Fire Safety Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 1st October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, and welcome him to this House. I look forward to his future contributions. It is also an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bourne. When he was a Minister he took very seriously the responsibilities which arose following the Grenfell fire, some of which we are debating today.

The fact remains that it is three years since Grenfell and 11 years since Lakanal House, and this is the first piece of substantive legislation that has been before Parliament. It is needed. We need to resolve the ambiguities in the fire safety order and clearly define responsible officers, their work and the parts of the building which will be subject to their responsibilities and to professional inspection.

I know that the Minister tried to do this to some extent in his opening remarks and in the letter that we received today, but we needed a report on the totality of progress on all of these issues post Grenfell, so that we could see where this Bill fits in with other initiatives. We have referred to the building safety Bill, which is still in very early draft form. Some people are saying that there is a clash of definitions of “responsible person” between that draft Bill and the Bill before us today. We must be clearer about how this all fits in with the Government’s consultation Building a Safer Future, the related safety strategy proposed by the Minister’s department, the implementation of the inquiry’s first stage and of the Hackitt report, and the progress on the proposed new regulator.

Specifically in the Grenfell case, we also need an indication of progress on potential prosecutions of the managers of the building and the suppliers. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, referred to the evidence reported in the press today about the person who would be deemed to be something like the responsible officer in Kensington and Chelsea, who clearly did not have a clue about their responsibilities and the regulations. The same applied to the representative of the major supplier. This is not an overregulated industry but a seriously underregulated industry, and those regulations that exist are not properly enforced. We need to look at all these aspects together, and some others as well.

My noble friend Lady Wilcox referred to sprinklers and the progress there. The case is not the same in Wales as it is in many authorities around England. The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, referred to electrical safety, and rightly said that the majority of domestic fires are caused by electrical faults. Inspection and enforcement of regulations in that area are also necessary. Whereas with gas there is a mandatory responsibility on landlords to inspect the gas installations, there is not one for white goods and other electrical installations within multi-occupied buildings more generally.

There is also some obscurity as to which pieces of legislation apply to which buildings. This Bill apparently applies to all multi-occupied buildings, whereas some of the other proposed legislation and regulation applies to buildings over 18 metres high, and that limit has been queried. We are also unclear as to how many buildings and landlords we are referring to. In the impact assessment for this Bill there is a pretty wide range of figures for buildings—2.2 to 3.2 million individual flats—and for the number of landlords, both private and social. So the House deserves a much more strategic report from Ministers on this whole area.

There are also wider issues. At the end of the day, whatever regulations come forward must be professionally enforced, and we must have adequate numbers of professionally trained inspectors. Regrettably, in the fire service there has been a cut of over 20% in recent years. That cut needs to be reversed. In particular, there is nowhere near a sufficient number of qualified and experienced fire inspectors to fulfil the clearer responsibilities in this and the other Bill. The Fire Brigades Union has indicated that there are fewer than 1,000 people who are even remotely qualified to carry out such inspections, which is about half the number there were a decade ago. We need a training programme and a recruitment programme to train up firefighters and others to fulfil these professional roles.

Of course, this may grow, because while in the Bill we are talking about tightening restrictions, the proposed new planning changes will allow, for example, conversion of office blocks to residential use, and adding storeys to existing buildings. If we are not careful, and do not have a robust and effective system of enforcing the use of safe materials and the safe design of the structure of the buildings, that will increase the potential danger of unsafe buildings.

The problem is not only with the fire service and fire inspectors. One of the other areas most drastically cut by many local authorities in the past decade has been building regulations enforcement, and the numbers employed there. The enforcement of standards of materials and the application of materials, as well as of the design of buildings, is clearly inadequate in almost every local authority.

With regard to materials and equipment, it is not just cladding that we should be worried about. There is also, for example, the issue of fire doors. In its briefing for the Bill, the LGA—I declare my interest as one of its vice-chairs—claims that thousands of non-compliant doors have been delivered to local authorities and housing associations in recent years. It estimates the replacement cost at £700 million. That is an absolute scandal. I know of nobody who has been prosecuted for failure to supply compliant doors.

The impact assessment on the Bill makes no mention of the significantly increased resources for both personnel and training that will be required to make it, and related measures, effective in carrying out their job. So there is a significant number of wider questions that we need to address in this context. I will support the Bill; I think it is necessary. But we need a clearer indication of how it fits in with other such measures.

Even in this limited Bill there is a serious omission. We need to mention the role of residents—tenants and leaseholders—and the need for them to be informed, and to have their concerns taken seriously by building owners, managers and suppliers. Let us remember that Grenfell residents were warning of the dangers of the refurbishment years before the tragedy happened—in terms of the cladding, the loss of firewalls and the increasing space for a fire to spread, and also of the potential dangers of the “stay put” evacuation advice. All were pointed to by the residents, and all were ignored.

More widely, the effects of the uncertainty about the safety of the buildings in which they live is causing widespread anxiety among all residents. Leaseholders also face potential substantial economic loss, as the value of their property falls and the availability of affordable insurance recedes because of safety fears. Tenants and leaseholders need to be listened to, and their role needs to be reflected in this Bill and in related legislation.

Planning

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I can assure my noble friend that local authorities will be essential in the process. They will continue to prepare the local plans and councils will have better, stronger tools to ensure good design and make the most of brownfield land.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, will the Government welcome the Architects’ Journal’s campaign on retrofit first? Far too often, developers favour demolition and rebuild when retrofit would have been more appropriate. This often has detrimental environmental effects such as emissions, detrimental social effects and sometimes dangerous safety outcomes. Will the new planning system favour retrofit as the first option wherever possible and ensure that in any replacement build or conversions, safety standards will really be effectively enforced?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I am aware of the campaign for retrofitting, and it often has a place instead of demolition and rebuild. I will look at the campaign and make sure that is fed into our policy as it evolves.

Business and Planning Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robathan [V]]

My Lords, I am sure that the Committee will be pleased to know that I will be extremely brief, not least because—I should declare this—the Chief Whip has asked me to be. I should also declare that I have not a financial but a family interest, in that my wife is the leader of Westminster City Council, which has been exercised on behalf of its residents about the idea that people might be able to buy off-sales until six o’clock in the morning.

The other people who are exercised are the traders, as well as the residents, of Soho and elsewhere. They and I welcome the commitment from the Minister, for which I thank her. I will not move my amendment.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

I will also be brief. The Minister has successfully taken the wind out of our sails on this one. I look forward to what she will say at the end of the debate. This is strictly about off-sales. It is not an anti-pub move; it is a way of avoiding the kind of disorder that the police have experienced and many of us have seen on our screens. It is solely to do with off-sales beyond 11 pm; obviously the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, goes to bed slightly earlier than the rest of us. If the Minister comes up with an 11 pm cut-off, I will listen to the details, but I certainly do not want to detain the Committee any longer.

[Baroness Thornhill [V]]

I, too, have been asked to be brief. It is worth saying that obviously there are serious concerns about the cumulative impact of these issues where premises are gathered together. Certainly, from my experience of running a local authority with, at times, too lively and vibrant a nightlife, saturation must be looked at.

I am grateful that we had a good response on the timing but the overriding principle for me is that, in collaboration with operatives—often through good Pubwatch schemes and the local police—local authorities have come up with conditions to put on these licences. The Bill suspends those and throws them out the window, when they have been put on for good reason and through good collaboration. In principle, I feel that this is an unwelcome move.

My daughter was glassed in the face as a 27 year-old when out with her friends on a normal Saturday night. It can, and does, happen. If only that glass had been plastic. I still think that we have to have that debate on Report.

Amendment 45 in the name of my noble friend Lord Shipley is about the late night levy, which is a curious anomaly that he will expand on. I totally support any change that will allow a local authority to refund pubs for services that they have not received during lockdown while they have been obliged to pay this additional tax. I call my much-shortened remarks to a close.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 1 Report

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, for that introduction and for his continuing engagement with this issue as a Minister and since. I think that is recognised in the community. I also thank the House for recognising that the aftermath of this tragedy is still with us—that there is continued grieving, distress and loss within the community. This report answers some of the questions; it makes some very good recommendations, most of which the noble Lord has underlined, and I agree with them. There are serious questions to be answered by all parties in fire protection ownership and the fire forces.

However, I fear that the sequence in which we have approached these reports, and to some extent the balance of this report, which focuses overwhelmingly on the night itself, are in danger of missing the main point. Unfortunately, bits of the report were leaked. They were seized on by elements in the media effectively to put a lot of blame on the fire brigade. Undoubtedly the fire brigade’s systems were found wanting in some ways, and the fire brigade has to examine whether to change its procedures; some of this has been demanded by the FBU for some years. The chief officer should perhaps consider her position, as mistakes were made. But the essential mistakes were made long before that. It is not just that the balance of blame in the media’s pre-coverage of this report has been unfortunate; it also obscures the many acts of bravery, dedication and innovation by individual firefighters that night. The focus is more than slightly the wrong way around.

I hope that subsequent stages will look at the cause of the fire—Sir Martin has started to do some of that, and some of it is in the Hackitt report. A simple fire in one flat went from the fourth floor to the 24th floor in 30 minutes. That was clearly the fault of the cladding, compounded by a degradation of the compartmentalisation of the building by the refurbishment that had taken place.

The key questions in this report and at the next stage must be why so much was ignored, why the owners and managers of the building had not provided the fire brigade with sufficient information, why concerns from the tenants had been utterly ignored for several years—regrettably, that situation is not uncommon in some of our social housing—and why, as the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, said, they ignored the lessons from Lakanal in Camberwell, which is just around the corner from where I used to live, and indeed ignored the lessons from some overseas brigades and terrible incidents there. We now need to examine the relationship between the owners, public and private, of high buildings and the fire brigade, and we need to look at whether the regulations have perhaps been changed too much, taking the responsibility away from the fire brigade and leaving too much to self-regulation. We need to ensure that the regulations relating to cladding actually work. The report finds that it did not meet the law, yet the providers of it say that they met the regulations and were advised as such. There is a problem there.

The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, also referred to the issue of how we define high buildings when, for firefighting and safety purposes, there has to be an enhanced safety position. In Scotland, as he says, it is already at 11 metres rather than 18 metres. We need to re-examine that. If we do not do so and come to some conclusions, I regret to say that more individuals, families and communities will suffer the kind of distress that still exists in the Grenfell area. The real villains are not the firefighters but those who took those decisions and, in order to save money, failed to provide safe cladding or make the refurbishment safe. That is why I repeat the question of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne: where do we now stand and why are we so slow in bringing criminal charges? Otherwise, we may face this situation again in some other community in another part of the country. That would indeed be a tragedy, and it would be the fault of the authorities—by that I mean the Government and local government—that we have not learned the lessons even now.

Housing: Rental Market

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I can only quote the figures that I have given noble Lords, which show that there is an increase but it is not having an impact on private rented property. As I said, we want to continue to follow the advocation for self-regulation and to support local authorities. In 2018, the Short Term Accommodation Association implemented the considerate nightly letting charter with Westminster City Council. With the fines that have been imposed—I have the details of those—it seems to be working. As I said, we are determined to follow the voluntary approach at present.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, a few months ago, I asked Ministers what they were doing about the situation where leaseholders and tenants of social housing were subletting to Airbnb and equivalent bodies, and the Minister indicated that it was not their problem but it was local authorities’ problem. I now ask about an issue that clearly is central Government’s problem: how many of the 80,000 odd premises that are let to Airbnb in London are registered for business rates, business for profit tax or VAT, because this form of tourism is detrimental to a lot of areas in central London where people live and where housing is in very short supply?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

As I said earlier, we think it is right that local authorities remain responsible for this area. Westminster City Council has investigated or is in the process of investigating over 1,500 properties for unlawful short-term letting. In one case earlier this year, a fine of over £100,000 was imposed. But the noble Lord is right that those who let out their properties for Airbnb must pay taxes. That is something that local authorities should look at. Of course, when they register, local authorities can find out who the hosts are and whether taxes have been paid or not.