Building Safety Bill (Ninth sitting)

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Thursday 23rd September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Christopher Pincher]

I will be more succinct in respect of this clause, because it follows on from clauses 37 and 38 and I referred briefly to it earlier.

Many of the persons with responsibilities under the Building Act 1984 are and will be corporate bodies, or “legal persons”, rather than individuals, who are known as “natural persons”. Any corporate body operates only through the actions of its employees, controlled by its managers and directors. As such, if there is an offence by a corporate body, there is likely to be some measure of personal failure by those in positions of seniority.

That liability is already provided for in a number of other pieces of legislation, including, most notably, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. The end result is that directors, managers and other such persons are just as criminally responsible as the company at which they have either made decisions directly leading to an offence being committed, or been negligent in allowing an offence to occur.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend clarify how that will apply when there is only one director of a corporate body?

--- Later in debate ---

[Christopher Pincher]

Dame Judith’s independent review raised serious concerns over the lack of a level playing field for approved inspectors and local authority building control. There were different statutory and non-statutory processes leading to incoherence, confusion and complexity in the system.

Clause 41 establishes a new registration and oversight regime to provide consistency across the public and private sector, and creates a new, unified building control profession. The new registration regime will raise standards in the sector and enhance public confidence by requiring a minimum level of demonstrated competence to provide building control services on different types of buildings. For the first time, individual building control professionals, whether in the public or private sector, will have to register with a regulatory authority. That is the Building Safety Regulator in England and the Welsh Ministers in Wales.

We intend for the registration process to involve the demonstration of competence against a shared framework. Registered professionals, who will be called “registered building inspectors”, will need to adhere to a common code of conduct. We will now be able to hold individuals accountable for professional misconduct or incompetence. That is the foundation for clause 43, in which we set out certain activities and functions that building control bodies can carry out only by using a registered inspector.

Together, these clauses will change the way building inspectors work with and for building control bodies, giving the consumer greater assurance that an experienced professional will be checking their building against regulations. We are introducing an updated registration regime for private sector building control bodies, currently known as approved inspectors. They will have to register with the regulatory authority to work as a registered building control approver and will be held to professional conduct rules. We are introducing sanctions and offences for misconduct to ensure that those organisations that supervise building works are held to high professional standards.

Clause 41 also allows the regulatory authority to delegate those registration functions to another body. We are introducing a new framework for the oversight of the performance of building control bodies, levelling the playing field for local authority building control and registered building control approvers. The regulatory authority will be able to set the operational standards defining the minimum performance standards that building control bodies must meet. It sets out the reporting requirements that will enable the regulator to collect information to assess and analyse the performance of building control bodies and make recommendations to drive up standards. It gives the regulatory authority investigatory powers when building control bodies breach the operating standards, and a series of escalating sanctions and enforcement measures to address poor performance issues.

[Selaine Saxby]

This is, obviously, a necessary and very technical clause, setting out a strong new regime of how we can improve competence levels and accountability in the building control sector. I wonder if he could clarify how the regulator will deal with poor performing building control bodies?