Building Safety Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, as we begin the Committee stage of this important Bill, born out of the tragic Grenfell fire, I reiterate my condolences to the families and friends of those who died in it.

I wish the Minister fortitude as he looks forward to what I suspect will be a very long period of the various stages of the passage of this Bill. We all wish him well and hope that he will have a sympathetic approach to many of the important amendments that we will be debating over the coming days, including Amendment 1 and the proposed new clause in Amendment 12, which I am moving today.

At Second Reading I argued that the Bill should address the perverse situation under the current building regulations in which, if all the occupants of a building escape safely from a fire but the building is totally destroyed, the outcome is considered a success. I believe that the life-safety limitation provided by the current regulations, which significantly influences the design of buildings, should be revised to take account of the protection of property.

My amendments would achieve that by adding furthering the protection of property to the list of purposes for which building regulations may be made; extending the requirements of persons carrying out works on a building to cover building resilience; and widening the scope of the building safety regulator’s functions to further the protection of property. The benefits would include longer-term protection with, therefore, more time for occupants to escape; improved safety for firefighters and reduced fire damage and environmental pollution; and reduced costs of rebuilding and replacing lost items.

At Second Reading I mentioned several recent fires in a range of building types as evidence of the need for such measures. Last week, the Sunday Times included an article looking back at one of the fires that I mentioned: the 2019 fire that destroyed the Worcester Park residential block in Richmond. The article noted that the London Fire Brigade arrived within nine minutes but could not save the building. Twenty-three flats were destroyed in minutes, and, although all 60 residents escaped safely, they lost everything. The article describes the impact: the girl who lost her A-level notes in the blaze and whose predicted grades dropped and she lost her university place; the social worker who received a fire brigade commendation for warning neighbours of the fire but who lost his job because of the trauma caused by the event; and several residents who invested their savings in shared-ownership flats in the block who now cannot find similar properties in the area because house prices have risen by over 13% since the fire. No lives were lost, but the impact was incalculable.

How did a relatively new building end up being destroyed in minutes, and at such risk to the occupants? The building owner claims that:

“The cause of the fire was never identified but the building ‘performed’ as it was supposed to, allowing everyone to get out safely.”


The owners of the Croydon self-storage warehouse gave a similar answer when challenged as to how a fire there in 2018 could completely destroy its warehouse and the possessions of 1,200 clients. They said the building met the fire safety building regulations. The same was said by those responsible for the Beechmere care home, Walsall’s Holiday Inn, Chichester’s Selsey academy, Northamptonshire’s brand-new 40,000 square meter Gardman warehouse, Bristol’s Premier Inn and countless other buildings. In each, the outcome was deemed a success, even though the buildings were destroyed and contents lost.

The current Bill does not address this failing. Indeed, it would not even have covered most of the buildings I mentioned, since they would anyway have been out of scope. But every time a home, a school or a business is destroyed by fire, lives are disrupted at great personal, social, environmental and economic cost. Fires do not need to be so dangerous and costly, but unfortunately it seems that the increased use of modern methods of construction and larger compartmental sizes in industrial buildings is resulting in larger, and hence more challenging, fire incidents. Moreover, at a time when we are striving to make buildings more sustainable, the regulations appear to allow for what are, in effect, disposable buildings.

In the other place, when this issue was raised, the Minister there said little, merely commenting that it would be wrong to complicate the role of the new regulator, yet as our Minister knows, the Government are already conducting research into property protection. I hope that when he responds the Minister will bring us up to speed on the progress of that research and how he sees property protection fitting into the regulations.

This is a wide-ranging Bill, primarily designed to address the failings highlighted by the Grenfell tragedy, and of course it must do so, but it should also be forward-looking and designed to secure the safety of people in or about all buildings. My amendments seek to ensure a safer, more resilient and sustainable built environment. I beg to move Amendment 1.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I invite her to speak.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

I shall speak to a number of amendments in this group, broadly divided into two areas. The first follows on from my noble friend Lord Foster’s introduction to the protection of property and the powers of the regulator. The second relates specifically to the safety of buildings and disabled people.

On the first issue, much of the focus among the public and in the debate in the run-up to the Bill coming to your Lordships’ House has been on cladding and the height of buildings. As was discussed specifically at Second Reading, a far wider range of safety, construction and adaptation issues have emerged as secondary issues, generally meaning that too many buildings are not complying with even the old building safety regulations. Life safety is not the only issue: far too many new buildings these days are being constructed in an unsafe way. The level of complaints against builders is the highest it has ever been, and my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath outlined that very clearly.

Secondly, I want to focus on the issues that disabled people face when they are asked to get out of a building, in the event of either a fire or a fire alarm. I am really looking forward to hearing the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, after her excellent speech at Second Reading.

I have not always used a wheelchair, but I still use a stick on various occasions, and I have to say that there is nothing more frightening than trying to leave even a low-level building coming downstairs with a stick with people racing past you. It was probably the second time I had to come out of a building for a fire alarm when I realised that I was as much a danger to the people trying to race past me as I was to myself, because of the risk of falling. Over the years, I have twice been in hotels where the fire alarm has gone off in the middle of the night—once, when I was trying to use my stick. The second time, because I was in my wheelchair, I had been told to report to the safety zone, which I did, and was told that someone from reception or the fire officers would come up, transfer me to the evac chair and take me downstairs. Twenty minutes later, I was still sitting there.

I have to say to noble Lords that this also happened to me in Portcullis House about five or six years ago. As a result—all credit to the House authorities—that was remedied and there is now a new arrangement. But when you are sitting there and you do not know whether it is a fire or a fire practice, and you cannot get out of your own accord, it is extremely alarming.

The use of PEEPs—personal evacuation emergency plans—is excellent, provided that they work. I have used them in workplaces, homes, hotels and guest houses. I was in charge of building some new disabled accommodation at Selwyn College when I was bursar there more than 20 years ago, and although they were not called PEEPs in those days, creating a confident document so that students, their friends around them and the college staff understood the needs of that particular disabled person was vital to them having confidence about being able to evacuate the building in the event of an emergency. The difficulty that we face today, highlighted especially by Grenfell, is that these documents are not in place.

Many disabled people are very concerned that the Home Office has appointed safety consultants CS Todd & Associates, who have been given a new contract worth over £200,000. This organisation was responsible for drafting and editing a fire safety guide for the LGA that said it was “usually unrealistic” to expect landlords to put arrangements in place for disabled people to evacuate blocks of flats in the event of an emergency. That is an interesting turn of phrase, because, as we know, there were a lot of disabled people in Grenfell and flats are increasingly being built, so evacuation for disabled people is vital.

I especially thank disabled campaigning group Claddag, a leaseholder action group led by disabled people who have decided that they will take the Home Secretary to court on this contract. They and the Disabled News Service are really highlighting this issue. It is important to note that, six years on from Todd’s advice, two-fifths of the disabled residents in Grenfell Tower lost their lives because there were no special arrangements in place to get them out safely. The fire service has recognised that the “stay put” advice for residents in high rise blocks must be changed, but there is no evidence from either the Government or from CS Todd & Associates that things have changed. In fact, a further set of advice has been published by Colin Todd on behalf of BSI that repeated this same arrangement.

That is why we need the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. There is an adage in the disabled world that says, “no decision about us without us”. This is fundamental to human safety and human life. It is vital that the specific needs of disabled people are taken into account in the Bill.

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Again, I look forward to the Minister explaining how he will exercise the powers, which are already on his desk, to have a named person and a certified building at the end of every building project, and to him being able to satisfy me that no permitted development project will be allowed to transgress the fire safety rules that will be established through the Bill before us. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, wishes to take part remotely. I now invite the noble Baroness to speak.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I support both amendments in this group so helpfully introduced by my noble friend Lord Stunell. We heard in our debate on the previous group of amendments about the wide range of safety concerns, from fire and flood to methods of construction and fitting out, which mean that some buildings are at risk. I should declare my interest as the vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group, and I thank the many Fire Ministers who have appeared before it, including the current Minister and indeed a previous Minister, who spoke just now.

I support the ideas about the golden thread as outlined by my noble friend Lord Stunell. Amendment 3 does that. Frankly, I thank him for owning up to the fact that he did not do this when he was a Minister. The all-party group has, over the years, argued for this policy to be part of the fire safety protocol.

The amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and supported by my noble friend Lady Pinnock, have a key safety issue: the power to prevent a developer’s ability to pick their own regulator. It is right that it is the public building regulator, the Local Authority Building Control, that is the sole regulator.

The bonfire of regulations just over a decade ago has meant that this field has become murky and filled with a lot of organisations that may indeed have close relationships. There was one day when the all-party group heard from a whistleblower who told us that, in the past, there has been unacceptable practice when the developer or owner of a building has had the ability to pick and choose the inspector, in this case, but it could have been a regulator. Fire safety inspectors were booked to come and check the fire safety doors—the front doors of flats and those on the stairwells—and that they were still the right ones that would manage the 40-minute fire safety tests. The managing agents for the building asked for a delay of a week, which was granted. The whistleblower said that it had been noticed by a number of residents that a series of doors were removed and replaced with other doors during that week—which of course passed all the tests—and, the week after the inspection, all the old doors were put back.

There has to be a mechanism for a regulator to start picking up on, and being concerned, when organisations are not playing by the rules. Those alarm bells can best be raised by the independent Local Authority Building Control.