Fire Safety Bill

Helen Hayes Excerpts

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

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I was a member of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee in the last Parliament, when our work focused on the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. The courage and dignity of the Grenfell survivors in continuing to speak not only of their own collective fight for justice but of the need to reform fire safety and building safety regulations to protect others from suffering as they have done is humbling and remarkable.

I also speak as someone who was elected to Southwark Council 10 months after the Lakanal House fire, in which six people tragically lost their lives, had shocked and devastated communities across the borough. The newly elected Labour administration that took over the running of the council in May 2010 did everything it could to address fire safety within Southwark, spending £60 million on fire safety works. Lakanal House was widely understood to be a warning siren for fire safety for the whole country, but no national reform of building safety and fire safety was delivered at that time. As we debate this Bill, we must reflect that had the coalition Government got a grip on fire safety reform, subsequent tragedies, including Grenfell, may have been avoided.

I want to focus my remarks this afternoon on three areas. First, how disappointing it is that so much of the substantive reform entailed by this Bill is deferred for secondary legislation. I understand that there will be new recommendations arising from the final phase of the Grenfell Tower inquiry, but three years on, there is much that is already known and action has been far too slow. In particular, I am concerned about the lack of dovetailing of this Bill with the forthcoming building safety Bill. This Bill establishes who is responsible for fire safety, but it does not establish how they should achieve it. We know that, across the construction and building management sectors, there is still total chaos caused by the lack of clarity on which materials are flammable and the lack of progress on testing and certification. We need urgent clarity on all forms of cladding so that the removal of all flammable non-ACM cladding on residential buildings can be completed with urgency. Action on this is long overdue.

Secondly, there is an urgent need for the proper resourcing of every organisation that will have new fire safety responsibilities as a result of the Bill. The number of fire safety inspectors is 28% lower than in 2010. Local authorities have seen more than 60% of the funding they receive from central Government cut over the past 10 years. Both our fire safety and local authorities must be properly resourced to deliver a new fire and building safety regime. This need for resourcing extends to training and professional development to build a skilled fire and building safety workforce. Grenfell Tower resulted in a collapse of confidence in fire and building safety and exposed many problems with accountability, which this Bill seeks to address, but also with expertise for certification. There is a chronic shortage of fire safety expertise in the UK at present. Can the Minister confirm in winding up that the new burdens calculation for this Bill will account for training and workforce development as well as the new inspection responsibilities?

Finally, there are half a million fire risk assessments in social housing in this country. Most councils and housing associations have worked hard in the past three years to bring their assessments up to date, but there is an important question about the validity of inspections undertaken under a broken fire and building safety regime. Equally, there is concern that if social landlords are asked to complete half a million new assessments in short order, this would be a costly and challenging task. Please can the Minister clarify how the transition to the new regime will take place such that all residents can be confident that a building with an up-to-date safety inspection is safe to sleep in at night?

As we are all spending much more time at home, I know that fire safety concerns—whether about cladding, compartmentalisation, lack of sprinklers or means of escape—are weighing heavily and adding to the burden of anxiety that many people are suffering at this time. This issue could not be more important, and I urge the Government to increase the pace of urgency to bring forward the substantive reforms of fire and building safety that residents across the country so desperately need.