Building Safety

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My eyesight is not the best, but I now know that those were the lovely dulcet tones of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. I remember that, when I was leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, the noble Lord visited me to discuss housing policy. He has had a long-standing interest in this area and has been a distinguished chief executive and an extremely senior civil servant in Whitehall, so he has worked at all levels of government and I know he comes from a good place. Peabody is a provider of extremely good social housing and there are great examples of that where I live. I commend the work it does. It provides housing for some of the most vulnerable people, but also people of all income streams who cannot afford market housing.

We have to work with Kate Henderson at the National Housing Federation and with the G15 associations, all of which have development arms and have built housing. We have to accept that some of the G15 associations may have built houses with unsafe material. I take the view that, if you are social developer, particularly as you have had a subsidy to do the development, and have made the same mistakes as a private developer, then the consequences should be the same. We should do that in a way that is fair and proportionate to ensure that the polluter, whoever it is, contributes to fixing the mess that they have played some part in creating. It should be collaborative; I have spent a lot of time reaching out to the National Housing Federation and different chief executives, and will continue to do so.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I have an interest as chair of the Built Environment Committee. I very much welcome the package of measures, although I regret the time that it has taken to get to this stage. My experience on the ground is that we need flexibility at the edges to apply common sense, so I welcome the notion of proportionality. Risk assessments by external advisers can jeopardise good businesses, as we know from the overzealous enforcement of a number of EU regulations and the disastrous EWS1s, which, if I understand it correctly, my noble friend is rightly withdrawing. Will the Government ensure that the new British Standards Institution guidance prevents the needless recrafting and remediation of buildings—especially old buildings with an old balcony or a wooden beam, which pose a low risk of fire?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I first praise the efforts of my noble friend in raising issues throughout my time as Building Safety Minister, and particularly for her passion about how we improve the built environment. The honest answer is that the introduction of the British Standards Institution’s Publicly Available Specification 9980 will go some way, and it will take time to ensure that we have a more proportionate approach. As I have already said in responding to questions, there is no silver bullet, but it is good to have the right direction of travel. That requires the lenders, insurers and valuers who follow valuation guidance from RICS to all take a sensible approach, and that takes time. The more we focus on proportionality and risk, as opposed to having a binary view that everything needs to be fixed in the most expensive manner possible, the closer we get to a far better place.