Building Safety Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I obviously support what my noble friend Lady Pinnock said in relation to the training and independence of building inspectors. That is perhaps the most obvious of the necessities which we now know exist, as far as plugging the gaps in the current regime is concerned.

I want to focus my remarks on Amendments 116 and 119A, where mine is the lead name and which deal with fire risk assessors. We have never had before, in capital letters, something called “Fire Risk Assessors”. There is no such profession and this will clearly be a significant gap, which has to be filled very quickly if we are to achieve the aims of the Bill. We know that, right across the industry, there are shortages of skills, qualifications and competence. Above all, there is a shortage of capacity. One problem that I know the Minister has had to confront is that it has been difficult to get effective surveys of high-risk buildings because the people have not been available to do them. There are no such people, or at least insufficient people, with the right competences, skills and so on to do so.

I do not know whether the Committee will have seen the reports of the fire risk assessment that was done in advance of the Grenfell fire. The housing association had a fire risk assessor and he made a fire risk assessment. It turned out that he was a firefighter but not qualified in fire risk assessment. In order to secure the job, he had manufactured a set of initials which were accepted by the housing association as proof of his skill and capacity to assess fire risks. This is reported in the public evidence sessions of the Grenfell inquiry. It was further revealed that he was commissioned not just to assess the Grenfell Tower; he was commissioned by the housing association to be its risk assessor for the whole of the housing stock of that organisation.

That is where the importance of having a register becomes immediately apparent. You need a register of qualified people for two reasons, which overlap: first, you are not allowed to practise as an assessor unless you are on that register; secondly, as a purchaser of the skills of fire assessment, for instance a housing association, you need to be sure that the person who offers you a cheap deal to do some quick fire assessment work is somebody who is qualified, prepared and competent to do so. Amendment 116 is trying to establish clearly in the Minister’s mind the need to make this process of regulation transparent, with a publicly published register. We are obviously probing at this point, but I hope the Minister can give us some satisfaction that, if not in the Bill then in parallel with it, these matters will be dealt with.

What I have said about fire assessors may be the most dramatic and acute of the problems, but the building control function was of course also exposed as woefully insufficient in the case of the Grenfell Tower. Bearing in mind that it was a local authority building control function being exercised, it is also true that the person who was the responsible officer did not once visit that tower to make an inspection. It was purely from a desk study of drawings which had been provided to him. There is clearly a tremendous gap. Even when somebody is appointed to do a job, they may not have either the skills or competences, or they may not have the attention span or the time, to give effective service to the cause of fire safety. I hope very much to hear from the Minister that he takes these matters to heart and has in mind finding a way of establishing how this can be put right.

Our Amendment 119A is about training of fire assessors on the same basis as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, moved on the training of building inspectors. Every one of the professionals engaged in this fire safety regime needs to be a qualified and competent person. That is so obvious that it hardly needs to be said, but at the moment we are woefully short of the number of people we need. Indeed, it has already been referenced that the RICS and others have pointed out that, at the moment, there are not enough people with the competencies to step forward if the Bill comes into force as the Minister intends.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am very sympathetic to this group of amendments, but I have a number of queries that perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, might address, just because I am not quite sure about them. One of the points just made is that a large number of people will be accountable —it seems to me to grow every time I look at the Bill. Although I understood what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, meant about the bonfire of bureaucracy, regulations and so on, there is always a danger that we are creating layer upon layer of bureaucracy and accountable people. I shall be moving some amendments later to this effect.

For now, it is obviously the case that we need qualified people involved in this, but, as has been described, there are so many new roles that the qualifications do not even exist. I am concerned about including in the Bill that you need to have the qualifications to do the role when the qualification does not exist. What does that mean? Will that hold up the process?

I am also concerned about saying that training is “compulsory”. I am concerned for the professional autonomy and integrity of those who are already involved in this area. I do not know whether legislation is the right way to go. However, it would be useful to understand from the Minister what he anticipates will happen. It cannot be, as it were, just any old Joe Bloggs given the role. Will attention be paid to talking to the professionals who already run practice qualifications in universities and further education? How will the Government manage the fact that they are creating all these new jobs with no attention, it seems, to how the qualifications will be awarded or who will give them? That is where I am very sympathetic to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, in having a register, but I am not quite sure that the amendment does it.

I am nervous, perhaps because I used to be involved in education, about another government demand on education that ends up giving people a lot of work to do when there is no capacity to do it, so it will just be a shoddy box-ticking qualification that will not mean very much. That is my concern, while being sympathetic in general.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in particular to the amendments in this group in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, who have made excellent contributions. I intend to be concise and brief, because the noble Baroness introduced them in an eloquent and comprehensive manner, which was followed up by subsequent speakers.

These amendments are much needed, and it is disappointing that these matters have not already been taken into account by the Government in the Bill. The new clause in Amendment 116 would require building owners and accountable persons, about whom I shall ask a question shortly, to verify the competencies of fire assessors before appointing them to conduct the fire safety assessments required by the Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, talked about the 1984 legislation and, prior to that, local authority employees. The cosy relationship between building constructors, developers and inspectors is really concerning. That needs to change.

These are serious concerns. Look at Grenfell, where numerous people lost their lives, and subsequent fires in high-rise and other buildings. The system is broken. Serious construction defects are there, and there have been failures in not detecting bad buildings. Building regulations have failed. That is criminal, as my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock pointed out on the previous group. We cannot have buildings signed off as safe when clearly they are not. Developers choosing building inspectors—a point the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, mentioned—cannot be a way forward. We have to all be singing from the same hymn sheet; that is what Amendment 116 talks about.