Building Safety Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord Crisp

Committee stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 4. In doing so, I thank the noble Lords who have put their names to the amendment. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, who is in his place but who I know cannot stay for the whole debate, and to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who I believe is probably somewhere on the M1. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, who will bring his great experience and insight to bear when he speaks.

As the awful tragedy of Grenfell revealed to us, and as those working in the industry already knew, the construction industry is in a very poor state on a number of different fronts, from quality and basic standards of all kinds to the supply of housing and the prevailing culture. Whether we worked in the industry or not, we were all deeply shocked by the Grenfell tragedy, and it is this that is the origin of the Bill. I recognise, therefore, that priority must be given to the immediate issues arising from Grenfell and that the Bill cannot address everything that needs to be done to tackle the problems in the construction industry. But it cannot ignore them either.

The Long Title says that the Bill makes

“provision about the safety of people in or about buildings and the standard of buildings”.

The Bill indeed picks up some of this, addressing the golden thread and cultural change, for example. Other noble Lords have addressed this in other amendments, including my noble friend Lord Lytton in his amendments on what is now called the perpetrator pays principle, on which I hope to speak later in Committee.

I originally wanted to press for a set of broad-based standards in construction, brought together around the aim of promoting health, safety and well-being. However, given the imperative of addressing the issues directly related to Grenfell—I am sure the Minister will appreciate this—I and the other signatories have gone for a deliberately simple amendment that makes only a start in that direction. Indeed, I hope that the Minister and the Government will welcome this amendment and see it as a contribution to their wider goals of levelling up and driving cultural change in the sector—something that I hope the Government will build on in levelling-up legislation and elsewhere.

Turning to the specifics of the amendment, it clarifies the meaning of “safety” to include health and well-being. It makes clear that the building safety regulator should consider human health and well-being in discharging its building functions. In practice, this means that the regulator, being part of the Health and Safety Executive, needs to consider health and well-being as part of safety when it exercises building functions under Clauses 4, 5 and 6 of the Bill and its functions under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Building Act 1984.

Even without our experience of Covid, there was growing evidence that showed that people’s homes and neighbourhoods have a direct impact on their physical and mental health. Cold, damp, overcrowded and cramped conditions, pollution and inaccessibility for older and disabled people all directly impact on mental and physical health and well-being and constrain opportunity. The quality of our homes and neighbourhoods is one of the foundations of our life and our life chances. The experience of Covid has simply dramatically reinforced all these points.

This is about opportunity for people, life chances and social justice. It is about enabling the people of this country to thrive. The way we organise and design our built environment matters to people and to a series of the Government’s policy initiatives, not least those dealing with health inequality, net zero and levelling up. These conditions also matter in considering our resilience as a country in the face of resurgent and indeed future pandemics. The problem is that the way we regulate homes now fails to secure the minimum standards vital to people’s well-being. This, as the Government’s levelling-up agenda recognises, is a major issue in securing social justice. People on the lowest incomes often suffer the poorest and most insecure housing conditions and live in neighbourhoods with the worst pollution.

This amendment is important because safety is currently undefined in the Bill, so it is simply not clear whether what I would call these common-sense aspects of safety relating to people’s health and well-being should be considered by the building regulator. This lack of clarity is unhelpful because the safety of people is generally defined as an absence of health risks or harms. I note that health and well-being have definitions in UK legislation, so their insertion into law would not be novel. It is also important to note that these issues are not covered by planning or other existing regulations; put simply, planning legislation has no legal obligations of any kind that relate to the health and well-being of people.

I will make one final point on cultural change before I sum up my argument. There is a problem with all regulation when it is written too tightly that people deliver on the specific and do not address the bigger issues—hitting the target but missing the point, if you like. I am sure there are people associated with Grenfell who are arguing that they followed the letter of the law while of course missing the far bigger point. We must not miss this opportunity to take a holistic view on safety. Do we want a future where we have regulated appropriately for fire but, to take just one example that the Committee will address, let people fall down unsafe steps, even though we know what can be done to prevent it? I believe it is necessary to make it clear that this wider definition will inform the decisions of the regulator. I believe that knowing that attention has to be paid to wider concerns of health and safety will also help drive cultural change in the sector as a whole. What I am proposing is about not more regulation but better regulation. Indeed, I believe that, in the longer term, going further and requiring developers to build homes that promote health, safety and well-being will help bring together some of the contradictory elements of the planning and building regulations. That, however, is for another time.

In conclusion, I well understand that the Government cannot make the level of change to the construction industry that is necessary within a single Bill or set of regulations, and I commend them for what is in the Bill. This is why I said at the beginning that we have deliberately added only this simple amendment. This definition allows for the consideration of people’s basic and common-sense needs such as freedom from pollution and damp; safety; access to green space and natural light; accessibility, including safe stairs; heat requirements; and security.

While the amendment is limited to clarifying the scope of the responsibility of the building regulator, it enables the beginning of a new approach to regulation in which human health and well-being are core to the delivery of building safety. I very much hope that the Minister will see this as a contribution to the Government’s goal of making appropriate provisions in the Bill about the safety of people in or about buildings and the standard of buildings.

I have heard it said that we are building the slums of the future. Here the Government have an historic opportunity—very sadly created by this dreadful tragedy—to reverse that trend and help create homes, buildings and neighbourhoods that we can be proud of. I hope that the Government will accept this amendment as an important step on that journey.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, as this is the first time that I have spoken at this stage of the Bill, I declare my interests as a chartered surveyor and member of various property-based organisations. I am also a patron of the Chartered Association of Building Engineers.

The noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, is absolutely right to say that, while the preservation of human life must be front and centre, by the same token buildings must be designed to retain their fundamental integrity for specified periods of time, at the very least—as set out, half an hour for this, one hour for that and so on. Noble Lords know this only too well. There are of course many reasons why this is necessary. The total destruction of a building was so graphically illustrated by the fire in Worcester Park, the downstream effects of which were described by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, in its destruction of livelihoods, life chances and, in particular, people’s confidence in their homes—I think this is the point the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, was getting at in his amendment. It casts a shadow across families and down the generations. Anybody who understands the concepts of trauma theories knows that; I am no expert, but I know that it happens. Beyond the utter undesirability, the cost, the insurance risk, the potential risk to firefighters and the general spread of contagion, there are compelling reasons why buildings must retain their integrity: structural, compartmentalisation, spread of flame and so on.

The building regulations, going back to 1965—which were the set of regulations in force when I was at the College of Estate Management studying what has become my lifelong trade and calling—include mandatory standards. There is a secondary aspect in parallel with those, which is the advisory approved documents and guidance. It is really important to understand that there were two different streams running in parallel.

One of the industry failings that has occurred—accompanied, I must say, by a failure of regulatory oversight—is on the part of those who were entrusted to make sure that buildings were constructed in accordance with the mandatory requirements and the best practice set out in the advice. The failing has been to assume that everything you needed to know was contained in this advisory guidance that went in parallel with the regulations. That is wrong. I can do no better than refer to, as I understood them, the opening remarks of counsel for the Government in the final stage of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s inquiry, when he made precisely this point.

If you follow slavishly the approved documents under part B of the building regulations, which is principally to do with fire, you will lead yourself astray, because it says “should”, “could”, “might” and all those sorts of things. You are dealing with advisory documents concerned with how you may be able to do it this way, or you may be able to do it that way. In other words, the regulations produce the mandatory test first and foremost, but all these other advisory documents then provide suggestions on how you might achieve it.

I strongly support Amendments 1 and 4 because this is about people and the security of their homes. It is about inclusion, decent design and, ultimately, outcome-based policies. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, kindly gave me a quick trailer on the “perpetrator pays” amendments, of which more anon. However, I finish by again following the noble Lord, Lord Foster, in saying to the Minister—who I know has really driven this policy forward; I give him great credit for producing this Bill—that I will do everything I can to assist him in making wise choices and accepting appropriate amendments when they are moved.