Building Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Stunell and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Report stage
Tuesday 29th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, as a former retailer, I have a good deal of sympathy with Amendment 254 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster. I agree with him that there is a gap here with online material posing a risk to safety, which is not the case with normal retail sales. In summing up, can my noble friend the Minister give us a bit more confidence as to when that gap will be filled? The Government are often too slow.

In that vein, I very much welcome the progress made by my noble friend the Minister on staircases, which are the subject of Amendment 262. I agree that the approach outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, seems to make sense and allow us the opportunity to get on with this consumer issue as well.

I share the concerns underlying Amendment 264 from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. There is a real problem of shortages in the built environment workforce, as highlighted in the Built Environment Committee’s report on demand for housing—a committee on which several Members of this House sit and which I have the honour to chair. However, to be honest, the amendment is overcomplicated. The direction of travel is right but I am doubtful that we should accept an amendment in this form.

On Amendment 261, of course we need improved homes; cold homes are very bad for health, as has been shown by many studies. However, this is an uncosted proposal. It will have huge compliance costs for homeowners—admittedly, over a reasonably long period—and I really do not think that we are in a position to add it to this Bill today.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 264 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Pinnock, which would require a report on the built environment industry workforce that takes into account various factors. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, that this is very much a probing amendment; we certainly do not intend to press it today.

However, we need to give this issue an airing. The whole pyramid on which this Bill is constructed depends on that bottom level: the workforce who will deliver it. We know that there is a grievous shortage of fire risk assessors, not least because the fire risk assessor who assessed Grenfell Tower was an unqualified, off-duty firefighter who made up the qualification letters that he put after his name when he applied for the job with the tenant management organisation. That evidence was given in phase 1 of the Grenfell inquiry.

We know that the Government have made strenuous efforts to get fire assessment training going but there is every indication that there is not enough and that, when this regime comes into force—we all want to see this as soon as possible—there will be a shortage of fire risk assessors. Earlier today, wearing his fire responsibilities hat via the Home Office, the Minister made the point that one of the jobs in the fire and rescue service is to upskill staff to gain the competences they need to fulfil their functions of realistically assessing risks and remedies in the duties they undertake. We think that there needs to be a clear plan for developing training for and upskilling the people taking on the new roles in this Bill. There is a whole series of new posts, including accountable persons and responsible persons—not to mention the safety regulator staffing itself—and we need some assurance that the Government are clear on all of them and have a laser-like focus on producing the answers that are needed. This is against the background of an industry that employs 2 million people, has 90,000 sole traders operating on the ground and in many ways, as we have discussed, has a dysfunctional contracting model. It certainly has low productivity and very poor standards of delivery of outcome.

The amendment may or may not be over-elaborate. I hope that it would be a work plan that someone is working on, even if it should not be in the Bill. I really want to hear the Minister give an account of how a work plan such as this is in fact going forward. If not, we will certainly be snapping at his heels over the coming months. Much more seriously than that, he will find that there will be the gravest difficulty in implementing the Bill, which is what we all want to see, on the shortest possible timescale.

I am the resident pointing at the hole in the road and saying to the contractor, “Please come and fill in this hole”. That is what this amendment is about.

Building Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Stunell and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment, although I am not sure whether it made its way on to the list. I support the great work of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, in his quest for a resolution on the subject of retentions—that is, the retention of part of a contract cost.

The noble Lord may recall that, when I was a Minister during the passage of a motley business Bill about six years ago, I promised that a review would be undertaken by the then DHCLG. At first blush, the arrangements seemed wrong and unfair to me, from my experience of the building industry. Somehow, delivery has been extraordinarily slow. It would be nice to have my ministerial promise delivered, albeit somewhat late, by St George here. I very much hope that the Minister will do the right thing and accept this modest proposal for a long-overdue review or whatever else might be agreed between now and Report, with the ever-energetic and nil desperandum noble Lord, Lord Aberdare.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has certainly been energetic, forthright and determined on this issue, and rightly so. He has reminded the Committee that the Hackitt report made it clear that the withholding of money from second-tier, third-tier and fourth-tier contractors and suppliers put pressure on them, which made it much more difficult for them to deliver a proper and effective product or job on site. The downward pressure that they faced as a result of the withholding of that money was a major problem for them as functioning entities. That was the view expressed in Hackitt, based on the evidence that had already emerged from the Grenfell inquiry.

Of course, there is much wider evidence around the country. The collapse of Carillion is an example. I think that £140 million of retentions were held by Carillion and thereby lost from those on lower tiers in the pyramid. Whatever else might be said about it, that put a number of companies at risk of going out of business, and indeed a number of companies did so just because that money was lost to them. The evil impact of this is very clear.

Some of the impact is less clear but just as difficult. Such companies find that they do not have the resources to invest in skills, training and continuing professional development, simply because they do not have that cash in hand. So it has an impact. Under

“Matters which the review may consider”,


the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has sensibly listed in his amendment three important ones and then put “(d) other factors”. I would add investment and training as one of the other factors that suffer as a result of this.

I want to remind the Minister that it is government policy that all government contracts should be written in such a way that retentions are not in place. Unfortunately, not every government department has read the memo. I asked the Business Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, a Written Question and subsequently an Oral Question about how that was progressing. He was quite frank in admitting, and it is on the record, that the Department for Education had so far refused to implement the Government’s overall guidance that all public procurement should be without retentions built into the contract documents. I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, is having a good go at the education department; I hope that I can add to that today and another Minister will have a good go at it, at the very least to make sure that the Government get their own departments to follow their own policy, which would be very much in the direction that the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, is advocating. I have probably said enough, but I certainly hope to hear good words from the Minister in a moment or two.

Building Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Stunell and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Monday 28th February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Does the noble Lord think this construction product schedule includes such things as wood? The thing about fire safety is that it is not just to do with whether it is a plastic tile of some sort but with where construction products are used. In a case that I am aware of, there is an argument that things made of wood—as they have been for a thousand years—are not safe and should be replaced by something else. I am not quite clear how the construction products link into that. This may be a question for the Minister, but I ask the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, because he has obviously been studying this.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

The noble Baroness is certainly right that there are materials that have been used in one way, safely and successfully, for thousands of years, and others that are intrinsically safe, such as bricks—presuming they are made of clay rather than straw. I will not try to give the full range, because I think the Committee would get bored quite quickly and my pool of knowledge is quite shallow, but she has raised an important point: it is not just about having a product but about what you do with it. I am sure the High Court would want to put both components together before issuing any building liability orders, which seem to be the nuclear weapon that the Government believe they have in their hands.