Fire Safety Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

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

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, and welcome him to this House. I look forward to his future contributions. It is also an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bourne. When he was a Minister he took very seriously the responsibilities which arose following the Grenfell fire, some of which we are debating today.

The fact remains that it is three years since Grenfell and 11 years since Lakanal House, and this is the first piece of substantive legislation that has been before Parliament. It is needed. We need to resolve the ambiguities in the fire safety order and clearly define responsible officers, their work and the parts of the building which will be subject to their responsibilities and to professional inspection.

I know that the Minister tried to do this to some extent in his opening remarks and in the letter that we received today, but we needed a report on the totality of progress on all of these issues post Grenfell, so that we could see where this Bill fits in with other initiatives. We have referred to the building safety Bill, which is still in very early draft form. Some people are saying that there is a clash of definitions of “responsible person” between that draft Bill and the Bill before us today. We must be clearer about how this all fits in with the Government’s consultation Building a Safer Future, the related safety strategy proposed by the Minister’s department, the implementation of the inquiry’s first stage and of the Hackitt report, and the progress on the proposed new regulator.

Specifically in the Grenfell case, we also need an indication of progress on potential prosecutions of the managers of the building and the suppliers. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, referred to the evidence reported in the press today about the person who would be deemed to be something like the responsible officer in Kensington and Chelsea, who clearly did not have a clue about their responsibilities and the regulations. The same applied to the representative of the major supplier. This is not an overregulated industry but a seriously underregulated industry, and those regulations that exist are not properly enforced. We need to look at all these aspects together, and some others as well.

My noble friend Lady Wilcox referred to sprinklers and the progress there. The case is not the same in Wales as it is in many authorities around England. The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, referred to electrical safety, and rightly said that the majority of domestic fires are caused by electrical faults. Inspection and enforcement of regulations in that area are also necessary. Whereas with gas there is a mandatory responsibility on landlords to inspect the gas installations, there is not one for white goods and other electrical installations within multi-occupied buildings more generally.

There is also some obscurity as to which pieces of legislation apply to which buildings. This Bill apparently applies to all multi-occupied buildings, whereas some of the other proposed legislation and regulation applies to buildings over 18 metres high, and that limit has been queried. We are also unclear as to how many buildings and landlords we are referring to. In the impact assessment for this Bill there is a pretty wide range of figures for buildings—2.2 to 3.2 million individual flats—and for the number of landlords, both private and social. So the House deserves a much more strategic report from Ministers on this whole area.

There are also wider issues. At the end of the day, whatever regulations come forward must be professionally enforced, and we must have adequate numbers of professionally trained inspectors. Regrettably, in the fire service there has been a cut of over 20% in recent years. That cut needs to be reversed. In particular, there is nowhere near a sufficient number of qualified and experienced fire inspectors to fulfil the clearer responsibilities in this and the other Bill. The Fire Brigades Union has indicated that there are fewer than 1,000 people who are even remotely qualified to carry out such inspections, which is about half the number there were a decade ago. We need a training programme and a recruitment programme to train up firefighters and others to fulfil these professional roles.

Of course, this may grow, because while in the Bill we are talking about tightening restrictions, the proposed new planning changes will allow, for example, conversion of office blocks to residential use, and adding storeys to existing buildings. If we are not careful, and do not have a robust and effective system of enforcing the use of safe materials and the safe design of the structure of the buildings, that will increase the potential danger of unsafe buildings.

The problem is not only with the fire service and fire inspectors. One of the other areas most drastically cut by many local authorities in the past decade has been building regulations enforcement, and the numbers employed there. The enforcement of standards of materials and the application of materials, as well as of the design of buildings, is clearly inadequate in almost every local authority.

With regard to materials and equipment, it is not just cladding that we should be worried about. There is also, for example, the issue of fire doors. In its briefing for the Bill, the LGA—I declare my interest as one of its vice-chairs—claims that thousands of non-compliant doors have been delivered to local authorities and housing associations in recent years. It estimates the replacement cost at £700 million. That is an absolute scandal. I know of nobody who has been prosecuted for failure to supply compliant doors.

The impact assessment on the Bill makes no mention of the significantly increased resources for both personnel and training that will be required to make it, and related measures, effective in carrying out their job. So there is a significant number of wider questions that we need to address in this context. I will support the Bill; I think it is necessary. But we need a clearer indication of how it fits in with other such measures.

Even in this limited Bill there is a serious omission. We need to mention the role of residents—tenants and leaseholders—and the need for them to be informed, and to have their concerns taken seriously by building owners, managers and suppliers. Let us remember that Grenfell residents were warning of the dangers of the refurbishment years before the tragedy happened—in terms of the cladding, the loss of firewalls and the increasing space for a fire to spread, and also of the potential dangers of the “stay put” evacuation advice. All were pointed to by the residents, and all were ignored.

More widely, the effects of the uncertainty about the safety of the buildings in which they live is causing widespread anxiety among all residents. Leaseholders also face potential substantial economic loss, as the value of their property falls and the availability of affordable insurance recedes because of safety fears. Tenants and leaseholders need to be listened to, and their role needs to be reflected in this Bill and in related legislation.