Higher-Risk Buildings (Keeping and Provision of Information etc.) (England) Regulations 2023

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2023 Grand Committee

These regulations are key to implementing the new regulatory regime for higher-risk buildings so that these buildings are managed safely and will bring about the systematic, lasting change that we know is needed for people to be and feel safe in their homes. I hope that noble Lords will join me in supporting these draft regulations. I beg to move.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak on this statutory instrument, which is certainly of great importance. We should never lose sight of the fact that all the work that has been done on the Building Safety Act, the Fire Safety Act and the subsequent regulations, which the Minister has sketched in for us, was triggered by the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower, in which 72 people died and many others suffered life-changing injuries and experiences.

I welcome the fact that the Government were so whole-hearted in their acceptance of Dame Judith Hackitt’s report on what should happen. The Liberal Democrats supported both those Acts of Parliament in their passage through Parliament and we shall support this statutory instrument today, but not without some questions on the way. In posing my questions, I understand that the Minister endured, if that is the right word—certainly he took part in—a debate on Thursday that very much overlapped with some of the concerns I am going to raise today.

The first of those concerns is that, in our view, the scope of these regulations and, indeed, the Acts is not sufficiently wide to give the protection that is needed. The limitation of this statutory instrument to high-rise buildings taller than 18 metres is one example of that.

Secondly, it has taken a very long time for this statutory instrument to reach us. It took five and a half years to get the Building Safety Act on to the statute book, and it has taken another 12 months for this particular statutory instrument to come into play. Was that lethargy, complacency or perhaps something else? There seems to be a trend for watering down and neutering some of the building safety regulation regime. Whatever turbulence there may have been in politics in the past 12 months, there has certainly been some turbulence in how the building safety regime has evolved. For six months, there was no building safety regulator after the resignation of the first regulator and a long delay in appointing a replacement.

Of course, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, now an Act, had to have its Long Title changed by a government amendment so that it could also tinker with the building safety regulatory regime, potentially taking it away from the purview of the Health and Safety Executive, which is the one trusted—or perhaps feared—body that the construction industry takes seriously. It will potentially instead be embedded in a completely new body, the shape of which we do not know, but we do know that we shall not have any parliamentary opportunity to debate, change or modify it.

I have two questions. First, can the Minister explain the 12-month delay, and can he reassure us that it is not part of a slackening of urgency in putting a comprehensive scheme in place? Secondly, is this the last statutory instrument that is needed in order to complete the regime, which is now urgently needed and which many actors in the construction industry are ready to get ahead with but lack the information from the Government to show them what they are supposed to do?

I have some more detailed, and perhaps technical, points about this documentation. I appreciate that the Minister may find that they are beyond the scope of his brief, and, if he wishes to reserve his position and write, that is fine. Nevertheless, they should be addressed by the Minister in considering this statutory instrument. In raising my points, I have made particular use of the evidence base provided by the Government in the impact assessment. I start simply by raising the issue that appears in paragraph 42 of that document, which reminds us that there will be a duty to display a building assessment certificate to the public on or in the building. That is very sensible, and we certainly support that proposition, but what is the method of enforcement of that display?

I have previously asked questions about the parallel requirement that a display energy certificate should be publicly displayed at the entrance of publicly accessible buildings. I asked how many public buildings actually had such a display, because I knew many did not, and I was told that no one had any knowledge at all of who did or did not display those display energy certificates. There is one in Millbank House, where my office is, so I am certainly not accusing the Parliamentary Estate of failing to do that, but if there is no enforcement system, the intention becomes a dead letter. So my third question is: can the Minister supply more information about how the display is to be monitored and enforced?

I now raise a point which comes in the evidence base document at paragraph 45 about the need to store the data electronically. Does the department foresee that being to a common standard, with a common database, or is every one of the 14,000 buildings that have been registered with the building safety regulator free to adopt its own system of storing material? Will that material be available to the building safety regulator, and if so, in what form? It is a technical question, but it seems to me one that the construction industry needs to know the correct answer to very early on. Linked to that is what kind of electronic database will still be supported by its inventor and seller in 60 years’ time, or even in 25 years’ time? What is foreseen as the way to make sure that this material does not simply become inaccessible just by changes in technology? How will all that work?

My next question relates to paragraph 47, which seems somewhat out of place with the statutory instrument. It refers to storing relevant information, and then goes on to say that irrelevant information should not be stored because it

“could undermine the purpose of the golden thread”.

Taken together with the correctly reported view of Dame Judith Hackitt that incomplete information was very often a challenging factor in her inquiry, it seems to me that we should find out more about what the Minister or the department think is irrelevant, as opposed to relevant, information. For instance, to take a historical example, is the fact that a fire compartment was made safe with asbestos relevant or irrelevant information? Of course, the debate last Thursday was about the change in regulations for fire retardants; is that relevant or irrelevant information?

When I looked at the statutory instrument itself, however, I could not see any reference to irrelevant information not being required, so I think that has somehow crept into the explanation but not the text. Maybe the Minister could tell me whether that is a correct or incorrect reading. My point is that it is difficult to know what is irrelevant, and that it can change over time as more knowledge emerges about the risks of particular materials. I would have thought that, if it does appear in the statutory instrument, the Minister might want to see it taken out.

I very much welcome what appears in paragraph 54 about the need to inform residents not only of the building’s safety features, but of the residents’ obligations in relation to using the building in a safe manner. That will obviously include not propping open fire doors, making sure that fire extinguishers are not misused, keeping combustible materials out of public circulation areas and so on. We welcome all that, but does the Minister believe that there is or should be any sanction or enforcement for residents who fail to comply with those requirements? As a former councillor and former MP, I am well aware of the discussions that are had, for instance, between social landlords and some tenants of social accommodation, about the challenge of achieving that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

I hope the noble Baroness will forgive me for not addressing her question rightly. I will certainly make sure that that point has been registered; it may already have been, but I will make sure that it has. In that vein, I will write to confirm one way or the other. I will have to write to the noble Baroness on a number of points that she raised around remediation and the mandatory occurrence training—I think she mentioned that there is a table. I will have to write on that. As I say, there are a number of other issues—

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord; he is being very thorough in his responses. Can he just pick up the point I made about the public display of the building safety certificates, and the parallel I drew with the unsuccessful regime for display energy certificates?