Building Safety

Lord Stunell Excerpts
Tuesday 11th January 2022

(2 years, 2 months ago)

Lords Chamber
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Lord Greenhalgh Portrait Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
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I first praise the efforts of my noble friend in raising issues throughout my time as Building Safety Minister, and particularly for her passion about how we improve the built environment. The honest answer is that the introduction of the British Standards Institution’s Publicly Available Specification 9980 will go some way, and it will take time to ensure that we have a more proportionate approach. As I have already said in responding to questions, there is no silver bullet, but it is good to have the right direction of travel. That requires the lenders, insurers and valuers who follow valuation guidance from RICS to all take a sensible approach, and that takes time. The more we focus on proportionality and risk, as opposed to having a binary view that everything needs to be fixed in the most expensive manner possible, the closer we get to a far better place.

Lord Stunell Portrait Lord Stunell (LD)
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I thank the Minister for his Statement; it is very welcome. Following on from that last point, there is a clear problem created by the insurance industry, which has made matters significantly worse. Will he have meetings with the insurance industry to guide them through the new British standard that will be published so that we do not go through another two years of overengineered responses based on an extravagant risk-based system?

Lord Greenhalgh Portrait Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
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I thank the noble Lord, who was a distinguished Minister in the very same department in which I find myself. He has been at the Dispatch Box in the other place and has great experience. He is absolutely right that we need to see movement from the insurance industry. I have had many meetings with the ABI. In fact, most recently, I have had a series of individual meetings with primary insurers—you get more out of a meeting when you have one of them in front of you; they speak more candidly to a Minister than if you have a group of them together. The new chair of the ABI is my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes, and I have engaged with her about how we can get a more sensible approach. Some of these hikes in insurance are not just 100%; they are 1,000%. The Father of the House in the other place, Sir Peter Bottomley—a distinguished parliamentarian—has raised the prospect that, if insurers are not going to be sensible about this, let us get the Competition and Markets Authority looking into some of these practices. There is carrot and stick to this, but of course I will continue, as I have been asked—in the Statement yesterday I was namechecked once—to follow up and make sure that we get a sensible and proportionate response from insurers; that is my job.