Fire Safety Bill

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 29th April 2020 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab) [V]]

Criticising this Bill would be as futile as criticising an empty bookshelf: one needs to look at the quality of the books. Clause 1 simply clarifies the fire safety order of 2005, and clause 2 is no more than a delegated power to make regulations amending that order in future. While the Bill is, in itself, welcome, it is no more than a piece of legislative furniture—the content is yet to come.

I want to illustrate the futility of even the best regulations on fire safety if the monitoring and enforcement regime is flawed from the beginning. Almost 1,000 people had their homes in the TNQ development of 460 flats in my constituency. The flats are unsafe because of fire stopping and other defects, which means that there is no compartmentation between them and a fire would spread swiftly up inside the walls of the building. When the building was completed in 2015, the regulations from the 2005 order were not unclear in any way. Approved document B specified that fire and smoke will be prevented from spreading to concealed spaces in the building structure by fire stopping and fire cavity barriers. Those are the rules. They are good rules, and they were not followed.

When it became clear in 2017 how unsafe the building was, my constituents had every confidence that the developers, Royal London and NEAT, would swiftly put things right. They were wrong. A complex blame game began. In January this year, the remediation work had scarcely started and was loosely timetabled to take another two or three years. When the defects were found, I asked what I believed was a simple question: who was responsible for inspecting the work? The answer, it appears, was everybody and nobody. The National House Building Council conducted over 1,000 spot inspections before it issued its insurance certificate in 2015. Its CEO, Steve Wood, informed me that he was disappointed to learn of the failures in the original construction. I wrote back to say that he could hardly have been surprised, given that his own inspection reports, which I had obtained, spoke of

“potential risk to health and safety of occupants, fire safety compartmentation, inadequate fire stopping, barriers to separating walls between units not fitted to design.”

The National House-Building Council signed off and issued the insurance cover just two months later without any further in situ checks being done. Instead, it relied on everyone else. The law says that final responsibility for building control matters lies with the developer, but the approved inspector is key to the developer being able to discharge that responsibility. Competition between private approved inspectors has undermined the impartial inspection regime provided by local authorities. Head Projects, with the approved inspectors, was obliged under the Construction Industry Council approved inspectors register code to provide a guarantee of compliance with the building regulation—in this case Approved Document B of the 2005 Fire Safety Order. I wrote to Rob Burrows, its managing director, asking how such systemic failings in the construction had come about under his regime. He refused to provide further information, and shortly thereafter the company went into a very convenient liquidation—so much for CICAIR accreditation.

Finally, what of the project managers, CBRE? It made literally thousands of inspections. Its corporate social responsibility report declares that it is a leader in responsible business practices, serving its clients with integrity. Surely it would not have signed off on a building that it knew to be unsafe. Perhaps, but I have received leaked copies of internal correspondence between the company and its own clerk of works at the development. In that correspondence, the company is accused of amending reports he had submitted detailing the failures of defects. It was specifically told that, to allow occupation without making occupants aware, there would be no protection against the spread of fire—[Inaudible]—therefore leaving life at risk, as these areas did not comply with current building regulations. That was tantamount to fraud under the Fraud Act 2006. The regulations were there; the proper, disinterested monitoring and enforcement were not. No matter what sensible regulations the Government put on this bookshelf of a Bill, they cannot make safe a building that was not constructed safely. My constituents thought they were protected. The law said so in the regulations. They have learned that to have a right, but no means of enforcing that right, is to have no right at all.