Building Safety Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I was not expecting to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, so I will not comment on her proposals but will wait to hear other comments. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for introducing the first group of amendments, and very much endorse what he said about the sad victims of Grenfell. I was thinking that taking fire safety and buildings away from the fire brigade, as we did about a quarter of a century ago, may have had some sad and perverse effects. I refer to my interests in the register, notably as a non-executive director of Secure Trust Bank and as the owner of property that is sometimes rented out. I am also proud to be chair of the Built Environment Committee and to see distinguished colleagues here today.

I was sorry not to be able to speak in the long and interesting debate at Second Reading. However, I remind noble Lords of my involvement in the Fire Safety Bill and the concern I expressed very early on about the position of leaseholders and their inability to sell property because of the uncertainties and the problems with the dreaded EWS1 form, which we will come on to. I look forward to debating the Government’s recent package later, but for now I turn to the regulator and his or her functions, the subject of this group.

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[The Minister of State, Home Office and Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

My Lords, I was not expecting to be in what the Romans called a frigidarium for this stage of the Bill. It is positively bracing. I am sure that as the week wears on we will get a slightly more normal temperature. It is already slightly better, so it clearly just takes a bit of time.

I will try to capture each group of amendments in three words or fewer. I am going to call this group the “widening the scope” group of amendments—that is three words. I will go through each amendment in turn. In practice, I have sympathy with every idea that has been put forward. However, I would like noble Lords to consider that the more we widen the scope, the greater the risk that we will actually fail in the first duty of any Government, which is to keep people safe. Our focus has to be based on what it is reasonable to expect from a new regulator in the Health and Safety Executive. So, although I have sympathy, I will resist this group of amendments, because, when we talk about high risk, the scope has to be necessarily tight in order to give the HSE the chance to grow as a regulator and to implement this regime properly.

However, I thank noble Lords for their contributions to this first group of amendments. I believe that this is a landmark piece of legislation and a necessary one. I can feel the broad support that it has from all sides of the House, and I look forward to further debates in Committee. There has already been good discussion in this grouping, and I am grateful for the commitment from all noble Lords to improve the Bill and to reform building safety more generally. I have listened to the concerns raised by noble Lords and I thank them for their helpful contributions. As I said, I will respond to them all in turn.

I start by talking about the fire which the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, mentioned. It is true that it was a staggeringly awful fire, even though there was no loss of life, and the noble Lord captured that very well in his speech. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to learn the lessons of the near misses, if you like, so I have met Geeta Nanda, chair of the G15, who I have known for some time. She is also the chief executive of the Metropolitan Thames Valley housing association, which manages Richmond House within Worcester Park, which consists of 23 households of shared owners. I have also met Dean Summers—on Zoom; I have not met him in person—who took over from Sean Ellis, and I had a meeting with him as the new managing director of St James.

It is fair to say that Richmond House, which was built in 2011 by the Berkeley Group—St James is part of the Berkeley Group—was built in a shockingly bad way. It was built without internal compartmentalisation and certainly would never have passed the building regulations at the time. There was also inadequate fire-stopping, which is one of the reasons why the fire spread so quickly. Candidly, it is absolutely right that the Berkeley Group pays for its replacement and addresses all the losses suffered by the shared owners. I am very interested in that, and I have asked for a report from the housing association and Berkeley on progress on doing precisely that. The building was not built in line with building regulations, so it should not have happened. It is a four-storey building and is under 11 metres, which, according to the building regulations, should not have been able to happen, so we have an example of someone having signed off a building that should never have been signed off. That is the lesson of Richmond House.

Sometimes regulation does not work. That, for me, is the lesson. The other lesson is that fire is a tragedy, not just when you lose lives but in the opportunities lost. This Bill does a lot to make housing overall safer, and we will have much better housing stock over the next 30 years than we have had in the previous 30 years.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Another problem at Worcester Park might have been the failure to implement the building regulations. I have found building regulation enforcement very patchy. There has been a lot of very aggressive enforcement of building regulations in my lovely county, yet here there has obviously been a disaster with building regulations. Is enforcement of the regulations not also important, and will that be improved by our work here?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I think we need to ensure the competence of enforcement and that it works, and the competence of the people who assess buildings and sign them off as fit for human habitation. In the same way with crime where we want an absence of crime, we want an absence of these problems. Yes, we need to improve enforcement and there needs to be the strong arm of the law. That is why we want to have a strong regulator in this new regulator under the HSE. We have Housing Act powers for local authorities to intervene. The fire service has powers under the fire safety order. There are lots of powers and lots of regulators that can step in and do something about it. In this case, they all failed. Yes, we need to strengthen them. We understand a lot more about the inadequacies of some of the built environment, but my noble friend is right that we also need to strengthen enforcement.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for his amendments. On Amendment 1, I hope noble Lords will agree that the regulator should exercise its functions in line with its first objective: to secure the safety of people in and around buildings. I am concerned that adding additional objectives for the new building safety regulator could distract from this mission. The Bill provides the regulator with a broader objective to improve the standard of buildings. Achieving this could involve the regulator improving regulatory standards relevant to property protection, such as security, resilience and fire safety, so the regulator’s remit already extends to considering these issues.

Adding a specific objective for property protection would have two main downsides. First, it would put property protection on a par with resident safety as a priority for the regulator. The Government believe that the regulator should prioritise residents’ safety and do not want the regulator to be distracted from that. There is a risk that a specific requirement always to consider property protection would result in the regulator favouring solutions that go beyond what is required for residents’ safety. The second downside is that this amendment risks skewing the building safety regulator’s oversight function. The Government intend the regulator to use evidence to identify emerging issues with the safety and performance of buildings and to make recommendations to Ministers on regulatory changes where needed. A property protection objective would distract the regulator from using evidence to identify and rectify the most pressing issues, which might, for example, relate to net zero and sustainability rather than property protection.

The pre-legislative scrutiny committee considered property protection but found that the existing objectives are a sensible starting point—I emphasise “starting point”. The committee suggested that the Government keep this under review. We are committed to doing this through the provision in Clause 135 for a regular independent review of the effectiveness of the regulator and the wider regulatory system.

Turning to Amendment 12, there are already powers for building regulations to cover specific aspects of building resilience. We believe that it is better that building regulations are targeted on specific issues rather than open-ended requirements. However, we recognise that, for residential buildings, further research into property protection is warranted. The impact of the loss of a home is significant, so we are taking this forward as part of the technical review of approved document B on fire safety. I thank the noble Lord for suggesting these amendments and respectfully ask him to withdraw Amendment 1.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak specifically to Amendment 6 but I endorse the others, for reasons that will become apparent. One thing we have all become aware of, post Grenfell and the Hackitt review, is concerns about repeat problems emerging, whether they are systemic ones to do with the way a building has been built or newly emerging issues. They happen time and again, and yet the industry, councils and Parliament do not seem to learn from them. I shall give one brief illustration to explain.

In my role as health spokesperson for my group in the Lords, I know that we are increasingly concerned about some of the mould and damp issues increasingly found in more recent 1960s buildings, to which landlords have been very slow to respond. There is clearly a public health issue where especially children and the clinically vulnerable remain at risk and become ill, and yet there does not seem to be a mechanism to provide a review to make sure that there is learning from this, especially since it is happening across the country.

The other amendments in this group set out a swathe of mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability for the BS regulator, the Secretary of State and Parliament. Returning to Dame Hackitt’s review, these amendments would be a strategic element to push the culture change that she sought, to make sure that those who have some responsibility have to look at a higher level to make sure that buildings are safe and are dealt with, and that the costs, both in building and in human experience, are monitored.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Briefly, I support the idea of review clauses and of learning from mistakes. Obviously, I have not been a Minister in this area, but I was a Minister in other areas and I did agree, occasionally, to review clauses where people had concerns. I found that the reports that came along two years later—if one survived that long—were actually extremely useful, and ensured that the Civil Service system was behind the objectives of the Bill. Exactly what one would put in a review clause is another question. I would certainly want added some of the points I made earlier—which the Minister helpfully said were contained in a code of practice for regulators—bringing up the agenda the sort of good practice we have seen at some of our better regulators, such as the HSE. I hope the Minister will think about whether there is scope for a review clause to help on some of these issues.

We talked about sprinklers. As people know, I have run supermarkets, so I have had practical experience of all these different fire safety methods. Certainly, when sprinklers were put in, it took away a lot of headaches, provided you could secure the water supply. That sort of innovation—whatever the new ones are; AI or whatever—can form part of a review process two, four or six years later.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 129 in my name proposes to add a short new clause to the Climate Change Act 2008. Section 56 of the 2008 Act says:

“It is the duty of the Secretary of State to lay reports before Parliament containing an assessment of the risks for the United Kingdom of the current and predicted impact of climate change.”


All I am seeking is to put in something to make more precise the need to refer to the impact of climate change on buildings and to say something about the location of those buildings that will be affected. It would require the Secretary of State to include in a report an assessment of the risks and the locations of such threats to buildings caused by climate change. We all know only too well, just today, the real problems we are facing because of climate change, yet climate change is not mentioned in the Bill at all. The amendment aims to rectify that.