Building Safety Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Kate Osborne and Shaun Bailey

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Shaun Bailey]

Q I wanted to touch on accountable persons, because the Bill creates that role. One of the things that you have talked about throughout your evidence is the relationships that the fire service has to build with different stakeholders. What pressures do you think your members will have in terms of this new category of person? Notwithstanding what you said about resource, if tomorrow you had to build those relationships, operationally what would your members have to do? What pieces would they have to move around to ensure that they could adequately build those relationships with the accountable persons, who have this quite significant responsibility on their shoulders?

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.

[Kate Osborne]

Q Hi, Matt. Nice to see you. I was interested in the comments that you, and previous panellists, made on the mantra around fire risk. I was at one of the fire stations in my constituency within the last week, and one of the firefighters there was talking to me about how much more flammable both building materials and the furniture within are. Do you agree?

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.

Building Safety Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Kate Osborne and Shaun Bailey

Thursday 9th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Kate Osborne (Jarrow) (Lab)]

Q Good afternoon. Broadly, what are your views on the responsible person or persons? What do you think of the responsibilities placed on them? More specifically, is it reasonable to expect all accountable persons to be sufficiently knowledgeable to assume the responsibilities in the Bill?

Liam Spender: I think the whole responsible person regime has not been properly thought out. You cannot see, as parliamentarians, the full detail—that is being developed behind closed doors with industry. You are being asked to put this through without seeing how that very important relationship will work. The fundamental issue with the accountable person and building safety manager is that you would expect to find that regime in a petrochemical refinery, not in a residential building. It is totally unsuited to what needs to be done, massively over engineered, and the cost of it will fall on residents. The Government need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a much more tightly defined set of duties for these people, in order to avoid a situation where we end up with the advice notes, on steroids—which is a real risk.

Giles Grover: I would echo those comments. The difficulty is, again, that the legislation and the guidance are still not really there to help us understand how it will work. There are potentially moral hazards between the roles of those accountable persons—the building safety managers—in terms of how they will coalesce. There might be different accountable persons, or responsible persons, depending on the building. It still feels like there is no effective control. I do not think anybody wants to be an accountable person right now; the competencies required are a pretty wide skill set, and I fear that they will not be able to get insurance. I think we need a lot more work on how the accountable person will interact with the responsible person.

[Shaun Bailey]

Q Thank you so much for coming today, Giles, and for your candour. I want to talk about how the Bill addresses some of the inherent power and structural inequalities that we see, particularly when it comes to the industry. Broadly speaking, we have heard some positive overtures about how we change behaviours and the possibilities that are there. How do you think this Bill should go further to do that? From a personal perspective, I have seen what those inherent inequalities do day to day; I have lived through that. What it sounds like from your responses is that there is a system that needs to be ripped apart. How do you think, within this Bill and subsequent legislation, that can be done?

Liam Spender: Thank you for that excellent question. There are three critical things to address. First, there need to be leaseholder resident representatives on the rule-making bodies. This avoids a situation where industry and Government make rules that suit them, and pass the bill on to leaseholders who are left with the inadequate tool of challenges to the building safety charge and service charge, to contest bills that have already been paid. Secondly, the Government are trying to perform some sort of Frankenstein operation, with the Building Safety Bill, on a system that has had its day—namely, leasehold. There is a fundamental imbalance of power in the leasehold system in favour of landlords. Until you address that, you will not solve the problem of rules being made to suit landlords and bills being passed on to residents with no oversight, and no control. Thirdly, Dame Judith Hackitt identified in her report the culture of box ticking in the industry, the race to the bottom and value engineering—all that sort of stuff. Until that changes, nothing changes; buildings will continue to be built that are not fit for occupation and we will end up repeating the cycle at some point in the future. Those are the three things that need to be changed. I think that the McPartland-Smith amendments go a long way towards changing them, by introducing clear, legal routes to recovery against builders if they do not do their jobs properly.

Giles Grover: I will just echo the comments on the fact that the whole leaseholder structure means that you are still at the bottom of the food chain. There is all this talk about the building safety charge, but, as Liam said, ultimately it is about leasehold law—despite the Government thinking there might be protections in landlord and tenant law, we have seen that there are not the supposed protections there should be, because all the cases are based on the terms of the lease, which are always written against us. There needs to be an overarching look at the fact that it is not just the building safety charge, it is about service charges and how they are levied. There needs to be a bit more control over that, so that there is the actual ability to challenge it, rather than saying, “You can potentially go to the tribunal.” Ultimately, the cases we have seen do that just end up being rebuffed.

I am still concerned about the insurance issues we are facing now. There does not seem to be enough control. We have seen buildings insurance soaring by hundreds of per cent. I am not sure what protections there are against that happening. We have tried to report it to the FCA and the CMA, but are simply told that the responses are not as constructive or helpful as they could be.

Everything needs to be looked at again—even the building safety charge itself. When it was first drafted, I remember a meeting with one of the deputy directors of MHCLG where they said they did not really know much it was going to be. It was an academic exercise. Even the numbers in the current impact assessment say it will be £16 a month. It might be £42 or £26 a month. For existing buildings it should be more. No one really knows. As some industry figures have started to look at it, it might well be hundreds of pounds a month. There needs to be an overarching, holistic look at service charges and building safety charges. That would be the first thing.

To go back to Liam’s point about the McPartland-Smith amendment, that is what we are hoping the Conservatives will look at and realise that, yes, residents must be protected now, because they are the innocent people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Shaun Bailey]

Q I just want to come back on the really good question that was asked about resident and tenant representation, because we know that when that is done well, it ensures that people can live in safe communities and make the representations that they need to. We also know what it looks like when it is done horrendously wrongly and the power of a few is collated around a small minority, who seem to dictate what happens for everyone else in a community.

May I just ask you both: where should the driver be to ensure that tenant representation is effective? Should it be prescribed from national Government, in the context of this Bill? Should there be a mix? We have so many different types of ownership and of tenant model; I have three that are utilised in my own local authority alone. How do we ensure that every single person who needs that representation actually gets it, and where should the prescription for that come from—from national Government downwards, or from local government upwards? How do we do that? As you said in response to me before, the core of this is the importance of ensuring that those communities are accurately represented. So I am interested to hear from you both your thoughts on that.

Liam Spender: Thank you for the question and for engaging with the detail on this; as you say, it is vital. There is no one better placed than the people living in buildings to have a view on what is safe and what they think needs to be done to make those buildings safe.

I think there needs to be clearer language in the Bill about taking into account the resident’s voice, because at the moment a lot of the language in the Bill is passive; it is about residents being given information and not particularly good rights of consultation. There needs to be something in the Bill that creates a genuine partnership between the managers and the people living in the buildings.

To reiterate the point that I made in previous responses, residents need a voice on the groups and committees that make the rules, so that from the ground up and from the get-go the rules are shaped by that voice as they are being made, rather than just presented at the other end.

The last point I will make is that there needs to be better and more readily accessible advice for leaseholders and tenants. Perhaps specific programmes can be set up to provide that advice, so that people know where to go to get help when things are not working, and we do not end up with relationships breaking down, and so that we can have a genuine partnership. I think that would be a helpful addition.

I will let Giles add anything that he wants to add.

Giles Grover: I echo all those comments. Again, I have seen for myself the difficulty of engaging all residents; there is the turnover of residents as well, and you might have absent leaseholders. I appreciate that it might be difficult to do it on a statutory basis, but a lot more guidance and help could be provided to those responsible persons. In general, whether at this point there is that engagement with residents, or whether it is about tackling the issues that we are still facing, in terms of fire safety in our buildings, there probably needs to be a lot more partnership with local government and central Government. Local government—local authorities—and the fire service are able to be more reactive. They are on the ground and already have that relationship with the responsible persons and the managing agencies. That whole approach of saying, “Okay, this is what central Government are doing and this is what local government is doing, supported by the fire services,” could actually help drive a lot of it forward. Councillors have that local knowledge, as they are the ones residents turn to directly, as well as their MPs. Engagement with all stakeholders could be a lot better than it seems currently designed to be.

[Kate Osborne]

Q Have you considered or anticipated any possible increases to service charges or rent as a result of the Bill? If so, do you have any idea what that impact might look like to you as leaseholders or tenants?

Liam Spender: I think the simplest answer to the question is that we can expect the cost of living in higher-risk buildings, however defined, to be significantly higher in the future than it is today. We cannot really give any credence to the Government’s estimates that it will be between £9 and £26 a month. If you read the press articles, some of which quote industry figures you will be talking to next week, they are already talking about £500 a year extra just to pay the administrative costs of the new regime. That might not sound like a lot of money, but for some people—particularly shared owners who struggle to get on the ladder—it is make-or-break money. It is a lot of money if you have not got it—that is one way of describing it.

If that sort of burden were being imposed on a company, there would be uproar about it and there would be a great deal more scrutiny of it, but billions of pounds of costs are being loaded on to leaseholders as a result of the new regulatory regime, and the question that needs to be asked is whether we really need to spend that money. Do we really need to spend other people’s money—people who may struggle to pay—on this particular issue? I will hand over to Giles and let him add anything he wants to add.

Giles Grover: It is difficult to consider it, because last year it slightly changed. Last year, it included the historical remediation costs, and there were some vague, wide-ranging, heavily caveated figures about what it might be. Those figures are still heavily caveated. I suppose the difficulty I have is thinking about the future building safety charge when I have to pay a lot more already. A lot of people are already paying hundreds of pounds, so it is hard to have this conceptual thought about what may be put in place when they are already facing hundreds of pounds a month. Until there is more clarity about what it actually is, until there is more control over the building safety charge, and until the problems I am facing right now and the thousands of pounds I have to pay right now are resolved, I will not really consider it fully.