Building Safety Bill (Sixteenth sitting)

Debate between Eddie Hughes and Christopher Pincher

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Christopher Pincher]

Only in the wonderful, marvellous, mysterious process that is House of Commons procedure could we come to clause 1 at the end of our deliberations on all the clauses. None the less, I am pleased to invite the Committee to debate it now. The Committee will no doubt be very familiar with the clauses of the Bill, but for the purposes of total completeness—we have an hour and 13 minutes left—I will inform the Committee of what the clause sets out.

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

Briefly!

[Christopher Pincher]

The first clause—briefly, Mrs Miller—acts as an overview of its constituent parts, which for the benefit of the Committee I may just run through again—or maybe I won’t. There are six parts and they contain provisions intended to secure the safety of people in or about buildings and to improve the standard of buildings.

Part 1 is purely an introductory overview. Part 2 establishes the Building Safety Regulator, sets out its functions in relation to buildings in England and provides key powers to enable it to undertake its functions. Part 3 amends the Building Act 1984, setting out the provisions for the new regulatory regime during the design and construction phase of the buildings in scope of the said regime. It also provides for the registration of building inspectors and building control approvers to improve competence levels through better regulation. Part 4 is concerned with buildings in scope during their occupation. It defines and places duties on the accountable person for building safety risks in their building and improves on aspects of accountability such as engagement with residents and the transparency of building safety information.

Part 5 details further provisions regarding safety and standards. For example, it provides arrangements for a new homes ombudsman scheme, requiring developers to become and remain members of it. It creates powers to make provisions about construction products. It removes the democratic filter that requires social housing residents to refer unresolved complaints to a designated person or wait eight weeks before they can access redress through the housing ombudsman. It also changes certain provisions in relation to the procedures of the Architects Registration Board. The aim is that an architect will be able to appeal against a decision taken by the ARB to remove them from the register, and I will consider whether a non-judicial appeal route should also be made available for architects to challenge such a decision.

Finally, part 6 contains general clauses about the commencement of the Bill’s provisions and covers applications to the Crown and other standard clauses. Clause 1 is uncontentious. It is an important overview intended to detail the Bill’s thematic structure, which is perhaps why it is so very dry. It may have been surmised during the passage of this Committee’s deliberations that many of the individual clauses and their amendments are rather dry. None the less, they have an important intent: to ensure that this country’s building safety is improved significantly, so that all sectors of society, be they developers, local authorities, architects and designers, building owners or residents, can have confidence in the industry that designs, builds and supports the homes in which people live. Members may have disagreed from time to time on matters in the Bill, but none of us disagrees about what we intend of it.

I am grateful to you, Mrs Miller, and the other Chairs for the occasional indulgence that you have allowed us. I am grateful to all the Clerks and the officials of the House for their support in bringing this Committee stage to a conclusion. I am grateful to my officials for all that they have done to provide us with the details and data to allow us to debate these provisions effectively. I am grateful to the Committee for the collegiate and collaborative way in which everybody has contributed to what we will report to the House. On that basis, and with an hour and eight minutes in hand, I commend clause 1 to the Committee.

Building Safety Bill (Fourteenth sitting)

Debate between Eddie Hughes and Christopher Pincher

Thursday 21st October 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Eddie Hughes]

I welcome those comments. We have definitely seen during the course of the Grenfell inquiry that products have been either tested or marketed in an inappropriate way, and it is good to see agreement across the House. The clause will strengthen our hand in that regard.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 133 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Schedule 9 agreed to.

Clause 134

Amendment of Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

[The Minister of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Christopher Pincher)]

Welcome to the Chair, Mr Davies. I am pleased to see that you are putting the Government’s heat and buildings strategy into full effect in the Committee.

The Government are committed to strengthening the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 in order to better protect people’s safety in all regulated premises. Clause 134 delivers on 10 proposals that received significant support from respondents to the 2020 fire safety consultation, to address weaknesses that were commonly reported by stakeholders and to better align the order to the new building safety regime. New duties on responsible persons, informed by best practice, will support greater compliance with the order and its effective enforcement, mainly through the improved recording and sharing of fire safety information.

For all multi-occupied residential buildings, the owner or manager will be required to provide relevant and comprehensible fire safety information to residents, as will be specified in the order and may be set out in regulation. That will reassure residents that fire safety is effectively managed and will empower them to hold responsible persons to account. For higher-risk buildings, responsible persons will be required to identify the accountable persons and to co-operate with them. The co-operation duties in this clause and clause 118, with which we dealt on Tuesday, will support a co-ordinated approach to safety in higher-risk buildings between those duty holders, subject to either the building or the fire safety regime.

For all regulated premises, responsible persons will be required to record their fire safety risk assessment in full, including measures taken in response to risk. When appointing a person to assist them with making or reviewing a fire risk assessment, they will be required to ensure that that person is competent to do so. We also need to strengthen the existing co-operation duty between responsible persons sharing premises by requiring them to identify themselves to each other, provide United Kingdom contact details, explain the parts of the premises for which they consider themselves to be a responsible person and record that information. Where responsibility for fire safety changes hands, the outgoing responsible person must provide critical information for the incoming responsible person, as will be specified in the order and as may be set out in regulation.

Our amendment to article 50 of the order will enable the courts to consider a responsible person’s failure to follow all statutory guidance issued to support compliance with their duties as tending to establish a breach of the order. We will also increase the maximum financial penalty available to the courts from £1,000, which is level 3, to unlimited fines, level 5, for offences of impersonating an inspector, breaching requirements imposed by an inspector or in relation to the installation of luminous tube signs, which brings the measure in line with the fire safety order.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 134 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 135

Architects: discipline and continuing professional development

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to consider clause 136 stand part.