Building Safety Bill (First sitting)

Rachel Hopkins Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We are now sitting in public again and the proceedings are being broadcast. Before we start to hear from witnesses, I encourage Members who wish to make a declaration of interest in connection with the Bill to do so. First, I will put my own interests on the record. My husband is a partner in Kingsley Napley LLP, whose clients include those involved in the building industry.

[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

I am still a sitting councillor in Liverpool.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

If there are no more supplementaries, we will move to Rachel.

[Rachel Hopkins]

Q Thank you, Mrs Miller. That takes us to my question, which is about whether there is enough detail in the Bill. Have the Government left too much in secondary legislation, for example the golden thread and the gateway process? Those are two key elements of the new building safety regime—and you talked about professional bodies wanting information as well—that are not actually on the face of the Bill.

Adrian Dobson: There is a chicken-and-egg situation. I have been involved in a number of meetings on the competence standard, and obviously you can go off only what has been published so far. The publication of the draft regulations on the competencies and due diligence is quite helpful, although I hope that there may be a chance to talk about some concerns about those definitions. The more information that can come out, the better.

The Bill does explain the basic principles quite well, and I think everybody is supportive of that. There is complexity. One of the points that I would like to make, if I get the chance today, is that our view is that, if the principal designer is a key duty holder, they should be involved in gateway 1, which is when some quite key design decisions are made. It has been complicated to achieve that, because it has been achieved through a change to the town and country planning legislation. I can see that some of this is going to have to be sorted out once the system is in place; that is just inevitable, really.

Graham Watts: I tend to agree with the point that Ken Knight made in the previous session: the detail needs to be in secondary legislation, in the statutory instruments. Of course, that does mean that there needs to be adequate consultation and scrutiny of those statutory instruments. I have some experience of this from the industry perspective, as a designated body implementing aspects of the Building Act 1984. Too much of the detail was in the Act. It meant that there were unintended consequences down the line: things that needed to be changed could not easily be changed. That made my mind up on that issue.

Where there is a need for more detail on the face of the Bill is in those areas relating to the paradigm change in the industry that I spoke about earlier. That needs to be supported by the Bill, particularly in the area of competence, which actually underpins virtually everything that we are talking about. In the report that we produced at the end of last year, “Setting the Bar”, which sets out a new competence regime for occupations involved in high-rise buildings, we were hoping and expecting that there would be greater definition in the Bill.

For example, we thought that the requirement for independent third-party certification might be on the face of the Bill. It is absolutely essential, but it is not there. We think that there should be mandatory registration for those who have duty holder roles, and I am not just including principal designer, principal contractor and building safety manager. Also, for example, there is a need for independent construction assessment, and I am sure Adrian and I will talk about that a bit more later. It also seems to me an anachronism that we are defining the roles for principal designer and principal contractor but not for the building control profession.

Without having mandatory registration with the regulator—to say that Joe Bloggs or Freda Smith are qualified to be a principal designer—there is going to be a lot of confusion out there about who is qualified to hold those roles. I worry that the less scrupulous people within the industry will find ways around the requirements in order to prove, by some sort of desktop study, that they are actually qualified. There are also things like making sure that there is regular reassessment and mandatory continuing professional development. Although I appreciate that there are reasons why those details might not be in the Bill, we need them to be defined.

[The Chair]

Daisy Cooper has a supplementary question.