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Housebuilders and the government are to jointly produce figures on the number of 11m to18m homes affected by the fire safety crisis and who built them.

Speaking to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee earlier this week, David O鈥橪eary, policy director at the Home Builders Federation, said the industry currently did not know how many homes were affected by the problem, adding he did not think the bill for the industry would be 鈥渃lose to鈥� the 拢4bn suggested last month by Michael Gove.

O鈥橪eary鈥檚 comments come after the housing secretary said he expected housebuilders to voluntarily contribute 拢4bn to pay for the repair of mid-rise buildings affected by fire safety problems, or face the imposition of a levy and a range of other sanctions.

Gove later said he wanted construction product manufacturers to contribute as well as all housebuilders with annual profits of more than 拢10m.

O鈥橪eary said: 鈥淚 think we need to establish over the next few weeks how much the government is actually looking for. The 拢4bn figure we鈥檝e heard, I don鈥檛 we can get close to that with the information that our members have.鈥�

But he admitted the industry did not have figures of its own yet and said the HBF had been working with the government to draw up detailed information, with Whitehall having set a deadline of this week to pull the numbers together.

O鈥橪eary said: 鈥淲e鈥檙e at the stage of assimilating our information, trying to match it with what information the government has.

鈥淚 think we鈥檙e still very unsighted on how many buildings need remediation even after all this time [and] where they are [and] who built them.鈥�

Housebuilders have already made clear their concerns that only UK housebuilders, which they say have already contributed 拢1bn to repairing their own buildings and will also start paying the 拢2bn Residential Property Developer Tax from this year, are being asked to pay, when many of the buildings affected were built by now defunct developers or overseas businesses.

O鈥橪eary said the government鈥檚 拢4bn figure might have been inflated because 鈥渢here are many, many, many buildings [鈥�] where there is no longer a developer and they were built by overseas developers or whatever鈥�.

He said he accepted that finding the information on the buildings was something 鈥渨e wished would have started some time ago鈥�.

The comments came as O鈥橪eary and John Mulryan, group managing director of Anglo-Irish developer Ballymore, both highlighted concerns over the increasing burden of levies and taxes on developers in the wake of the fire safety crisis.

O鈥橪eary said he expected the new 4% Residential Property Developer Tax will actually raise 拢3bn over the next decade, rather than the 拢2bn estimated by government, while Mulryan said that because of the way it was calculated, it worked out to effectively a 6% additional tax rate.