Building Safety Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, safety has a cost, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans reminded us. We have to decide where we should require money to be spent. I will talk a bit about the electrical safety and standards provisions and then come back to staircases.

I know there is a shortage of electrical experts able to carry out these assessments. Our own electrician, who is very expert, cannot do the assessments we are being asked to provide for social housing and other blocks of flats—for example, my son has a let flat, because he is an academic. The electrician says that he needs to go on a week’s course and, as a busy self-employed person, he does not have time. The lobbying organisation Electrical Safety First, which tried to get me to support Amendments 122 to 124, because I am keen on safety and looking after the consumer, seemed relatively unconcerned about this. Moreover, the amendments are wide-ranging and uncosted. As noble Lords will know, I worry a lot about the shortage of skills in the industry.

These amendments would further jeopardise housing supply, this time including social housing, and leave flats empty. Social housing landlords will be doing this sort of thing anyway post Grenfell, I think. For similar reasons, I am against the wide-ranging Amendment 121.

I am much more relaxed about Amendment 120, especially as it includes a consultation provision. The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, and I did the Consumer Rights Act together; she is right to think forward to the needs of an increasingly ageing population, which is exactly what this amendment does. We also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young. The huge potential cost to the NHS of accidents in an ageing population is also a very strong argument for action, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff.

This is Committee, so I am sure the Minister will reflect further, but if one can find a way—without imposing significant costs—of making staircases safer, that could be extremely useful.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I added my name to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Foster, which the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, has just disagreed with. Those three amendments seem to me an essential guarantee of safety for the tenants, leaseholders and others who occupy buildings that are owned by what are broadly social landlords.

The noble Baroness is correct that the normal training of electricians does not include an ability to do this, but that needs to be addressed. I contrast it with the gas situation. Social landlords are obliged to have a gas inspection regularly and, by and large, they do it. Gas suppliers both train their people in that respect—it is an essential element of a gas fitter’s training—and, certainly in my experience of London boroughs, they carry it out pretty regularly and effectively. I do not see why electrical suppliers should not be in the same situation.

As has been said, over half of fires are ultimately caused by electrical faults; most of those are in appliances, but if those appliances are fitted to an installation and a system whereby the defusing mechanism does not work and the fire goes back into the wall and beyond, you have a terrible and inaccessible situation. That is exactly what the more serious fires caused by electrical faults are. There is clearly a responsibility on the manufacturers and retailers in terms of the quality of the appliances, but there is also a responsibility on those responsible for the buildings to ensure that there is a proper inspection of the whole electrical system. That needs to be addressed; it is an anomaly that gas is different from electric. There was a time when the biggest accidents were gas—now they are predominantly electrical. I hope that these three amendments are carried.

On staircases, I agree with the amendment spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Jordan. I would also say—somebody referred to it earlier—that there are new high-rise and medium-rise buildings that have received planning permission with one staircase and one means of escape only. That is perfectly legal at the moment. It should not be, but I know of at least three examples in London boroughs which have been passed because they say that there are alternative means of escape—in other words, a lift. Most of us are advised not to use a lift in a fire, and it is pretty much built into our psyche, so that is not a sufficient reason. If we are addressing the staircase regulations, for medium-rise and high-rise buildings, two means of escape without involving an electrical lift need to be written in. I support all the amendments in this group.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been an interesting debate about two very different but important aspects of safety. I want first to talk about the Safer Stairs campaign introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. She and others made it clear that falls on stairs are a huge issue, but unfortunately it seems continually to go under the radar when it comes to what to do to stop so many people suffering often catastrophic falls.

As we have heard, the British Standard has existed since 2010. It has been rigorously tested by industry but has never been made a legal requirement. That is strange: we have a standard, but we do not have to bother with it—that seems a very odd way to go about things. There does not seem to be anything to stop the Government putting this standard into primary legislation. There is a precedent for doing so: the ban on combustible materials went into the Building Regulations 2010. My noble friend Lord Jordan put it in a nutshell when he said that, if the Minister were to accept the amendment, we would have the opportunity to end day-to-day tragedies—the smaller stuff. Kicking the can down the road will cost lives. If we do not address it now, it could be many years before any new ombudsman tackles the problem. If it is 10 years before we get a grip on this, that is 7,000 more unnecessary deaths.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, and the other signatories to the amendment therefore have our strong support—as well, it seems, as that of many noble Lords, not just in Committee today but at Second Reading. This is the Minister’s opportunity to do something that would genuinely make a huge difference. He should accept the amendment and, as my noble friend Lady Young of Old Scone said, just do it.

We also fully support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, which aim to improve the safety of electrical installations. We have heard that the number of fires in high-rise residential blocks has risen consistently year on year, which indicates that we need to do something practical to try to stop that number continuing to increase. Safety parity for all renters was mentioned. As we have heard, it cannot be right that in a mixed-tenure block a private renter will have electrical checks carried out by law while the social tenant living next door will not. As the noble Lord said, a fire in a tower block does not check the tenancy status of those that it threatens.

I will briefly reference my noble friend Lord Whitty’s point about how wrong it is that there is only one escape staircase in blocks now. A planning application was recently overturned because it was challenged on that. As part of the response to Grenfell, the Government really need to get to get to grips with this. I know that this is a planning issue, but I hope that the Minister will take this away.