Fire Safety Bill (First sitting)

Karen Buck Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Daisy Cooper]

Q This question is to Mr Davis. In your written evidence, you talked about the standard of risk assessor training being “infinitely variable” and said that only some people may be “competent”. Could you expand on that and explain what the lowest end of being competent is, compared with the highest end, in order that we can understand what you are saying? For people at the lowest end of being qualified or competent, are you saying that they need one day’s training or two years’ training? What is the gap? If you could explain it, that would be helpful.

I also have a quick question for Mr Carpenter, following up on your last point. What do you think is the fairest way of managing the costs? I say that as an MP with constituents who are being asked to pay 20 grand or more as an up-front, one-off cost, as well as having their service charges increased sixfold. Some of them are trapped financially because they cannot fight, and they have no mechanism to raise the money that is needed to pay for the remedial work. So that is a question for each of you, quickly.

Dennis Davis: It is difficult to give you a very quick answer. There could be 50,000 people who call themselves risk assessors. Some of them will be employed by a company specific to their premises and will help to maintain the integrity of that company’s building facility etc. They will be trained, maybe on a week’s course and maybe in particular areas, and that will be their skill base and they will do that.

The fire safety order, when it was brought in, was deliberately intended to be applied by individuals if they so wished. Part of the phrasing, I think, at the time was that it was not intended by the Government to be a consultants charter. The inference from that is that you should be able to apply a lot of common sense, and the Government published a very detailed series of guides to assist in that.

So at one level you need no qualification; you can do this yourself, provided that the premises are simple. At the other end of the spectrum, you certainly would need degree-level education—level 4 and above—to be able to apply the standards to complex buildings. In addition to that, you might need a high level of granularity, as I have said, in a particular system. That might be the installation—that is, the cladding system—or the fire alarm system.

This spectrum is very wide. The problem, as we foresee it, is that there are people going around who say that they are fire risk assessors, but they do not have a qualification. They have not attended any form of course, training and so on, yet they purport to offer this service. Our worry is that the public are then placed in a situation where they think that they have received good advice, but they may not have done. There is certainly anecdotal evidence of that sort of application.

James Carpenter: One of our asks is that we want to be able to reassure housing association residents that they will not need to foot the bill for these works. Obviously, there is the £1 billion building safety fund at the moment, but that is predicated on where the viability of the owners may be threatened by funding the works themselves, and it will involve submitting a business case and so on as to why they would be at risk without support.

We are currently assessing our position. However, it would be unlikely that large associations such as L&Q would be eligible under this particular scheme, and those that are would then have to notify the Regulator of Social Housing, which may in turn result in a downgrade of their viability. We are working jointly with the G15 on this. Neither our leaseholders nor tenants should pay the price for systemic issues in relation to building safety. We need to exhaust all possible options to claim the costs, or to get those that were responsible to pay for those things. Failing that, and in the absence of Government funding, we will have no choice but to consider those legal obligations that are set out in leases with residents. However, that is the last point. We have not done it with the buildings that we have remediated; we have not done it with leaseholders, but it is there as the last resort.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Q I want to return to the issue of access, because I feel that the Government underestimated fairly consistently the complexities of access, be it in respect of fire doors or the issue of retrofitting sprinklers. There were local authorities that wanted to retrofit sprinklers, and even set aside money, but were unable to do so because of this issue of uncertainty of access. Could you two give us an idea of what you feel to be the scale of the problem?

It was widely believed that leaseholders would want to co-operate, for example, after the Lakanal fire, yet lawyers were saying that as many as one in three simply did not and would not. So can you give us an idea about the scale of the problem and the complexities? In London, there are particular issues with things such as the overseas ownership of property, which makes it difficult to track the true owners of properties. Can you also comment on why enforcement is difficult, for example, for housing associations and local government, in terms of the cost and the length of time it takes to take people to court?

[The Chair]

Mr Carpenter, for some fairly concise answers, if you will, please.

James Carpenter: On the challenge, we have got more than 100,000 homes and there are tenants in a lot of those. The issue of access is not just in relation to leaseholders; we also have issues with tenants, where they do not want to help us to meet those demands. With leases, we have a separate issue. It is not just about inspecting; we can also have challenges where we want to make improvements to buildings, but they are objected to by residents, because they do not want sprinklers in their home or a fire alarm system. We may then manage to put a fire alarm system in someone’s home, and it is linked to the building to raise warning to others, and they unscrew detector heads and so on. So the challenge is a huge and, as a landlord, there is very little power we can take without going through a lengthy and costly court process—often the costs of that are not recoverable. That is the challenge, but I point out that that is not all tenants and all leaseholders. Obviously, we do get people who co-operate and understand, but there are also people who don’t want you accessing their home.

[Ms Buck]

Q Is that a significant minority, and we are not just talking about this being very rare?

James Carpenter: Access is a significant problem for building owners to manage—it is not small in any sense. It is not all tenants who cause those issues, but this is a significant challenge for landlords.

[The Chair]

A quick answer from you, Mr Davis.

Dennis Davis: I am very sorry but I cannot give you a scale on this, which is what you asked for. The anecdotal evidence certainly is that there are tenants, whether leaseholders or not, who do not like you to have access. In addition, there are difficulties in any case for everyone, because people work and so on. Therefore, access outside normal working hours can often be the norm if you are trying to visit inside someone’s dwelling. You can understand why those arrangements have to be made, but it is a serious issue for those seeking to maintain systems—there is absolutely no doubt about that.