Fire Safety Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 1st October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is right that we should remember the 72 victims of the Grenfell fire, their families and neighbours. It is right that we should remember the first responders, the emergency services, the public servants and volunteers, who came forward to help and have been helping in the weeks, months and now years since. We also need to remember the righteous anger and deep frustration of that community as more time has passed and more compelling evidence has come to light about the institutional and corporate failures that caused this fire. We must make sure that it never happens again.

I know the Minister takes this issue deeply seriously and I very much welcome his remarks in introducing this Bill. I know that his predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, did so as well and I look forward to hearing his words in a few minutes’ time. I thank the Minister for reaching out to those on the other side of the House to gain a broad consensus for this Bill and to make sure that the foundations are firmly laid and progress made briskly. We support the Bill, but it is a matter of regret that it has taken 38 months since the fire to bring it to your Lordships’ House. It will be another four months at least before the building safety Bill reaches us.

Meanwhile, that compelling evidence of failure mounts up. I give just two illustrations from the last couple of weeks of Grenfell inquiry evidence. Last week, the project manager of the cladding subcontractor told the inquiry that he had no knowledge of the existence of key product safety regulations relating to the cladding he was installing. Yesterday, the senior building control officer at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea told the inquiry that he had received no training in technical industry guidance and had not considered at all the lessons about the fire risks of cladding systems. The brutal reality is that the only people who noticed what was going on were the residents of Grenfell Tower and they were dismissed as malcontents and trouble- makers. That must never be the case again.

That is the context in which the Minister has brought forward the Fire Safety Bill today. I thank him for setting out so clearly what it is intended to do when it comes into force and for making the point very clearly that it is a start, not the finished product. I thank him too for the letter that he circulated to your Lordships today that sets out other measures that the Government have taken and plan to take.

The Liberal Democrats certainly support the Bill’s intention and will be supporting it in its passage through your Lordships’ House. It plugs some gaps and removes ambiguities and, crucially, it makes a named individual responsible for fire safety reports in every building in England and Wales, regardless of its height. There will be a formal assessment.

This Bill has thoroughly good intentions, which we support, but we should also be quite clear that it would not have stopped the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire. That would require not only this Bill but also the building safety Bill to come into force urgently. It will require a complete change in the culture of building safety from the construction industry, clients and building owners, designers and contractors, national and local regulators and building users too. It is going to require a massive investment in the training of fire engineers and fire assessors and of all those in the industry who, up to the night of the Grenfell fire, had just been winging it and keeping their fingers crossed. At every step of design and procurement and every level of contracting and subcontracting, there have turned out to be fatal gaps in knowledge and skills that must be plugged. The Government have a serious responsibility to enable, facilitate and drive that process relentlessly.

In considering this Bill, I and my colleagues will be urging the Minister not to confine himself simply to the routine task of steering an uncontroversial Bill on to the statute book, but to undertake to put a rocket booster under the process of delivering a complete package of reform. I hope that he will take back to the Government the intense concern from right across your Lordships’ House on all the progress needed to make sure that things happen “at pace”. That catchphrase has been used repeatedly over the last three years from the Dispatch Box and we need to see it happening, not just in the Home Office, where this Bill sits, but also in MHCLG in relation to regulations, in BEIS in relation to the Construction Leadership Council and the work it is doing, and, indeed, in the Department for Education on apprentice training and graduate training to fill some of the gaps in knowledge and manpower.

The reform the whole building regulatory system, the proper staffing and training of qualified personnel to operate that system and the restoration of confidence of local communities caught in the eye of the storm all remain to be done three years after the fire. We take this Bill as some evidence of progress but it is also, to some extent, evidence of delay so I hope the Minister will convey the sense of concern in this House and the anger of local communities right to the very highest level of government, to which, I know, he has good personal access.

I have some questions. Will the Minister undertake to provide your Lordships with a detailed report on the number of fire engineers the Government estimate will be needed to properly deliver the regulatory system set out in the Bill? Can he tell us what estimate he has of the current shortfall and the steps he is putting in place to overcome it? Does the Minister share my fear that the implementation of the Bill will have to be delayed because of that shortfall? Has he taken note of the fall in the number of fire safety officers employed by fire and rescue services in the last 20 years? Does he believe that the current number is sufficient to take on the new duties that the Bill sets out? Perhaps he can say a little more about that. Can he confirm that there is to be a publicly accessible register of all fire assessments?

I know that the Minister will want to honour the often-repeated promise that tenants and residents would be at the heart of the new post-Grenfell regulatory system, with their concerns and their practical experience of day-to-day life in their own home being taken seriously. Does he agree that every one of them should be able to read a copy of the assessment for their block and be told exactly who is responsible for monitoring the risks and delivering the necessary changes? That needs to be a person with actual responsibility, not a distant corporate body registered in the Cayman Islands or an anonymous helpline. We must never again have residents’ legitimate concerns ignored or simply dismissed as troublemaking. We shall certainly want to return to this in Committee.

I am sure the Minister will have read the useful briefing prepared by the LGA, setting out its concerns about some of the practical matters of implementation. It is not at all surprising that, in view of the cuts local authorities have suffered to their income because of Covid-19, they have also raised serious concerns about where the cost of inspection and enforcement is planned to fall. No doubt other noble Lords will expand on that point in the debate.

The Bill is wholly silent on the question of costs and the impact assessment is vague too. The struggle to safeguard leaseholders and tenants who face huge bills directly arising from the replacement of ACM shows just how easily the individuals with no prior knowledge or professional background get left carrying the can, while the contractors and the paid professionals just move on to the next job.

What are the Government’s intentions when it comes to meeting the costs of any remediation that the Bill shows is necessary? Has the Minister any assessment of what those costs are likely to be? How does he intend to safeguard leaseholders against being saddled with yet another huge bill caused, as they might see it, not by them doing something wrong but by a new piece of well-meaning legislation dumped on their heads?

The Minister may feel that these are small details and that we should focus instead on the bigger picture, but I say, as a former Minister, that it is often the small details that trip up and spoil the big picture. Even more to the point, if we look at the big picture, this Bill is not the big picture; it is a small part of a much bigger picture, where reform and challenge is urgently needed to put right past wrongs and prevent future tragedies.

So we do welcome this Bill, but it has to be seen as only a small step in a long journey, one that has taken a long time to get started, where the pace is still too slow and the urgency to bring forward legislation seems to have been somewhat lacking. Those 72 Grenfell residents and their families and neighbours have waited far too long to see justice and to see meaningful change and action. I very much hope that the debate today can put some extra energy back into the campaign to achieve that change.