Building Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I believe I can make this a full cross-House welcome for the Bill—rather a rare occurrence. I join others in warmly welcoming the tone of the Minister’s speech. With its regular repeats of the campaigners’ hashtag “polluter pays” and the promise to take on board proposed amendments from your Lordships’ House, it truly is a breath of fresh air. I can only congratulate the Minister and the Government.

I note how this shows that campaigning works. After uncountable long hours of effort from affected residents, petitioning, marching, letter-writing and social media campaigning, the people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in unsafe, faulty, terrible standard buildings are today being heard in your Lordships’ House. I hope that they will get some sense of repayment from that. If only the residents of Grenfell —who before the terrible tragedy tried so hard to get officialdom to listen to their safety concerns—had been listened to, then 72 people might be alive today. There is a lesson there that I hope Ministers will take note off. Experts by experience are indeed experts about their lives and environment and need to be listened to.

As so many speeches thus far have demonstrated, there is much to do in improving the Bill, ensuring that it covers all the dangerous buildings that it should, particularly those occupied by vulnerable residents, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, highlighted, as well as the crucial issue of fire doors, as highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, and many others. What could be more basic and surely solvable than that? As many other noble Lords have noted, a lot of the focus has been specifically on cladding, but there are so many other issues, and it is crucial that the Bill does not become overly focused on cladding at the cost of those other issues. Following on from the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, who talked about fire suppression systems, there has often been an ideological resistance in the UK to sprinklers, but we really need to rethink that for many types of buildings. On the structure of the Bill, the idea that housebuilders will just hand over their ill-gotten gains to cover the damages at the Government’s request is surely a fantasy. The Bill needs to demand full, complete recompense.

However, rather than running down the already well-travelled list of the ways in which this Bill needs to be improved, I will briefly take a broader view. I cannot help thinking that the Bill Office was perhaps demonstrating a better quality of engineering than many buildings in putting me after the noble Lord, Lord Foster, given the point he made about building safety more broadly and cold homes—I would add to that homes that overheat, given the increasing number of heatwaves that we will experience in the climate emergency—being a risk to life which should be covered in this Bill.

We have the poorest quality housing in western Europe—draughty, poorly insulated and expensively relying on gas for heating and cooking, which has, as we increasingly understand, significant health impacts as well. I foresee long conversations with the Bill Office about scope, but a home that kills its vulnerable resident with excessive heat, or that sickens and kills them through biting cold, is one that is deadly. That has to be a building safety issue. This is an issue that the Government seem astonishingly reluctant to tackle after their green homes grant fiasco. I note that the big announcement today on levelling up fails to address this issue—astonishingly, given how much of a factor it is in the terrible quality of life and the poverty in so many of the areas in this country that the scheme is supposed to address.

The Bill also needs to at least start to address the enormous systems disaster that is the building sector. I have no doubt at all that, this morning, inadequately trained workers were putting the finishing touches on buildings that are dangerous and that will be moved into by unsuspecting residents—or possibly suspecting residents, who still have no choice in the matter. The CEOs of our mass housebuilders should be forced to have the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Best, embedded on their phones, playing morning and night, to show them what society thinks of them and their companies. They have operated for the profit of the few at the cost of the rest of us, as in so much of our society. That financialisation has to be challenged, treated as morally unacceptable and made legally impossible. I acknowledge that this is something that we cannot fix just with this Bill, however much your Lordships’ House improves it—and I am sure that we will improve it massively.

It is interesting to take a global perspective and see the other parts of the world with building safety crises similar to that in the UK. In the US, in Florida, there was the dramatic, awful, deadly Champlain Towers South collapse, which was recently explored in-depth by the New York Times. It demonstrated that in the building boom there in the 1980s, regulatory corners were not cut but rather bulldozed through, and now there is a legacy of incredibly dangerous buildings in an incredibly difficult and dangerous environment. In Australia, the University of New South Wales’s City Futures Research Centre looked at 635 apartment buildings in Sydney. Its report—called Cracks in the Compact City, if noble Lords want to look it up—found that 42% of blocks had water problems, 26% had cracking problems and 17% had fire safety issues. One building, built just six years ago, was in danger of immediate collapse.

What ties together these countries? Neoliberal politics and, attached to that, a particular ideology that “cutting red tape” is how to set societies on a better way forward. It is important to highlight that because, as we are here in your Lordships’ House today, we see the Government embracing the need for regulation, forced by tragic circumstances and dedicated campaigning. They are accepting the need for so-called red tape, which actually forms the rules that keep us and the environment safe.

At the same time, we have a press release from No. 10 that tells us that a

“‘Brexit Freedoms’ Bill will be brought forward to end the special status of EU law and ensure that it can be more easily amended or removed”.


It tells us there will be a

“Major cross-government drive to cut £1 billion of red tape for businesses”.


Applying that approach is what forces us to be here today, trying to rebuild essential systems of regulation that were slashed away in an orgy of deregulation. We can do much today to force the repair of walls, the replacement of fire doors and the renovation of dangerous balconies. Changing our economic and government system is a much bigger task that this Bill demonstrates is urgently needed.