Building Safety Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Shaun Bailey Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Eddie Hughes]

We return to the question of capacity. I touched on the idea that organisations such as housing associations or councils already have their buildings under a management structure and a safety structure, and already have appropriate people appointed to those roles. They will have a benchmark with regard to the legislation that sets out the requirements of a building safety manager against which to measure that they have the appropriate skills and competences in place. The fact that within those organisations they will need to identify a named person who has those competences will focus minds, albeit that the person with those responsibilities might not need to discharge all the duties; they can delegate them to others.

The hon. Gentleman is right that this is a big endeavour, but it already exists in many organisations. On the appropriate salary levels, I think it is beyond the scope of the Bill to identify the remuneration for people employed in this, but as I say there are already people doing this role and I am sure that those who are already managing their buildings effectively and safely will not find this a much more onerous obligation.

[Shaun Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd, and to see a fellow Black Country MP on the Treasury Bench. I agree wholeheartedly with what the Minister said, but we need to ensure that we do not allow anyone to test the boundaries, particularly when it comes to such things as regular intervals on assessment. He encapsulated a lot of what I was going to say in his contribution. I know that he agrees that we have to have a culture that ensures that those who are regulated by the legislation and by regulations do not see the leeway that we have rightly given them as an opportunity to test the boundaries.

[Eddie Hughes]

It is an important point. We need to strike a balance between being prescriptive, and setting very specific regulatory periods within which tasks have to be performed, and allowing some latitude for people to continue to manage their buildings in an appropriate way. If we give prescription for one thing it certainly will not apply across all 12,500 buildings, or however many more might be created in future. I return to the point about the Building Safety Regulator being live to developments within the sector and ensuring that it can respond accordingly.