Building Safety Bill

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord and the noble Baroness for raising this important matter. I am afraid that the Government will not be able to accept these two amendments, but I assure your Lordships that their intention has already been met in the Bill. The building safety regulator will be the building control authority for building work on higher-risk buildings as defined under Part 3. Clause 32 provides new powers to set procedural requirements in building regulations to govern building work. These powers will provide the basis for the new gateways process for creating new higher risk buildings and a new refurbishment process when carrying out certain building work on higher-risk buildings.

The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, brought up very specific issues and situations. I will make sure that we write on those, because they are very specific and I do not have briefings on them, although I can say that minor works will still be covered by self and third-party certification, as the noble Lord, Lord Khan, said. However, the BSR can inspect those works if it wishes to, so it will keep an eye on them and will use its powers to do that. On trade and business self-certification and on window replacements, which the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, mentioned, I will get a specific answer to noble Lords and put a copy in the Library.

The building safety regulator will be solely responsible for overseeing compliance with all aspects of building regulations, not just fire and structure, when building work is carried out on higher-risk buildings. This responsibility will not be split between the building safety regulator and the relevant local authority. Furthermore, these amendments refer to the building safety regulator acting as

“the building control authority by virtue of Part 4.”

The meaning of the term “building control authority” is inserted into the Building Act 1984 by Clause 31 and does not relate to Part 4 of the Bill, which is concerned with higher-risk residential buildings when they are occupied. In addition, Clause 31 provides the legal framework to enable the building safety regulator to be the building control authority for building work carried out on higher-risk buildings. It also provides that on multibuilding sites where one or more of the buildings are higher-risk buildings, the developer may, for convenience, seek an agreement with the building safety regulator that it will be the building control authority for the whole site, including in respect of any low-rise buildings.

I thank noble Lords for suggesting these amendments, but with that explanation I respectfully ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment. I will write.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I thank the Minister for her reply and shall await the letters with the greatest interest. A central point here is who notifies who and who knows when stuff is going to happen. For instance, in the current situation, whether it is installing a new boiler or a new window or having some electrical work done, the work is not necessarily commissioned by the owner—it might be by the flat occupier or the leaseholder. On the completion of those works, a certificate is issued to the client and, as I understand it, a copy goes to the building control authority and goes on to its register. It is a post hoc situation; it is not cleared in advance.

I want to see what is in the letter and to understand clearly that we have not left any loopholes, perhaps literally loopholes through which smoke can go or fire can spread. If it is not already clear, we want to see an improved Bill, a strengthened Bill, and we in no way want to weaken it or make it more difficult to enforce or enact. We shall be watching. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stunell and Lord Khan, for raising these important points, particularly the role of the building advisory committee and its functions.

I will first respond to Amendment 7. I hate to say this again, but I am afraid the Government will not be able to accept the amendment. We seem to have said this all afternoon, but I sincerely hope to reassure the House that the Bill already makes appropriate provision in Clause 9 for a wide set of functions for the committee.

Clause 9 provides for the establishment of a new expert advisory committee—the building advisory committee—as recommended by Dame Judith Hackitt in her independent review. The building advisory committee is to be established by the building safety regulator. That is important: it is a committee under the building safety regulator. It will provide expert advice and information to the regulator about matters connected with any of the regulator’s building functions, except those functions relating to the competence of persons in the built environment industry and registered building inspectors. This will include validating and assuring technical guidance, such as approved documents, to ensure that it is fit for purpose. Clause 9 will play an important part in ensuring that the building safety regulator has access to the support and expert advice required to enable it to deliver its critical work. That is why I respectfully ask the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, to withdraw his amendment.

I turn to the question of Clause 12 standing part of the Bill. I first thank the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and noble Lords today for their scrutiny of the delegated powers in the Bill. I am sensitive to the concerns that have been raised about Clause 12. The Government believe that the Bill sets up the right committees for the near future, but the Bill also needs to enable the building safety regulator’s committee structure to adapt and improve over the longer term through these delegated powers. We have heard many challenges about the future of building in Committee this afternoon and it is therefore important that there is flexibility within the system.

The Government included Clause 12 because of expert advice from the Health and Safety Executive, as the future building safety regulator, that this is needed to enable its committee structure to adapt and improve. This reflects HSE’s more than 40 years’ experience delivering regulation at an appropriate distance from government. Since 1974, HSE has needed to change its industry and subject advisory committees to reflect industrial, technical, legal and administrative developments. This has resulted in HSE having a rich mix of advisory and stakeholder-led bodies.

I hear the concerns about any use of this power to remove a statutory committee and so offer noble Lords additional reassurances. First, the Government would bring forward regulations to repeal a statutory committee only after a recommendation from the building safety regulator that this is needed as part of changes to improve the working of the regulatory system. Secondly, the Bill provides that such regulations would be subject to the affirmative procedure. Therefore, this House can hold the Government to their assurance that the regulations will not be brought forward without a specific recommendation from the regulator and a convincing case about how it will improve the regulatory system. With those assurances that this power is intended only to ensure the new regulatory system works well over time, I suggest that this clause should stand part of the Bill.

On the detailed questions from the noble Lord, Lord Khan, I do not know whether I have details on funding, staffing and independence. Oh, I have—that is very timely. The statutory committee sits within the building safety regulator. Its activities will be funded by the regulator through a mix of central government grant funding and fee income. Once the amount of funding is decided, we will make sure that noble Lords get a letter. I assume that the same will be the case on staffing—that how it is staffed will come down from the regulator to the committee—and that it will be independent.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I slightly got the impression that I might even have got a draw on one of those, and I thank the Minister for her reply. In relation to Clause 12, we will want to see the detail of what the Minister has said. It is somewhat reassuring that she understood the concerns that have been expressed, and we look forward to examining it in more detail.

I have to say that she did not do quite such a convincing job on why the building advisory committee should be treated in a different fashion from the committee on industry competence or the residents’ panel. If the whole point of the procedure in Clause 12 is to stop the fossilisation of a set of structures in primary legislation and to give the possibility of changing them as time goes on, which is really the argument she deployed, it does not seem consistent with that line of reasoning that she has been resisting giving some flexibility to how the building advisory committee uses its functions, acting obviously under advice from the building safety regulator itself. That may well be something we come back to. Perhaps the Minister might like to think, in terms of her reply and the reason she gave for retaining Clause 12, about why that search for flexibility in the longer term is not an argument that also applies to Clause 9 in respect of its difference from Clauses 10 and 11.

Building Safety

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the Minister on his untiring work here. The Statement made in another place yesterday is certainly extremely welcome. As a practising chartered surveyor and valuer, I am particularly determined to ensure that the regime where the purveyors of shoddy buildings have not been properly held to account must stop, but I understand the immense complexity, raised by other noble Lords, to do with insurance and other matters downstream from the immediate problem.

My first and last concern is the point made, in particular, by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock: namely, that innocent people have devoted their life savings and invested their homemaking, their very being and their work/life balances in properties which have been found to be not constructed to safe standards. This is an appalling social and mercantile evil—let us make no bones about it.

I request that the Minister confirm that this cannot and must not be turned into a tax solution. The reasons for that will be self-evident. It would be both unfair and an unbelievably blunt instrument. It will almost certainly require hypothecation, and would merely serve to collectivise what should be an individually assessed liability; the Minister mentioned that it will be property by property.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, I fear that there will not be a great queue at the Minister’s door with open cheque books, and I suspect it will be necessary to move to plan B, because it is not just the cladding but an awful lot of other defects—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Will the noble Earl ask his question, please? There are other people waiting.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

Does the Minister agree that the only remaining viable route that is coherent across the piece is, in effect, the polluter pays amendment, the draft of which had the scrutiny of top legal minds, such as Daniel Greenberg QC? Furthermore, does he agree that this is the only means whereby the perverse habits of what is known in the trade as value engineering will become something of the past, and in future that the inculcation of consistently good construction methods will be the lasting legacy of Grenfell?

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate both of my noble friends Lord Coaker and Lord Morse on excellent maiden speeches. I am privileged to know both well and know that they will make valuable and valued contributions to the work of your Lordships’ House. I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests, particularly the reference to my relationship with St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and BioRISC, a research initiative that has set itself a challenge to provide cutting-edge evidence-based information about existing and emerging biological security threats and interventions.

I will make three brief points. The first draws on BioRISC’s work and advice. Biodiversity continues to decline at an unprecedented rate, as shown by the 2019 ground-breaking report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the 2020 report Global Biodiversity Outlook. Our natural environment underpins the delivery of clean air, water and food production, as well as promising solutions to the climate crisis. We have been reminded over the past year of the inextricable link between human health and the health of the natural world.

Public investment on environmental policies has had, at best, mixed success, as illustrated by the failure of many agri-environmental schemes which, despite costing billions, are accepted as having achieved little in preventing the dramatic decline of nature on farmland. This is unsurprising since, typically, their design and implementation have not been informed by the best available evidence from a wide range of sources. In medicine and public health, not using the best available evidence would be unconscionable, but it appears to be acceptable in this space. Does the Minister think that existing processes consistently use the best available evidence on the effectiveness of actions to inform decision-making and, if not, what mechanism will the office for environmental protection deploy to ensure the transparent use of the best available evidence, enabling scrutiny by experts and members of the public, to ensure that taxpayers’ money for our environment is spent cost-effectively?

Further, and also about evidence, six years after receipt of the completed report of the Government’s own Lead Ammunition Group recommending that lead ammunition be phased out, on 23 March, the Environment Minister Rebecca Pow announced plans to do just that. The fifth sentence of Defra’s press release is:

“A large volume of lead ammunition is discharged every year over the countryside, causing harm to the environment, wildlife and people.”


It accurately summarises the extensive harmful consequences of its use, which makes a compelling case for regulation as soon as possible to protect human and animal health and to enable us to move towards a greener and safer future. But, inexplicably, it goes on to announce the commissioning of

“an official review of the evidence to begin”

that day,

“with a public consultation in due course.”

Information on the impacts of lead ammunition on wildlife, the environment and human health has been known for years. The LAG report was informed by a comprehensive review of all available evidence. Given the Government’s view that extensive harm is being caused today, why have they commissioned a further evidence review?

Yesterday, speaking on the BBC’s “The Andrew Marr Show”, America’s climate envoy John Kerry said,

“I’m told by scientists that 50% of the reductions we have to make (to get to near zero emissions) by 2050 or 2045 are going to come from technologies we don’t yet have.”


UK FIRES, a major research programme funded by BEIS through UKRI, and comprising six leading universities, a consortium of UK-based industries and several policy advisers, in its report, Absolute Zero, published in November 2019, told us the same and set out the first description of the delivery of zero emissions in the UK with today’s technologies. The report informed the Council for Science and Technology’s letter of 20 January 2020 to the Prime Minister on whole systems and was the topic of a debate in your Lordship’s House on 6 February 2020.

The primary recommendation of Absolute Zero, reflected by the Council for Science and Technology, is that the Government should create a delivery authority to guarantee compliance with the Climate Change Act. It reminded us that the London 2012 Olympics were delivered on time and on budget by such an authority which, interestingly, adopted a principle of using no new technologies to guarantee risk-free delivery. The delivery authority would need to be substantive and enduring, able to hold accountability for delivery across different government departments and through to 2050, and necessarily an exemplar of the whole-systems approach recommended by the CST to co-ordinate across the government departments charged with emissions responsibility in different sectors.

The Institute for Government, in its report Net Zero: How Government Can Meet its Climate Change Target, said, at page 9,

“Government should also assess gaps in delivery capability and consider creating the net zero equivalents of the Olympic Delivery Authority to tackle infrastructure challenges, such as housing retrofit and renewable heat.”


Do the Government plan—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord that the advisory speaking time is five minutes.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I am finished, my Lords.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

There is very little new on transport in the Queen’s Speech, apart from promising a Bill for HS2 from Crewe to Manchester. As my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch said, there was a distinct lack of ambition for the transport sector in the Queen’s Speech. So, at the start of this new Session, it is time to review the purpose, benefits and likely outcome for HS2, and to ask again whether it is needed at all.

According to cost engineer Michael Byng, to whom I pay tribute for his professionalism and work in checking the cost of HS2, the latest cost estimate is £158 billion. Many would think that some of that could be better spent on improving the regional lines in the Midlands and the north, which need about £100 billion more to meet their levelling-up needs. HS2 costs have risen tenfold over 10 years, and it is time to bring to account those who have promoted it and withheld information from Parliament and the public since 2015-16.

I welcome the very powerful maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Morse. The National Audit Office has of course regularly investigated HS2’s costs and programme overruns. Quotes about its reports include:

“Ministers have no idea how much HS2 will end up costing”


and:

“The high-speed rail project is running wildly over budget and will not deliver good value for money”.


My worry, which I am sure the noble Lord will share, is why the Government ignore such advice and comments.

So I suggest that we go back 10 years, when there was a comprehensive campaign of cover-up to Parliament of the true costs and delays. At a Commons Select Committee hearing on phase 1, the DfT’s Permanent Secretary, Bernadette Kelly, when asked why her department had not given the Select Committee the latest and highest estimate, said that if they had done so, Parliament would probably have cancelled the project.

In January 2017 the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who was then Transport Minister, arranged a meeting for Michael Byng and me with an official from HS2, a man called John Stretch, and an official at the Department for Transport called Mike Hurn, to discuss the budget for phase 1. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, expressed surprised that Mr Stretch declined to provide a detailed, measured estimate in support of the costs that he was tabling. Later, during a meeting at the Oakervee review, of which I was deputy chair for a bit, HS2 directors admitted that they had no budget for measuring the work, despite having spent £11.4 million on cost consultants.

It was very odd that during 2018-19 Nus Ghani MP, the Minister of Transport, and Mark Thurston, chief executive of HS2, both stuck to the £55.7 billion figure when all the evidence led to new chairman Allan Cook’s stock-take of £88 billion, which of course left out quite a few elements of HS2 that would have taken it up to £100 billion. More recently I have received documents alleging that the Said Business School’s Professor Bent Flyvbjerg confirmed his earlier advice, given in 2015-16 to the then Leader of the Conservative Party, who of course is now Prime Minister. The forecast cost is supported by a presentation given in January 2018 by Jeremy Harrison, then director of risk and assurance at HS2, in which he stated that the total value of contracts for the entire project—without risk allowance—exceeded £80 billion. So the Prime Minister and other Ministers knew of this £80 billion figure in 2015-16. One has to ask why the Minister, Nus Ghani, and the chief executive, Mark Thurston, said three years later that the budget was still £55 billion.

The latest cost increase will be at Old Oak Common at the London end, where Michael Byng has finally costed the station at £7.1 billion, compared to a cost estimate from the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, of £1.67 billion. This is only a fourfold increase in costs—I suppose that is all right for HS2—but it does not include the cost of passenger disruption for trains using Paddington station, which will have its train and seat capacity halved for four years during the building. It is very clear that many DfT and HS2 officials and Ministers, with the honourable exception of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, have misled Parliament over years.

The NAO has stated that lessons need to be learned—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord of the five-minute advisory speaking time.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful for the reminder, but a Bishop was recently allowed to carry on for six minutes and 40 seconds, so may I finish?

Doug Oakervee has stated that pressure from the construction industry persuaded him to recommend that HS2 went ahead. This need could have been met equally well by regional upgrades in the Midlands and the north, so I suggest that HS2 be stopped now and the relevant officials and Ministers held to account for misleading Parliament.

Fire Safety Bill

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Greenhalgh, I beg to move that the Bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Motion agreed.

Northamptonshire (Structural Changes) Order 2019

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2020 Grand Committee

Finally, again in relation to Northamptonshire and Cumbria, why did Mr Berry tell our leaders that a condition of this was that we had an elected mayor? What is the Government’s policy on having an elected mayor for the whole county—that is, not having one for each authority, but having an elected mayor to cover the two unitary authorities? Where has this idea come from? What is the logic of it? Why is that thought to be an essential part of effective local government reorganisation? I should say again that I am not against elected mayors. Having an elected mayor has done London enormous good. Mr Street in Birmingham and Mr Burnham in Manchester are playing a good role. I am not against elected mayors in principle, but I do not see why they have automatically to be part of a scheme to revitalise local democracy and have a more sensible local government structure. I am asking for the principles that led to the Northamptonshire reorganisation to be more clearly stated and for the Government to be a little clearer about whether they see these principles to be of general relevance and how they would apply in the Cumbria case. I would be grateful for an explanation of those points by letter from the Minister.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for being slightly late. I was stuck in a committee. I declare an interest as a vice-chairman of the Local Government Association and president of the National Association of Local Councils. Probably more importantly, I am a member of Wiltshire Council. For 10 years, I led a unitary authority and for the six years before that I led a county council, leading it and its four districts in to a unitary authority. So I know quite a lot about unitary authorities. I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, that this is a mess. For many years, since I started in local government about 25 years ago, I have hoped that government would grasp hold of this and look at the reorganisation of local government so that we were more similar and sensible and would therefore have a stronger voice with central government because we would not be so complex in the way we do business.

I know a little bit about Northamptonshire, and I wish it well in the future. I think this is the right thing for that county, although personally I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben: I would have had one single unitary authority. Northamptonshire is about the same size as Wiltshire—about 500,000 people—which, in my experience, is about right, although I always said that if somebody gave me another 200,000 to 300,000 people, I would take them. I would have become much more efficient and been just as local. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and I have talked about this in the Chamber a number of times. There is no reason for a unitary authority to become divorced from its communities. People in Wiltshire will tell you that Wiltshire Council is now much closer to its communities. It takes work, planning and a system to do that, but it can be done. It can also work much better with its parish and town councils and start to look at devolution downwards. We talk a lot about devolution from central government to local government, but we forget the people on the ground. The people to deliver playgrounds, parks and gardens, swimming pools and things like that are towns and parishes. They do not cost the central taxpayer any money, because that is local precepting. It is easy for a town or parish to have a scheme, ask local people for the money, and be challenged on whether it has delivered it with the money it has got from local communities. I do not worry about size.

The other issue about size is that county councils now deliver more than 85% of the services across the county area. We are probably talking about 13% to 15% of the services, so why are we not thinking about a million? It would not worry me, providing that each of the unitary authorities is big and strategic but looks at how it can be local as well. That is possible. Cornwall and Wiltshire are doing this very successfully. They are also saving the money. I am sorry to say to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, that it does not take long. In Wiltshire I was bothered, as every leader who changes a local government system must be, that local services would take a dip. I assure the Committee that every performance indicator in Wiltshire got better when we went to unitary and did so straight away. It did not dip. Not only that, we expected to make the savings in two years; we made them in 18 months. This is not a bad news story; it is a good news story. That is why I would support Northamptonshire all the way.

I would be concerned about children’s trusts. What Mr Berry said recently about Cumbria is concerning. It concerns me because if we take children’s services and adult care services out of local government, what is left? In local government over the past 10 years, we have shown how efficient and effective we can be. Just because there might be one difficult apple—not a bad apple, but experiencing difficulties—it does not mean that the system has to change. In both children’s and adults’ services, it is important that there is democratic accountability locally. We have seen what happens in the health service when there is not democratic accountability. Please do not do that to us for children’s and adult care services.

I could go on a great deal, but I will not. Northamptonshire has been through a very difficult time, and this is its chance to step up to the mark and deliver the services that its people deserve. I wish it all the best.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I refer to my relevant interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the Minister for explaining the order. I agree with many of the points made by every Member here. Like my noble friend, I am generally a supporter of unitary authorities. I think they are the way to go, generally speaking. However, this is quite a sad day in some ways. We are not here because councils have come together and decided that this is what they need to do for their county. They have not had discussions and worked out that this is the best way forward. We are here because of complete incompetence and bad management at Northamptonshire County Council. This unitary authority decision has then been imposed on people. As we have heard, they could not have one unitary council—I do not know why, but they could not—and they could not have three. It had to be two. That is very disappointing.

I know the area really well. I lived and worked in the east Midlands for a very long time. I like Northamptonshire a lot. The town of Northampton got its charter in 1189. It has a beautiful town hall. The town was incorporated in 1835. The county itself is wonderful. As has already been said, it has a very compact shape and great road and rail links. There are great businesses there. Dr. Martens is in Wellingborough. The county also has Weetabix, Barclaycard and Carlsberg —all really good businesses. It is the home of the motor industry, with Silverstone and the Rockingham Motor Speedway. These are Premier League businesses with a Sunday league county council working for them. It is dreadful that we are where we are today.

Corby is another great town, with a great history in the steel industry. We may not all remember, but it was 40 years ago that the steelworks closed. Some 10,000 people lost their jobs in one fell swoop. However, the local community, the local authority and the councils came together, and they reinvented themselves.

I am also disappointed in the names of these two councils: North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire. They are terrible, dreadful names. Where have the historical county names gone? I mean names such as Northamptonshire, Kettering, Wellingborough, Corby and Daventry. We must also remember that we can have all the new names and structures and we can dismantle what has gone before, but unless the structure is sound, the funding is stable and the officers and members understand the challenge before them, this will solve nothing at all and we will back here again in a few months or a few years’ time.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I take note of what the noble Lord has said. Actually, it falls in line with what I said at the beginning, which is that a letter is due. I will do my best to set out our approach in more detail, because there is sense in what we are doing. This is not a scattergun approach and nor is it chaotic.

I want to answer a question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, concerning Northamptonshire and the new arrangements. He asked: why not one or three unitaries, rather than two? The inspector recommended that a two-unitary solution was best because a one-unitary council was perceived as replicating and rewarding the failing county council, and three was seen as not meeting the criteria on credible geography with councils of adequate size.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook]

I urge the Government to look again at the issue of consulting. I fully agree that it is about consulting local communities, local people. I have a problem when we take too much notice of those district and county authorities that are still there. With the greatest respect, they are trying to protect themselves, their officers—which is understandable —their members and their authority. Their views are sometimes challenged by that. It should be local communities that make the decision, not the local authorities within them.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

I promise that this will be my last comment. The argument that we could not have a unitary authority for the whole county because it would be seen as rewarding the county council that has failed is rather weak. There was a failure of political leadership. The way to deal with that is to remove the people and not let them stand again. Not going forward with the one-council option because it could be seen as a replica of the failed county council is a weak reason.