carry on disadvantaging our high street retailers in the meantime. As I explained, local government has a role here in developing strategies and local plans; central Government have a role in looking at changes to business rates, compulsory purchase powers and other things; and retailers also have a responsibility.”
“Business rates are easy, and we are probably not going to tear them up, forget about them and change them tomorrow, because they are relatively easy to collect—that is a great benefit of them—but thinking that all business taxation at local level should rely on square footage is something that goes back historically, because it was an easy thing to do when everybody shopped in a shop. Ministers have to think a bit about the longer term. Sir Amyas said that the situation will not endure forever. Well, Ministers do not tend to endure forever. Perhaps this Minister has other aspirations but, realistically, at some point a Minister will have to grasp the nettle and consider, if not completely scrapping business rates, then at least recognising that reform has to happen in the light of changing shopping habits.”
“Interestingly, Sir Amyas Morse, in his retirement swansong before the Committee at our evidence session on local authority finance—he is normally forthright in his views—said: “I am concerned as to how realistic basing everything on business rates really is…it is concerning as to whether something that is based on a square footage formula in the modern day is going to be terribly relevant to measuring business activity… Even though it may be convenient to go forward with it now, I cannot believe it will endure forever, because it is just such an odd way of trying to measure business activity.” He is right.”
“The Government said that they were bringing in lots of reliefs, which they are, but a point that has been made to us quite strongly is that although the sticking plaster of reliefs is a welcome and useful mechanism, lots of those sticking plasters on top of one another becomes an unsightly and terribly confusing mess. Lots of people said that the system was now really confusing, with a number of reliefs in place. The evidence that I heard at the Treasury Committee evidence session the other day clearly suggested that the need for so many reliefs so frequently indicates that the basic system is flawed and in need of more substantive review.”
“Only the Government can alter that. Simply altering business rates will not change the high street back to how it was 20 years ago, but there needs to be a recognition that shopping habits are changing and that taxation policy ought to change in line with that. We recommended that the Government look at a number of options: an online sales tax, an extension to VAT, a green tax on deliveries, or anything to reflect changing shopping habits. That money could be used to reduce the general business rates paid on the high street, to give a holiday when a business carries out improvements to stop an immediate rise in its business rates, or to add to the Government’s fund to help high streets. The Government had all those options—we were not totally prescriptive—but they came back and said no; they did not want to do anything at all.”
“I am serving as a guest on the Treasury Committee, which is conducting an inquiry into business rates, and exactly the same sort of evidence is coming forward. Not everyone has the same solution; some want wholesale reform of business rates, while others simply want some changes to make them fairer, but the demand for change was pretty consistent. The reason is that it is considered unfair that Amazon pays 0.7% of its turnover on business rates, and it took quite a bit of extraction to get that figure out of Amazon, while high street chains spend between 1.5% and 6.5% of their turnover on business rates—in other words, more than double, and in some cases it is 10 times as much. That simply is not fair—this is about the element of fairness. People on the high street are trying to trade at a significant cost disadvantage.”
“The local authority would then have to say, “Actually, you did that under permitted development rights, but now we have a local plan, which means we need to compulsory purchase those properties and fundamentally change the land use.” There ought to be a proviso that if a local plan is going to re-designate an area and affect particular properties, it is not helpful to have permitted development rights for the same properties at the same time. The Government need to think carefully about that. At the end of the day, it is not helpful to the individuals to be given that freedom, which is not really a freedom. The biggest issue on which we disagree with the Government is that of business rates. Every bit of evidence we received showed that there is a problem.”
“We said that before the Government further extended permitted development rights, it would be helpful if they carried out an assessment of the impact on the high street of their previous extensions to those rights. The Government did not agree to that, which is disappointing. It is always good to have an impact assessment on what has already happened before doing something else, but we disagreed on that. We were clear that permitted development rights should not be allowed to get in the way of a local plan that tries to change the fundamental land use of part of a centre. If a local authority is trying to change buildings from retail into housing, leisure or a park, for example, it is not helpful if someone converts the odd shop into a house a few months before that local plan comes into effect.”
“We identified two additional areas of interest where local government is trying to work with business to change, and where change is needed from central Government. The first is compulsory purchase orders. We learned that where councils try to change land use in an area, they often have to compulsorily purchase some properties. Again, we are pleased with the Government’s response. They accepted that and said that they will review the whole process, which is cumbersome, long-winded, time-consuming and costly. A slightly more difficult area was permitted development rights, for which the Government consulted about extensions at the same time.”
“We recognise that, as part of this process, the Government’s £675 million future high streets fund was helpful. It was there for councils and businesses to tap into and use for this change process. Of course, we do not think it is enough, although the Government do: that is one point of disagreement. We also made the point that the taskforce that the Government set up— Sir John Timpson came along and talked about it—is a really helpful way forward, but we said that it cannot be a talking shop. It must be a place where councils and others can go and get real, hard advice, and where we can collect examples of good practice. Very often, what is done in one area can be learned from and implemented in another. That is something that we can greatly benefit from.”
“There is a concern that councils often have not caught up with the rapid change in online shopping, and therefore their local plans are out of date and do not reflect that change. They are not looking at the changes that they need to make to the land use in their town and city centres. When we went to Darlington, it was readily accepted that a whole retail area might simply have to be closed down, and that a completely different use might have to be found for that part of the town. It is very simple maths: if 20% of the shopping that was done on the high street 30 years ago is now done online, we need 20% fewer shops. We do not want that to happen in a pepper-potted way, which would simply mean a bit of decay everywhere; we need to concentrate it and change how that land is used in the future.”
“We urged all local authorities to adopt “living documents, regularly updated to capture and reflect changing trends,” which “must be forward looking, anticipating what will happen in five years’ time.” Local authorities should have dynamic strategies for the high street of the sort we have just talked about. We were pleased that the Government basically accepted that all local plans should be reviewed every five years, and that town and city centre strategies should be looking at least 10 years ahead. They were on the same wavelength. All I would say to the Government is, go look at the cuts of about 50% that councils have made to their planning budgets. When planning departments prioritise planning applications, they often lack staff with the capacity and capability to think ahead and do the necessary local plan work.”
“We heard about Malton, which is successfully branding itself as a place to go for food. Centres can identify themselves in different ways to show that they are an attractive place for people to come to. Business improvement districts, where local businesses come in, can play an important part. We were pleased that the Government accepted our recommendation that community representatives should be encouraged to sit on BIDs. BIDs should be about not just business, but community. That is in keeping with our general recommendation to change the whole approach of high streets from simply retail and business to wider community uses. A key issue from a council perspective was local plans, which should be living mechanisms that are kept up to date.”
“People will be drawn in by the coffee shops and leisure activities, and then they will go shopping, which will be an important part of a wider experience. That is what we see for the future, and our report looks at ways in which we can get there. We concluded that local councils have a really important role to play in developing that approach. They need to work with their communities and businesses, and try to create a sense of place for the area, which might be very different from the place next door. On one of our visits, we went to Stockton, which had been badly hit by the loss of retailers. It was putting on bike rides, fun runs, marathons, outdoor theatre and other activities to try to encourage people, particularly in the summer months, to come into Stockton centre and use the retail facilities.”
“We concluded that the days when the high street was 100% retail—for much of the 20th century, people went to their high streets or town and city centres to shop—have gone, and that there now needs to be a strategy in each area, backed by the local community, initiated by local councils and supported by local traders, to create a different approach to the activities on the high street. We concluded that if high streets and centres are to survive and thrive by 2030, they must become “activity-based community gathering places”, with a reduced retail element and a wider range of uses, including green space, leisure, arts and culture, health and social care, and housing, with the community at its heart. Retail will be there, but there will be a number of other activities drawing people in.”
“The decline of the high street is a matter of concern to Members across the House because it is a concern to our constituents and the general public. The change—the reduction in the number of people shopping, in some cases the empty shops, and in the worst cases the decay and deterioration across villages, small towns, larger towns, cities and district centres—is almost entirely down to online shopping. Some 20% of sales are now done online: the highest percentage anywhere in the world. That has happened in the UK over a fairly short period—the past 10 or 15 years—and in many cases the use of shops and the reaction of councils and the Government have not kept pace with that very rapid change. We as politicians cannot and should not want to halt it, but we must look at what we can do to mitigate its impact and address the situation.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the Eleventh Report of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, High Streets and town centres in 2030, HC 1010, and the Government response, CP 84. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. It also gives me great pleasure to discuss the report by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on high streets and town centres in 2030. I thank everyone who contributed to our inquiry, including our witnesses. We took a range of evidence from retailers, councils, landlords, planners and academics, and we came to our conclusions after eight evidence sessions and two visits. I thank the Committee staff for their work in putting the report together. The reason why the Committee decided to conduct this inquiry is, I think, pretty obvious.”
“They should read the excellent report from Tesco that said how this could be done and how it could benefit the high street. Question put and agreed to. Resolved That this House has considered the Eleventh Report of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, High Streets and town centres in 2030, HC 1010, and the Government response, CP 84.”
“We can have a brighter future by changing the nature of the high street, with changing uses—coffee shops, leisure, open spaces, public services and residential—all being brought in, led by the local authorities with BIDs through their local planning processes, involving their local communities and businesses in a package. We also said that there has to be a level playing field for retail, which will still be an important part of the high street. We held our inquiry after all the Government’s initiatives on business rates had been brought in, and no one who gave evidence said that they were sufficient. That is the reality. The Government simply have to go away and look again at the possibility of alternatives, such as an online sales tax.”
“I thank all hon. Members for their contributions, and particularly members of the Select Committee, whom I also thank for agreeing this report unanimously. We did very well: it was 45 minutes before Brexit was mentioned and 70 minutes before Mike Ashley was mentioned. We started off with failures of retail, whether British Home Stores, which is gone, or House of Fraser, which is restructuring, and we subsequently heard about Arcadia, Marks & Spencer and Debenhams closing stores and small businesses going out of business altogether. We looked at a situation that could get worse, with some high streets failing completely, but then we looked at the possibilities for the future. We recommend that all stake- holders get together, including local councils, Government, retailers and landlords.”
“When I drive around Europe this summer, I will not find any two major cities less well connected than Sheffield and Manchester. A review has been done of improving the road connections between those two cities, and there is now an agreed best way forward. When will the Government activate that, so that we get an all-purpose, all-weather route between those two cities?”
“More than 4,000 of my constituents will lose their free TV licences. Will the Secretary of State explain to them simply and clearly how he expected to keep the promise made to them in the 2017 manifesto about their free TV licences? What mechanism did he intend to use?”
“That was even though the Committee, when it did its report last July, recommended that an immediate fund be established, initially at a very low rate of interest, at least to provide the wherewithal to get this work done, and we could argue about who would pay for it afterwards. We are still very much in that position.”
“The Government’s reasoned response was that leaseholders should not have to pay for the responsibility. However, for a year after the announcement of the funding for social housing, there was virtually no progress at all on private high-rise buildings, except where some developers decided that they would accept responsibility for the material they had put on. We have to recognise that, in some cases, developers were no longer responsible for the buildings—they may have been bought out by other companies, which were often freehold companies with limited assets— while there were leaseholders who could not pay. It really was a situation that was never going to be resolved. Ministers kept saying—I think this was the famous phrase—“We rule nothing out”, but for the most part nothing actually got done for a long period of time.”
“Very importantly, it is a story not merely about new building, but about existing buildings, and I will make particular reference to that in a few moments. It was immediately agreed that the ACM cladding—the cladding on Grenfell—on other high-rise residential buildings should be removed. However, the Government initially produced no funding to go with that. It took till 16 May 2018—roughly a year after the disaster—for the Government to come forward with £400 million, which was welcome. It has generally meant quite a lot of progress on taking the cladding off high-rise social housing, and that progress is welcome. It is not quite complete, but it is welcome progress. Alongside that, there has been a real problem in relation to private sector buildings and the refusal of the freeholders to accept responsibility.”
“However, it is also a story of probably quite a slow response in some respects, and of a response that is still completely inadequate in others and one that has not been finalised. I hope it has not been finalised because I hope that the Government will go further. It is a story about ACM cladding—the cladding on Grenfell—and clearly a requirement for that to be removed, and it is a story of other materials that may be just as dangerous as ACM cladding. It is a story of materials generally that are not of limited combustibility and what should happen to them. It is a story not merely of high-rise residential buildings, but of other high-risk buildings such as hospitals and old people’s homes.”
“Dame Judith came in January, and she is coming again at a session before the Minister. We have tried to follow through not merely on what the promises were, but on how far they have been implemented and what more needs to be done. We have had a very detailed exchange of correspondence with Ministers. Indeed, I am still waiting for some answers on the most recent questions we have asked. As I say, we tried to concentrate in our inquiry on the issues of cladding, building safety and building regulations. In the end, this is a story of a response by the Government with a recognition that dangerous or potentially dangerous material on high-rise and high-risk buildings needs to be removed.”
“As a Committee, we have not looked at the causes of the disaster and the reasons for it, because that is a job for the inquiry to do. It was not our job to go into that area and second-guess its findings, but we have tried to follow up particularly on the work of the Hackitt report. We have looked at what improvements can be made to regulations and rules on buildings and building safety to make other people safer in their homes and other buildings they are in in the future. We produced a report last July after taking evidence. Prior to that, we had had a session with Dame Judith after both her interim report and her final report. We have had Ministers before us on a number of occasions. I see the Minister for Housing in his place. He came most recently in January, and he is coming again in a few weeks’ time.”
“I will speak in particular about the work of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad). I say in a heartfelt way that I do not think her constituents—particularly those most directly affected by this disaster—could have a better champion. She has the respect of Members across the House for what she has done to represent her constituents forcefully, with emotion and with detailed knowledge of these matters. She certainly has my respect for what she has done. In looking at a disaster and a tragedy such as Grenfell, we can occasionally look at what can come out of it that will help others—in this case, what will help other people to be safer in their homes as a result.”
“What happens where a developer has already, rightly, paid for the work themselves: can that developer claim the money back from the fund, or does it apply only to work that currently has not been carried out? In the end, who is responsible for the work being signed off as satisfactory? There are a lot of questions that need addressing, and I have written to Ministers about them on behalf of the Committee.”
“Indeed, when the permanent secretary came to see the Committee, she said there was a risk to local authorities if they used the powers in relation to whether they could actually make them hold and make them effective, and whether local authorities could actually get any money back if they went in and spent the money themselves. Now we at least have the £200 million fund that the Government have announced for private sector properties, but there are a lot of questions about it. First, who applies for the fund? Who ensures the work is carried out? Is there a timeline by which all this work has to be carried out? What happens if no one applies and the building is still there with this cladding on it? What happens to the local authority if it goes in and does the work in default: does it get the money back?”
“I entirely accept my hon. Friend’s point. I suppose I am trying to take a practical and financial approach to this issue. I recognise that that is all right for me sitting in here as a Member of Parliament, but for the people who actually live in these properties it is a very different experience, given the impact on their daily lives and their mental health, as my hon. Friend has rightly highlighted. The Government then gave additional powers to local authorities. I am not sure that a single local authority has used any of those powers yet.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for taking away from me my final, winding-up comments. She is absolutely right, and that is at the heart of Dame Judith’s report. This is about making sure that materials are right and are properly tested. In the end, it is not even about the building regulations in relation to fire; it is about the building industry as a whole and how it operates. There is a race to the bottom, and the industry is taking the cheapest on board all the time as the way forward. This is about making sure not merely that the materials are right, but that the materials specified are actually used, that the buildings are properly signed off and that they are properly maintained and managed. This is a whole-system issue.”
“Fundamentally, however, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) prompted me to say, this is about the whole construction industry not being fit for purpose. We need a fundamental review of how it operates, considering not just specifications, but including the management of projects and ensuring that people have homes and other buildings that are safe to live in.”
“I know that if building regulations are changed, we cannot always go back and retrospectively apply them to all existing buildings, but we are talking about a fundamental issue of safety and fire prevention that the Government must consider. Importantly, we must also think about non-residential buildings. Many hospitals, schools, student accommodations and residential homes are not covered by the current ban, although they are high-risk buildings. In 2018 the Committee said that this is about not just high-rise but high-risk buildings, and that provision must be applied. Some progress has been made on many issues, but we have a lot more to do. Dame Judith recommended a whole review of building regulations, which is key, and we must get proper tests agreed. There is the conflict of interest to resolve, and the issue of existing buildings.”
“How can we say to people, “You are safe in your homes, but we wouldn’t put that material on a new home because we don’t think it’s safe”? That is a fundamental problem. I am sure that sums are going round in the heads of people in the Treasury, who will be counting the cost of taking material that is not of limited combustibility off all existing buildings. That cost will be considerable and probably far larger than the budget for dealing with ACM to which the Government had to commit, but is the Minister really comfortable with saying to people, “You’re going to live in a home that has material on it that we would not consider safe to put on a new building”?”
“Will the Government pay for that as well as for taking ACM off homes in both the social and private sectors? That is a fundamental question. There is no point in banning the stuff if we then return to the same problems that we had with ACM. The Government introduced a ban on materials that are not of limited combustibility immediately after Dame Judith’s report—on reflection she probably feels that she might have recommended that herself, and she is certainly comfortable with that recommendation, which was right. But there is a problem—the elephant in the room—how can we possibly say that it is too risky to put materials that are not of limited combustibility on new buildings, if we are happy for such materials to remain on existing buildings?”
“The Minister was very open and direct about it, and he did say that all those properties would now be tested—I think there has been a delay in the testing, which is unfortunate, but it has started—but that if those tests showed that the material on those properties was as dangerous or as risky as ACM, the same rules would apply about taking it off and about having a requirement to take it off. That is what he said. There is, of course, disagreement about the testing arrangements, which have been a matter of contention right the way through our work. We must come to a conclusion whereby the industry in general is satisfied that the tests are fit for purpose, but nevertheless that testing is happening, and if any material is as dangerous as ACM, it must be removed.”