Building Safety Bill (First sitting)

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

I am also a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Eddie Hughes)]

I am a member of the Chartered Institute of Building.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Before I bring Rachel in, I think the Minister has a supplementary question.

[Eddie Hughes]

Q On Graham’s point about the paradigm shift that the industry and sector have to go through, what is the CIC doing to help them? The legislation is obviously going through Parliament. People need to prepare for its arrival, so how are you ensuring that people are suitably well informed, and taking the right decisions and action now?

Graham Watts: As you know, Eddie, it is a massive industry—3 million people and several hundred thousand companies. Co-ordination, communication, leadership and challenge are the key factors that we in the CIC, and the bodies that support us, such as the RIBA and the Chartered Institute of Building, need to concentrate on. We really need to get away from a culture that is based on a race to the bottom, as a result of which companies that win work at very low profit margins do everything possible to prioritise the commercial side of things, avoid penalties and cut corners on quality in order to increase profit. That is the basic culture that we have to change. We have seen the evidence of that in the Grenfell inquiry. We do not need to see where the evidence is; it is there before our eyes.

Adrian Dobson: One thing to add is that, obviously, we are keen for things to move on at pace. What a number of the professional bodies, including the RIBA, are doing at the moment is working on our accreditation regimes for the new duty holders, because obviously we need to be in a position to accredit professionals to undertake the principal designer and principal contractor roles once the new regime comes into play. That is an important task for the professional bodies to be getting on with now.

[The Chair]

If there are no more supplementaries, we will move to Rachel.