Building Safety Bill (Second sitting)

Siobhan Baillie Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We will move on to Siobhan’s question.

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

Q The Bill gives the Secretary of State the power to regulate construction products. Does the Bill contain enough information about the new regime? Is there enough certainty about what products or types of products will be regulated?

Peter Caplehorn: The issue there is that we fully recognise that this legislation is needed and fully support it, but there is an ongoing conversation to be had with regard to the definitions. We have looked at how you would define a safe product and, indeed, a safety-critical product, and there is quite a bit of work to be done to balance out the needs of the regulations with the practicalities.

To give the Committee an example, if we were to take a sheet of plasterboard, it can be used in many different applications. If it is just used as a finishing element, I would suggest that it is not anywhere near a safety-critical item in most cases. Whereas when that same sheet of plasterboard is used in a compartment wall that is used to fire separate two areas of a building, then it very much is a safety-critical product, so there is that diversity within the product sector.

Equally, some products are clearly safety critical and should be strictly controlled and monitored. We need an ongoing conversation as the team develops the regulations, to ensure that the guidance and, eventually, the list of safety-critical products are clearly usable in a practical sense, and also so that there is complete clarity as we go forward.

Dr Steedman: It is an excellent question. We have to think of products as forming a system, and sometimes products that are completely safe in one system might be completely unsafe in another. Electrical cabling, for example, might be suitable in one jurisdiction, in one country, but if you mixed it up with electrical systems in the UK you would have a disaster on your hands. So this concept of safe products is very difficult to define, because products really have to be seen in context.

The onus should perhaps be on performance-based criteria, so we look to specify the performance of a product and them to demonstrate that that performance has been achieved, and not just by the class of product but by the actual individual product placed in the structure, ensuring that compliance is rigorous. This concept of shaping performance requirements and then allowing industry to innovate in order to achieve those requirements is very important. If you prescribe every detail—the diameter of everything, the thickness of this and that—rather than making things safe, you actually lead yourself down the path of blocking innovation and stifling progress.

We want to balance all of that out, and the best way of doing that is through performance regulations, with standards managed independently, that are required to be used in safety-critical situations to demonstrate that the products will actually do the job that the designer wants to achieve.

[Siobhan Baillie]

Q This might be a question for the Minister, but do you feel, given how the Bill and the regulations are going, that there will be scope for that wider definition and the performance-based work? Do you think the groundwork has been done and that we can fit around it?

Peter Caplehorn: I think there is a lot of work to be done in this area. We have been working closely with the MHCLG team as this has developed, but I still think that we probably need to map out a number of practical examples so that when the regulations eventually emerge we have the right practical answers. That might be in the form of guidance, but it certainly needs a little more development before we have a system that I could vouch for to deliver the outcomes needed.

Dr Steedman: There are interesting lessons from other sectors. The medical devices industry, for example, faces those challenges the entire time. Whether it is a sticking plaster or a heart device, there is a whole difference in the level of risk, so the way in which that type of product is regulated and the standard developed is another place to look. I agree with Peter that we need to take our time. The architecture of the Bill is there to do this, but there is a lot of work to do in developing the guidance and secondary legislation.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Q I asked the previous panel this question about construction products, but I should have held it for these two witnesses. By the way, I think that far too much plasterboard is used in homes anyway, and not for safety reasons but just because of quality of life, but that is another issue. The Bill does address construction products and future-proofs for products that we do not yet know about. That is fine, but quite a few historical building failures have resulted from the interrelationship—chemical, physical or whatever—between products that only emerged over time, or that should have been tested in the past. The products are safe on their own but not when put together in a certain way with other products. Could the Bill do more in that regard?

Peter Caplehorn: Thank you for that question, because it is of concern and it has been historically, as you said. The Bill as set out does start off in the right place. We have the structure to pursue those issues. In parallel, a lot of work is being done on the quality of testing and on verification of product quality. We are starting a new road that will start to address some of that, but equally, I would raise the move towards greater competence across the industry. Clearly, some product combinations will cause trouble and they can be seen by somebody fairly early on in the process who is competent in analysing those criteria. I would put designers and engineers firmly in that spot.

Some more difficult inherent problems that occur over time are in the province of the testing and research and development areas of product manufacturers themselves. They do a lot on research and development on products because, clearly, it is in nobody’s interest for things to emerge later on that will cause problems. None the less, we do see them.

Back to our central subject of the Bill, it does set out the framework, and I believe that with the secondary legislation coming along behind it, it will give us more opportunity to ensure that products are fully tested in combinations, to ensure that we reduce the prospect of any failure like that happening in future. None the less, it is a challenging arena.

Dr Steedman: It is important to remember that we are focusing on safety here, and that means human safety affected by a physical object, and not necessarily quality. The Bill will not necessarily transform the quality of the industry—that is a different thing all together. You are absolutely right that if you look at historical failures of engineered structures, in many cases it is to do with communication between different parties involved in a very complex industry and the long chain that Peter described. The failure to understand the consequences of the assumptions of the person who did that piece of work leads to an issue in years to come that people cannot diagnose. There are some very famous examples of that.

Perhaps one of the additional points worth making is on the digital information. New standards are being developed today on digital management of fire safety information, for example, and new tools—there is a BSI identifier tool to allow a persistent and enduring identifier to be applied to individual products, so that downstream, you could walk around a building in years’ time and identify precisely what that was, and if an issue had arisen you would be able to trace it back.

Dame Judith Hackitt’s recommendation on the “golden thread”, the digital trail of construction products and how they are assembled, and the ownership of the building through life management are a vital part of the culture change that will enable a much easier identification of problems in future. As Peter says, the physics is relatively well understood; if people do the right tests, they will find the problem, but sometimes things surface many years on and we want to catch that at the earliest possible stage, to make sure we avoid safety issues.