Fire Safety Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 17th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, Amendment 8 in my name seeks to make progress in respect of the recommendations of the first phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. I intend to test the opinion of the House on this amendment.

It is disappointing that progress has been so slow, in all matters, following the tragedy at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. That is a matter of huge regret and, quite frankly, unacceptable. I have stood at this Dispatch Box for years urging the Government to move forward on all aspects of the tragedy with greater speed and urgency, but that plea has so far not been answered. We have on record pledges from Ministers to implement the full recommendations in the report of the first phase of the inquiry, but this Bill does not include provision for any of those recommendations to be implemented. That is most regrettable.

When this Bill was before the other place the Government did not take the opportunity to correct this, and opposed bringing it forward. Instead, they said that they would launch a consultation. The consultation was launched in July and ended last month—a full year after they pledged to implement the first phase recommendations. That highlights the problem: we are not moving quickly enough. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, will explain to the House why the timescale that the Government are working to is so slow. People have waited far too long for legislative action.

I do not understand why the Government are not even prepared to include in the Bill the simplest of the inquiry’s recommendations, such as the inspection of fire doors and the testing of lifts. Perhaps the Minister will tell us why when he responds to the debate. These recommendations need to be implemented urgently. The Government need to do more and act with greater speed.

We remember that terrible night of 14 June 2017, with its dreadful loss of life and the ruin and devastation caused to the lives of those left behind. The physical scars may have healed, but the mental scars remain. It is beyond belief that, more than three years later, we have seen so little action.

This is the third piece of legislation from the Government. Today, people are still living in blocks of flats covered with ACM cladding; there are schools, hospitals and other buildings covered in it as well. Three years after the Grenfell Tower disaster, people will go to bed tonight having to rely on a waking watch. The cladding scandal has people trapped in their homes, unable to sell them and with the unimaginable worry that they are living in buildings which are potential death traps.

We ask the Government to take the long-overdue action to which they have committed themselves. It is urgent, necessary and right. Everyone concerned demands that these safety changes are put into effect. There is no justification for delay. The Government have given no reason for not acting immediately. They say that they want to do it not in this Bill but in the building safety Bill. That is just not acceptable, and I hope that the House will reject it. I beg to move.

[Lord Stunell (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I strongly support the eloquent plea made by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, that we should get on with what everybody knows needs to be done. No one is apparently objecting to it, but the Government have not yet acted. The sense of impatience in your Lordships’ House is much more strongly felt by those who live in blocks affected by ACM and by all the terrible flaws in building construction revealed during the Grenfell inquiry and in Dame Judith Hackitt’s responses.

Amendment 8 systematically lists some of the key requirements that Dame Judith’s report strongly commended and recommended be done. The Government came to your Lordships’ House—not once, not twice, but at three-monthly intervals, for two years—promising that everything would be implemented and that this was a high priority. I am afraid to say that opportunities have been missed. The draft building safety Bill is silent on these issues, so it is not simply a case of saying that it will come up there: it does not. The opportunity has also been missed to include it in this Bill.

Among the recommendations is the inspection of individual flat entrance doors. We all know that tenants and leaseholders have individual views about personalising their accommodation. Not surprisingly, many flat doors do not comply. A survey in July showed that, of the roughly 750,000 fire doors in buildings of this type, perhaps as many as three-quarters needed some action to make them compliant. There is a potential risk to the residents in block after block after block. The Government are now resisting Amendment 8, which sensibly includes the core requirements of Dame Judith’s report for making our buildings safe. We have to wonder exactly how sincere the Government are in their frequent, powerfully expressed commitments, which, unfortunately, they do not seem willing to implement.

Just this last week, I have been looking with members of the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service at what needs to be done to satisfy the requirements emerging from the Grenfell inquiry. They told me that they have been inspecting high-rise buildings in Greater Manchester—as you would expect—with considerable diligence. Having reassessed the situation based on their professional knowledge, they have already required a number of those blocks to completely change their evacuation procedures. Surely it is time that these sensible requirements were included in legislation. It should not just be up to particularly diligent fire authorities to make residents safe, but to owners, leaseholders and the building industry.

Here is the opportunity for the Minister to accept the strength of the argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. Will he come back at Third Reading and include provisions along these lines? If not, I shall certainly be joining the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, in the Lobby at the end of this debate.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, has withdrawn, so I now call the noble Lord, Lord Shipley.

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[The Earl of Lytton (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and I thank her for moving her amendment.

On the question of registers, I certainly agree that some list of assessments should be held for regulatory compliance reasons. However, there are likely to be several assessment bodies. Although something like the register of energy performance certificates, referred to by the noble Baroness, might be appropriate, I hope that the basis of assessment does not change every few years, as has happened with EPCs. I also hope that the standard of those accredited will be based on those with a professional standing and a working knowledge of construction. That standard was not adopted with the accreditation of energy inspectors, and I am sure that the noble Baroness would agree with me on that.

Beyond the minimum for regulatory purposes, it would probably be necessary to avoid a register that contained sensitive information. It is fair to say that some of the information that could be in a fire risk assessment might be sensitive. Therefore, it should not just be an online, free-public-access provision—at least, not in its full form.

It is also worth bearing in mind that this will, to a degree, for ever be a work in progress, so the register will not necessarily be accurate and up to date—but of course that is the situation with EPCs. However, somebody would have to maintain it. I think that that could be done only by a central government body, and that would have resource implications.

The really important thing is that occupiers and managers of buildings know that an assessment has been carried out, that it is in date and that occupiers in particular have the right to see it, and that any competent authority may do so as well.

Turning to Amendment 11, on the question of a public register of assessors, it is likely that many bodies will offer accreditation. Again, a central register would have to be held by some public agency if convenient public access was to be a reality. In practice, certifying bodies will themselves hold records of those accredited. I am not entirely convinced that others beyond occupiers, prospective purchasers and relevant public authorities need to have access to the register, and the public knowing that this matter is in hand, with enforcement of the need to carry out assessments, starting with those at greatest risk and progressing through the housing stock, would seem a fair balance.

The issue immediately before us, which has already been touched on, is the assessment of competence and, more particularly, capacity. This cannot be dealt with immediately. Not only does trainer capacity need to be built but issues to do with professional indemnity cover need to be resolved. I have already flagged up a number of these issues with the Minister, particularly the question of accrediting already competent professionals with a knowledge of construction. Therefore, the point was well made by the noble Baroness but there are issues that need to be taken into account.

On Amendment 12, in this group, I would much have preferred the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, in whose name it stands, to speak before me. This concerns one of the shortcoming issues that seem to be common in permitted development rights developments. Shortcomings in terms of living space, amenities, local environment, open green space standards and so on are all too frequent, and the health outcomes for occupants are also often very poor. Some of the buildings subject to conversion to residential have been quite unfit for that purpose. I have inspected some, so I can say that from professional experience. None the less, these projects have been signed off, although I suggest that that does not get owners off the hook on compliance more generally and that all developers who think themselves protected by completion certificates should think carefully about that. There is certainly an issue here.

In the meantime, ensuring fire safety in these permitted development conversions is a matter of top priority, particularly because they happen to house some of the most vulnerable people in society. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Lord Stunell (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 10 and 11, but will speak more fully on Amendment 12, as prefigured by my noble friend Lady Pinnock and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton.

Amendment 10 requires there to be a national published risk register, of which the two key requirements we have set out are that it should be publicly available and up to date. I understand the noble Earl’s concerns that this would always be a work in progress, but fire safety is always a work in progress. If we are talking about annual inspections, keeping a fire risk assessment up to date should come with the job.

If every landlord, designer, building contractor and construction operative always acted in strict compliance with the spirit and letter of every part of the existing regulations, this amendment would be superfluous. In my former professional life, I spent some years supervising building construction work; in case every anecdote about shoddy builders has bypassed your Lordships, I can confirm that such strict compliance is rare. However, one thing I thought sacrosanct was compliance with fire regulations. Even if the brickwork was shoddy and the plumbing a nightmare, at least the fire doors would fit. I now know I was wrong.

The picture emerging with devastating force from the evidence given to the Grenfell Tower inquiry is that at every level, from client and specifier to designer, contractor, subcontractor, and, as it now seems from the evidence this week, even specialist suppliers of critical components, it was not just a case of a few unfortunate errors because of lack of skill or experience but in some cases deliberate efforts to defeat the rules—even safety-critical rules on which many lives depended.

In the months and years since that terrible fire, evidence has been accumulating that this was not a one-off event in a particular building that happened to have a terrible outcome. There now seem to be, right across the country, many hundreds of buildings containing thousands of homes that are not just non-compliant, but pose a real and significant risk of harm to the people who live in them.

None of this would have emerged had the horrific events of that night not brought it very starkly to light. There was no transparency or openness to inquiry but a dismissive casualness in handling the legitimate concerns of those who had worries. In the case of the residents of Grenfell, those who had practical observations of non-compliant building work were completely swept aside. There was certainly no register you could check to show that your home was not a death-trap.

That underlines a significant truth: when those with power and authority find out about bad things and high risks that do not affect them but have a great or even fatal impact on the vulnerable and the weak, their natural reaction is to keep the news to themselves in order to avoid trouble and expense and to hope for the best. We must decisively end the hoarding of bad news on fire safety by the informed and powerful and empower the vulnerable who carry the risks and sometimes pay the ultimate price of life itself.

From now on there will be fire safety assessments. That is a very good thing, but it is essential that those assessments are in the public domain. I take the caveats that the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, has rightly made about privacy, security and so on, but the essentials of a fire safety certificate should be available for public inspection. They should be at least as public and accessible as an energy performance certificate from which you can discover how much insulation I have in my loft and I can discover how much the noble Earl has in his. We put up with that because of the greater good; we ought to be ready to put up with the same sort of thing for the far greater good of saving life post Grenfell.

It is unacceptable for landlords and building owners to hoard that assessment to the detriment of those to whom they rent and lease their properties and whose lives are in their hands. Grenfell Tower residents’ legitimate and specific fears about weaknesses they could see with their own eyes were swept away by those in authority. No one knew if any assessment had been made, what it said or what should be done about it, and who should rectify the faults disclosed.

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I have enormous sympathy with the sentiments behind this amendment, but I do not think it works. Liability cannot fall on one person without establishing where else it might fall and what the consequences might be.

[Lord Stunell (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the contributions of my noble friends Lady Pinnock and Lord Shipley and to support this amendment. I hope the Minister will see the strength of the argument and accept the amendment. If not, I regret that I shall also be seeking the opinion of the House on the matter.

I thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for his—as ever—very thoughtful and constructive contribution. I am sure the Minister is aware that this is a complex and difficult question with many different moving parts, which the noble Earl so eloquently summarised. The one set of people who are not moving are the tenants and leaseholders stuck in flats which they cannot sell. They may be putting themselves at considerable personal as well as financial risk. These tenants, residents and leaseholders have no control over the circumstances in which they find themselves. They played no part in the decision-making—or lack of it—that has left them stranded. They are the vulnerable people whom the mighty, the powerful, the professionals and those with big pockets have left stranded. Our amendment is saying, “Right, let us at least fix this bit of the moving parts—these bits of the equation.”

I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, that there is a much bigger set of problems to be confronted. I hope that the Minister will accept this and will say that the Government are going to launch a wholesale consideration. I suspect that this is of concern far beyond the Home Office. Perhaps some prime ministerial attention can be given to sorting out this difficult and complex area.

The key question is: who will pay for the necessary works? Our amendment is simple and, I hope, clear. The innocent occupiers—the renters and leaseholders of millions of homes across the country—should not be held to ransom by building owners. They should not be forced to pay for making their homes safe, when they should have been safe from the start.

I know that the Government have begun to face up to the excessive costs facing leaseholders. The Minister has a well-tried set of statistics which he will give us again. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, ticked that box for him by recounting them. I know the Minister believes—as I do—that far more remains to be done.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, mentioned the construction warranty guarantees. Most of them are turning out to be virtually worthless. At the same time, they are often sold to residents and leaseholders as though they were some kind of guarantee that, if things went wrong, they would be compensated. This is not so. For the moment, at least, they are not delivering. The rush of people disclaiming that their warranty warrants anything is remarkable.

That puts an interesting light on something the Minister said in discussion of the previous group. He said that we did not need registers or government oversight because self-regulation would deal with it. He said that was the way to go and they did not want to increase the regulatory burden on anyone. I know that is the Government’s mantra in general, but one of the few positive things to come out of Grenfell was the tearing up of that whole story—that regulation was for losers—and the understanding that regulation provides a safety net that secures people’s future. This is just another case where self-regulation failed and none of the industrial, insurance and construction sectors stepped up to regulate their own behaviour and safeguard tenants. No case at all, therefore, can be made that tenants and leaseholders should be the ones collecting the bill.

I shall not rehearse any of the hard-luck stories that we are familiar with, but a straightforward case can be made to the Treasury: the longer this issue hangs around, the longer it will take to put all the remedial work in hand. If there are arguments over who pays, it will not be done and, if it is not being done, the risk of another major incident—and all the public money that will be spent on that—looms in the distance. And it is not just that, of course: there are also the long-term costs of health and stress that will be loaded on to the NHS as a result of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people finding that the home they live in is worthless. I wonder how many bankruptcies there will be. If you are a sole trader and the bank has a guarantee on your home, what is your position when you cannot get an EWS1 form? How does that leave you in terms of business survivability?

Today the Minister has talked about phasing things, going slowly and proportionately, and getting fire tests and so on, but every time that we have looked further than the end of our noses we have discovered that there is more stuff to do—an estimated 750,000 fire doors around the country, just for starters.

I hope, therefore, that the Minister can give millions of leaseholders some words of comfort and support in backing our amendment. If not, I fear that I shall join my noble friends in testing the opinion of the House.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, Amendment 13, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, adds a new clause to the Bill that would prohibit the owner of the building from passing the cost of any remedial work attributable to the requirement of the Act on to leaseholders or tenants, except where the leaseholder is also the owner of the building.

As the noble Baroness has said, these leaseholders have done absolutely nothing wrong. They have actually done everything right: they have bought their property and are paying their mortgage, and they are being penalised for the failure of others. That surely cannot be right. The fact that their building has been given dangerous cladding has made their flats worthless. They cannot sell them but they still need to pay their mortgage. They cannot get the work done. They may be paying for a waking watch.