Building Safety Bill (First sitting)

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

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

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

I am still a sitting councillor in Liverpool.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

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

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

Q Good morning to you both. Will the reforms to the building control profession fix the problems identified by Dame Judith Hackitt? In particular, are the Government right to return the power of duty holders to choose their own building control body?

Sir Ken Knight: It is quite a significant part of Dame Judith’s report, of course, and that mixed economy has come through into the Bill. It is actually something that I support, providing that there is a level playing field in the competency, ethics and assurance of those doing the work. That is covered in the Bill, in a great deal of how the Building Safety Regulator will need to bring that to bear. The Bill makes the point, though, that in those buildings of higher risk the Building Safety Regulator is the enforcing authority for building control purposes—not either of those two bodies. I think that that is right. However, it is about levelling up the playing field for the competencies and assurances that are in place with some bodies and not others at the moment. There is a bit to go, but I personally do not object to that outcome, providing that the private sector actors involved in that are not directly employed by those for whom they are doing the work in seeking the outcome for the approvals.

Dan Daly: I do not have much different to say. The inability to choose your own building control body is important, particularly for developers that have wrapped up a number of those services within their overarching companies. Having some independence of that is important. There needs to be some robust checking if there is private sector involvement; that is the important element, and hopefully that is part of the role that the Building Safety Regulator will be able to take on. I suppose that is something to come in the guidance that will follow this Bill. We have issues of competency and capacity across the sector, so we need to keep our mind open to all those avenues, but with the appropriate checks and balances in there and the appropriate safeguards to ensure there is no compromise on safety in favour of profit.

[Ian Byrne]

Q It is good to see you both again. Is height the best measure of risk? If so, is the threshold in the Bill appropriate?

Sir Ken Knight: I am sorry; I missed some of the early part of the question.

[Ian Byrne]

It is my Scouse accent. Is height the best measure of risk? If so, is the threshold in the Bill appropriate?

Sir Ken Knight: I promise you that it is my hearing. Height is pretty arbitrary in risk. I think any professional would say that; I am sure Mr Daly will comment from a national fire chief’s point of view. It is right that there is at least a point to start, and the threshold in the Bill of 18 metres or more than six floors is a place to start. I would not want to presume that that means that high-rise is necessarily high risk, because risk is a difficult equation with two axes—one is probability, and the other is the catastrophic outcome risk.

Dame Judith’s report, and indeed the Bill, are based on the idea that the more people who could be involved in a single fire, the greater the catastrophic risk. In reality, more deaths occur in the home in bungalows, but that is not about height; it is about the demographics of people living in bungalows and the effects of that. It was right to set the bar somewhere.

Helpfully, though, the Bill allows the Building Safety Regulator to look at that first flush of buildings in scope—that will result in something like 12,000 buildings, a significant capacity issue to deal with—and then to move on from that in a dynamic way to look at other risk features that are not necessarily height-related. One might want to include in the next stage care homes and hospitals that are not necessarily over 18 metres. However, as a first tranche, the place to start is right.

[The Chair]

Mr Daly, would you like to reply to that?

Dan Daly: The short answer from our perspective is no. We talked about broadening the scope, and that is a nod toward the fact that we recognise other premises as being high risk. Part of that risk is about not just the physical attributes of the building, but the people who live in, use and work in those places, particularly our most vulnerable people, and the reliance they may have, in terms of the evacuation strategies from those buildings, on the building’s performing in a way that allows time for horizontal evacuation or phased evacuation, supported by people who are there to enable them to escape from the building when they need to.

There are a number of factors that I do not think are yet covered here, and I would like to see the opportunity to broaden the scope at some appropriate point, but I understand the proportionate start in the way that Sir Ken has described.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Amesbury]

Q Does the Bill protect leaseholders from unaffordable costs, and focus the mind or regulate to ensure that the industry steps up and pays its responsibilities and its fair share, given previous incompetence and very shabby practices?

Graham Watts: I think the answer to that is no, but the Bill does a bit more than the draft Bill did, particularly in the extension of the Defective Premises Act 1972. I am from the industry, and I have no doubt whatsoever that no leaseholder should have to pay for having been mis-sold a home that is not fit for purpose or safe. That should be axiomatic, and we should be exploring every opportunity. I know the housebuilders and developers have put up something like £500 million already, but in many cases they are not there any more—they have gone bankrupt, or it was a special purpose vehicle developer that does not exist any longer. I have no doubt that the Government must do more, but the industry must also do more, and I welcome the polluter pays principle of the developer tax.

Adrian Dobson: This Bill is a piece of the jigsaw; one problem is that this is predominantly a forward-looking piece of legislation, so it will address new projects and alterations to existing buildings, but it will not deal with the historical defects. That is a situation that will ultimately require the Government to engage with the insurance sector. We now have a situation where—to use the example of the EWS1 form, which I know you talked about earlier—because the insurance sector has pretty much excluded fire safety cover from many professionals, it is difficult to get professionals who can sign these forms, and they will now inevitably take a very precautionary approach, because they know that this insurance is difficult to get. There are some risks in thinking that the Bill itself will solve that; that historical liability is more complicated.

The Bill also raises the question of the insurability of the duty holder roles in the new regime; this illustrates why the interrogation of the regulations will be so important. The regulations as they are drafted at the moment mix words such as “take reasonable steps” with “ensure”, and they are very different. One is an absolute obligation and one is more like the CDM regulations. Will the insurers provide the insurance to underpin these roles? The insurance issue is where the problem lies, in my view.

[Ian Byrne]

Q I have really enjoyed the evidence so far; it has been really good, but will the Bill improve levels of competence and, just as importantly, listen to the Grenfell inquiry and the shameful evidence that we have heard? Will there be accountability in the construction industry?

Graham Watts: I think the answer to that is yes, because competence is in the Bill and it underpins and supports all of the work that the industry has done over the last four years—some of the things that Adrian talked about earlier in the different sectors. As I said before, I would personally like the Bill to go further in defining the levels of competence and in making sure that the people who are registered actually have the competencies. I think that is absolutely necessary.

Adrian Dobson: I would tack slightly along the same line. I think the Bill is very good at trying to address the competence issue, although, for example, there are weaknesses in other areas of the industry. Procurement is complex in construction. I know that has been discussed in the Select Committee and various places. There is a duty on the principal designer to monitor design work for compliance, and a similar duty on the contractor. “Monitor” is quite a weak term. In design and build procurement there is no requirement for independent inspection, or no duty on the designers to return to the building and say, “Has this building been designed and constructed in accordance with that design intent?” So I think it is stronger on competence than it is on addressing some of the realities of the construction industry. Will the hard stop at gateway 2 really be a hard stop, because the commercial realities of the construction industry will tend to want to keep the project moving forward, and that is a risk? So it is good on competence and perhaps a bit weaker in other areas.

[Ms Rimmer]

Q The Bill gives the Secretary of State the power to regulate construction products. Does it contain enough information about the new regime? Is there enough certainty about what types of products would be regulated by the Secretary of State?

Graham Watts: We are obviously at an early stage in the development of the new powers for the product regulator. As we have discovered from the Grenfell evidence, it is an absolutely imperative aspect of the Bill, so I certainly welcome that side of it. The work that has been done in the industry to ensure integrity in the marketing information for construction products has been scandalously shocking in the past. As somebody from the industry, I am ashamed of the fact that we did not wake up to that, but I welcome a rigorous attention to the regulation of construction products and also the Government’s recent decision to postpone the implementation of the conformity assessed mark for a year, because that was causing huge problems in the construction sector. Personally, I think a year is not enough, but at least it is a step forward.

Adrian Dobson: My answer is probably similar to before. There is an inevitability that there will have to be secondary regulation. Maybe an area that it does not address is that once we get to the stage of developing revised guidance, we have some questions about how much different sectors of the industry have been able to influence the testing process. If you are going to rely on testing to give you confidence about the performance of products, that genuinely needs to be independent testing. I will be interested to see what the regulations say about that and how they keep that independence of the testing.