Fire Safety (Protection of Tenants) Bill

Sarah Wollaston Excerpts

Friday 19th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) on this Bill. My Totnes constituency shares half of Torbay—an area in which people know only too well what the consequences of tragic fire deaths mean both for families and for the wider community.

Thirty-one people died in the Paddington rail disaster; we quite rightly held a public inquiry and no expense was spared to make the railway safe. The fact is, however, that in the year running up to March of this year, 328 people died in fires, but they did not all die on the same day or even in the same week; otherwise we certainly would have held a public inquiry into those deaths.

Most people in the outside world would assume that smoke detectors are already compulsory, but they are not. They would also assume that for the most vulnerable households in our country—houses in multiple occupation or homes where vulnerable children are living with adults who are not in a position to care for them properly—protection already exists. After the incident in Torbay, to which my hon. Friend referred, people assumed that corporate manslaughter charges would be brought; in fact, there was no possibility of that because there was no compulsion in the law for smoke detectors to be fitted, even though this was a vulnerable household.

Smoke detectors save lives, and nobody disputes that. Nor does anyone dispute that hard-wired smoke detectors are far preferable to battery-operated smoke detectors. This amounts to a law of diminishing returns. If the Minister will not accept the expense of installing hard-wired systems, there must surely be a case for insisting at least on extended-life batteries that provide 10-year protection. Again, that really would save lives, so I put the same question to the Minister as was put previously: if there is another fire death, or particularly if there are large-scale fire deaths, will he come back to the House to explain why this very simple measure, which would save so many lives and be so simple to introduce, was not introduced?

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay: if we have annual gas safety checks and if it is possible to insist at the beginning of an occupancy on an energy-saving certificate and an electrical safety certificate, why is it not possible to insist on a system that, as a bare minimum, will have a 10-year battery life? My preference is for hard-wired systems, but if that is not possible, what is wrong with simply requiring a technician at the beginning of a tenancy to press a test meter, especially if it could save lives? I urge the Minister to consider those issues; I will not detain the House further.