Building Safety Bill (Eighth sitting)

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Shaun Bailey]

I grateful for the opportunity to speak on clause 32 which although very technical, is none the less very important. I want to speak about mandatory occurrence reporting, because I think that is a key matter. In order to understand trends and where consistent issues are becoming a problem it is key that disasters such as Grenfell are not allowed to repeat. We need to spot problems early. That comes back to the broader point of collaboration and working together. This is a collaborative piece. To ensure that the legislation works for the future and that we have a market that truly works for everyone, we must ensure that information is shared. We must ensure that trends are spotted early. It is about treating the issue as a partnership between stakeholders. To have the BSR acting as the centre point and information gatherer will be key.

The clause needs to provide certainty, although we will need to see the secondary legislation that will derive from the Bill. We need to ensure that leaseholders and residents have certainty and that they know where they stand, but we have a market to meet, and we must build houses. We know that we have a housing shortage and that we need to construct more places for people to live. To do that, we must have a regime that works. We must know that, ultimately, those who use the regime and construct property understand the rules by which they play. Equally, the balance must be struck so that they cannot game the regime either. That is why there needs to clarity.

The hon. Member for Weaver Vale is right that we need to examine the detail in secondary legislation. We need to see what the structure of that will be. It is all well and good to say “we’ll prescribe this, and we’ll prescribe that” but we need to know what specific forms will look like, how people will fill them out, whether they will be usable in a commercial context or will that encourage an organisation, a builder, a company or whoever to circumvent the system, because they think, “Do you know what? It’s a little too complex for me to do, so let’s see how I can fiddle it around”? The wording of the clause goes some way to delivering this, but we need a system that says to builders and stakeholders, “Look, it is within your interests to play within the system and comply with the regulations, and to share the information as part of the mandatory occurrence reporting.”

We have spoken about the impact in Wales as well, and it is important that, ultimately, we have that consistency in England and Wales. The hon. Member for Weaver Vale will know that there is a lot of cross-border buying and selling, and we must ensure that there is consistency so that people know where they stand in terms of the regulations. I am sure that he has many building firms that will do work both in England and in Wales, so they will need that consistency to know exactly the rules within which they are playing. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us about the conversations he has had with colleagues in Welsh Government to ensure that. That will be a real test of clause 32 and the subsequent secondary legislation, so that the marketplace that must fit within the regulatory framework knows where it stands. I come back to the point I made before, which is ultimately about ensuring that we can continue to have a market that builds houses, to address the situation that we have with local house building.

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

I want to touch on a couple of things. Enforcement is key. We heard lots of evidence about the need for culture change. Enforcement gives us rules and regulations, which the sector needs, but we need to change the culture. Listening to the Minister’s response, I am at a loss to know where the enforcement will come from and how it will be funded. It would be good to get a real understanding of how this golden thread will be enforced. We listened to evidence from the Fire Brigades Union about how fire safety officers have been decimated. We know about local authority cuts. I would really like an understanding, on the record, of where the enforcement will be made and how it will be funded. We had rules, regulations and laws, but without enforcement we still had Grenfell. Hugely important moving forward is how the new set of regulations will be enforced to ensure that it is adhered to and we get the culture change that we desperately need.

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[Shaun Bailey]

Clause 33 is just common sense, really. It is ultimately about ensuring that those people who are appointing people, or those organisations that are making appointments to do work, are doing so in a way that is right and safe. I am conscious that I should not stray on to clause 34, but it is about ensuring that they appoint people with the ability to do the work and to perform those basic duties that we would expect.

I am slightly surprised that we need clause 33, to be honest, because to me it is common sense that if we were going to appoint people to do a job, we would make sure they could do it properly in the first place. None the less, we have seen, and we have heard in the evidence, that it is needed. It is probably a sad indictment of the market and the industry we are dealing with that we need to specifically prescribe in legislation that people who are appointed to do the work can do so in the way they need to, and that we will require building regulations to specify what that looks like.

I turn to the general duties as specified in new paragraph 5B. A lot of this stuff would appear to be relatively straightforward; it is just about ensuring that people are undertaking the work in the right way. I will not make too many comments on industry competence, because I appreciate that that is addressed further on, but, broadly speaking, for many of these clauses it will be interesting to see the regulations that follow and how that is prescribed.

[Ian Byrne]

Is the hon. Gentleman wondering, as I am, about professional indemnity insurance and the ability of all duty holders to secure that?

[Shaun Bailey]

That is a good question. What will be needed is a broader conversation with the industry, and the evidence from the Association of British Insurers was about that industry engagement. What we are trying to do with this legislation is to bring about cultural change, so that cultural change must be holistic. As part of that, we must be open to having those conversations with insurers and with all parts of the sector. I am just thinking about these duty holders, and the point raised by the hon. Gentleman is about remembering what the sector is.

Obviously, it is not just the firms that are building or constructing these developments: it is the insurers, the subcontractors and the people who provide the materials. The sector encompasses all those people as well, so how far do we extend these duties? Again, these are questions that we are going to have to deal with, perhaps through secondary legislation: how far do those appointments go? What do they look like? Who are we appointing? Who are we applying them to?

Those are all academic questions that I do not wish to tempt my right hon. Friend the Minister to answer today, because I appreciate that we will go into further detail about them, but I think that the point made by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby triggers a further conversation that is definitely worth having. Broadly speaking, though, clause 33 is about doing what many of us would consider to be common sense, and for that reason—although it is quite surprising that we need it—I fully support it and hope that it becomes part of the Bill.

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[Shaun Bailey]

I am mindful that just looking at this clause triggers a lot of thought processes. As the hon. Member for Weaver Vale has just said, we might have thought that this was already a given: that if we get someone to do a job, they should have the skills and qualifications needed to do it properly. It triggers some broader thought processes on how we embed these legislative and regulatory standards within the system more broadly.

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Minister for his response to the intervention on education. Clearly, as a result of this clause, we will have to embed this within the culture, which will require that stakeholder engagement. I was heartened to hear my right hon. Friend say that he would take that away and ponder it.

The key thing, as with all of this, is how it will operate in practice. The sentiment of the clause is the right one: in order to ensure that people living in high-rise buildings are safe, those buildings must be constructed by individuals who know what they are doing, and the onus must be placed in statute on the organisations constructing these buildings to ensure that the competence and skills base is there.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon raised an important point in her intervention about getting the balance right. I think this does get the balance right, in that it ensures that we can still recruit to the industry, so that a flow of workforce still comes into it, but things clearly have changed since 1984. My right hon. Friend the Minister articulated that by highlighting that the existing regulations are 37 years old. Just to put that in perspective for the Committee, that is slightly before I was born. I was born in 1992—I do not know whether that horrifies some Members.

I am the grandson of a builder, and it is clear that building sites have changed in 40 years. The expectations and complexity of the jobs that firms are now undertaking require the ability to know that the competencies are there. We now have a raft of qualifications, and different levels of experience and needs, as I have said in previous contributions—I am sure everyone has noted that meticulously. None the less, it is important. Things have changed and moved on. We are operating and trying to regulate an ever-changing marketplace that has new technologies coming on board and new materials coming into play, and we need the individuals who operate in this space to have the skillsets and ability to react to that.

The one thing that I would say—perhaps this will be addressed in secondary legislation—is that in my profession, we always had to show continuous professional development. We had to show that we had not just sat there after qualifying perhaps 10 years ago, because things had moved on.

[Ian Byrne]

On the issue of competence, last week we touched on training—the funding of training and who is going to do it. We will need lots and lots of people, and that is a huge opportunity for this country, but who will monitor the competence? Will it be accredited? Will there be an agency to accredit it? Again, this all links back to the evidence that we have been listening to over the past two weeks about culture change. This can start right at the very beginning of somebody’s career, and it can be hard-wired in. It would be good to get an understanding of who will oversee the competence, and how the training will be delivered and—I am going to say the magical word again—funded.

[Shaun Bailey]

The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point. I am sure he and I are both passionate advocates of technical and vocational education, and this clause says that we have to treat the industry with some respect. That means having in place accreditation structures that are properly recognised. I get what he says about funding, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister has heard his plea. I say to the hon. Gentleman—if you will indulge me, Mr Efford—that he has a sympathiser in me, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister will at some point have conversations with the Department for Education and the Treasury about how that looks. The hon. Gentleman is right. Ultimately, although this is a short clause, it leads to so many different things. That is the key thing. Ultimately, as he articulated well, if we are going to ask for this, we need to know what the accreditation models are and the FE providers need to know what the structures are for providing this training. All those conversations come out of clause 34.

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[Shaun Bailey]

I am not sure whether the question was to me or to the Minister, but I will give my opinion, as I am sure the Minister will give his.

From my perspective—you are being very indulgent, Mr Efford, so thank you—what clause 34 does for productivity is to push the point on accreditation and on being sure that people have qualifications, so that a young person thinking about where to go hears, “Come to this trade, because you will get skills, qualifications and accredited.” I know from my communities that a lot of the time it is about how something is pitched or framed. If we want to attract young people into jobs and skills, we have to say what they will get from it. If a young person can get accredited and feel, “You know what, I have a qualification, and can take this further. I can move forward and go different places with it”, that is one way to deal with the productivity issue, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton North East said in his intervention. There are many other ways as well.

I was trying to articulate a point on the role of the Building Safety Regulator in setting industry competence. We have said throughout our deliberations on the subject of safety that we cannot see the BSR only as the executioner who comes in at the end, when it has all gone wrong. It cannot do that; it has to be leading the way—that is the key bit. That comes back to the point that I made before—my hon. Friend doubled down on it for me with his intervention—which is about ensuring that the link-in with the different stakeholders allows us to implement what is going on in clause 34—to ensure that the training bars are there, the levels are in place and we know where we start. When we train up the next generation of people for the construction industry, they need a clear idea of the knowledge base that is necessary.

[Ian Byrne]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his long and knowledgeable contribution. I was listening to what he was saying. What a wonderful opportunity for the trade unions to be involved in training right from the outset. Does he agree?

[Shaun Bailey]

I will make a probably revolutionary point: I might be a Conservative MP but, yes, trade unions have a part in this—110%. The discourse with the trade unions is beneficial. I, too, have benefited from positive relationships with my trade unions when necessary. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Again, part of that is the holistic approach. That is the whole point of how the clause has been constructed. It allows us to be flexible and to have those ongoing conversations, which will be important in the implementation of the legislation. My right hon. Friend the Minister is listening intently and absorbing this—I am grateful to him for doing so—and he will pass it on to his officials, because to make the Bill effective we will have to be as broad brush as possible with engagement.

To conclude—I am sure many hon. Members are disappointed—clause 34 as drafted, as I said about clause 33, does something that is basic, which is that people who undertake a job of work should have the ability to do it. I hope I have articulated that in some way in my contribution, but as I have said, that will trigger a lot of further conversations. We need this to work. We need to ensure that the people undertaking the work on these high-risk developments—which we still need, because we have a housing shortage and we need to build more houses and more places for people to live—have the relevant qualifications. To that end, the secondary legislation, the guidance note, the approved document referred to by my right hon. Friend the Minister, and the competence standards being developed by the British Standards Institution, will all be important. We need to ensure that they are translated into a workable approach that brings together all the different stakeholders —we have discussed trade unions, further education providers and the industry more broadly—so that when 16, 17 or 18-year-olds decide to follow this profession as a career, they know what is expected of them. Speaking from my own experience, it can be odd when people do not know what the benchmark is.