Kate Osborne
Main Page: Kate Osborne (Labour - Jarrow and Gateshead East)(3 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
James Dalton: Sure. There are two different types of insurance in play in your question. On the cost of buildings insurance, it is important to note—I think I heard this in the previous sitting—that the Bill is prospective. It is not retrospective except for the provisions that I will come to in a second. Will safer buildings be built as a result of the Bill and all the accreditation and certification, in terms of the golden thread? Buildings should be safer as a result. As I said to your colleague, safer buildings should be cheaper to insure, and that insurance should be more available.
On your question about the Defective Premises Act 1972, that issue is about liability insurance, not buildings insurance. The challenge in that space is that, without there having been consultation, the Bill retrospectively extends the period of liability from six to 15 years; some insurance policies will have excluded liability over and above six years. I do not know who is going to pay for the period between six and 15 years, when there is found to have been negligence. There may not be an insurer that is on risk to cover that liability. That is the big concern from an insurance industry perspective. Other insurance policies potentially would come on risk. Then we have a question about whether it is fair and reasonable to amend the Act retrospectively without consultation.
Q
Dr Colwell: An initial reading of the Bill in its current form suggests that the answer is no. Work will be required to ensure that we are clear on the standards being applied and how those are being used in the framework. We also need provision for going from testing to third-party certification, to ensure that we have the provenance following through on the products being used and the context in which they are being used.
The Bill lacks a little clarity. As mentioned earlier, the detail will probably have to sit in a secondary framework if we are to ensure that we get to the level of implementation that gives us a clear playing field.
Q
James Dalton: May I comment briefly on the buildings insurance point? I should have been clearer in my answer and said, “All other things being equal.” I do not know what the insurance premium tax will be on the commission of buildings insurance, or what the wider regulatory environment will be like, tomorrow, next year or in five years’ time. All other things being equal, the Bill should, overall, decrease the cost of buildings insurance. It is a very difficult question to answer.
As I said in my previous answer, some insurance policies will be clear. There will be some insurance policies where the businesses in question that were insured no longer exist, for whatever reason. The question then becomes how those affected leaseholders and/or building owners will exercise their rights under the extension. To answer your question, in my experience insurance litigation can be complex, expensive and lengthy.
Q
Mr Wrack: First, I welcome the accountable person role. I think that is a step forward, as one of the problems that we have had in terms of building safety is identifying who the relevant party is. It will create big challenges for various bodies in local government, and certainly for the fire and rescue service because there clearly are large numbers of such buildings—although they are concentrated, particularly with the 18-metre limit, in particular parts of the country.
It will create a significant challenge for the London Fire Brigade, for example, to monitor and keep adequate records of who the relevant accountable person is, and the relevant building safety manager who sits underneath them once the building is occupied. There are lots of operational challenges. Those points have been made by the National Fire Chiefs Council and others. I will keep banging on that it does raise significant resource implications, inevitably, for us.
Q
Mr Wrack: There are loads of things that come out of that. Building construction is always changing. A long time ago, as recruit firefighters, we were taught about building construction, but that was the building construction of the time—of the 1970s and ’80s. Things have changed and as I say I do not think that enough horizon-scanning goes on about the emerging risks in how we build and alter buildings, and what we put in them.
On the question of furniture, again, my union has a very proud record. We led campaigns, including here, about foam-filled furniture and requirements to provide measures to address the impact that it was having in domestic fires. However, what is emerging today is a growing concern, across the world, around the contaminants that might be involved in fire-suppressing materials within foam-filled furniture—you solve one problem, but you may create another. There is a lot of work to be done.
On research, again, I think one problem that we have in the UK is a low level of public research into fire safety matters. Over the decades, we have worked with people at the BRE and so on, but much more needs to be done on that front. The fire risks are changing; the materials that we put into and on to buildings have changed, so they affect how buildings react in a fire.
Q
Mr Wrack: There are other regulations covering office buildings. One big thing that has been highlighted by Grenfell is the difference in standards between high-rise residential blocks and an office block of an equivalent size.
In an office block, you would have far different fire safety measures, including two stairwells, regular fire safety drills and so on. Those do not exist in purpose-built blocks of flats, because those blocks were designed to deliver compartmentalisation—they were built to contain the fire within the flat of origin. What has happened in recent years is that that has broken down. I think that residential blocks are different from non-residential blocks. Whether two is the right number, I do not know.
Q
Mr Wrack: That sort of structure is precisely what is needed. The post-war legislation effectively created the modern fire service. It introduced such a body, called the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council. It included the Home Office, the inspectorate, chief fire officers and the trade unions. We had a very close relationship with researchers at what became the BRE, the fire service college. It was a joined-up way of thinking about the risks of fire, but was eventually criticised for supposedly being slow. Looking back, I think that criticism was very badly placed. I look at how they responded to a fire in 1958 where firefighters were killed; within weeks, guidance was issued.
I must say that it takes much longer today to get a change, and firefighters on the ground are hugely frustrated at the slow pace of change post-Grenfell. In the 1970s, we did have bodies that were looking at the emergence of high-rise blocks of flats, and their implications on fire safety and firefighting. We do not have those anymore.
Then Grenfell came along. We had warning signs. We had cladding fires in Melbourne and Europe. My own union came to the House after a fire in 1999 to warn about cladding systems, so as long ago as 1999 we were making warnings about the new systems that were being put on blocks of flats, which created the risk of the fire spreading up the outside of the building, yet in the intervening years very little has been done to address that risk; to improve the knowledge on the part of firefighters on the ground; or in any way to prepare for what that might mean for the people living in those blocks of flats.
There has been a complete lack of joined-up thinking for more than two decades on fire safety, and I appeal to people to think about how that could be put right.