Fire Safety Bill

Suzanne Webb Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Randall (Gedling) (Con) [V]]

The Fire Safety Bill is a short Bill of seven clauses that amends the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. That order consolidated different pieces of fire safety legislation, and this Bill clarifies that the order applies to a building’s structure, external walls and any common parts. I am sympathetic to the aims of Lords amendment 4, but I am concerned that the fire safety order, or any Bill concerned with amendments to it, is not the appropriate legislative device to resolve the problem of remediation costs. The fire safety order is designed to place duties on the person who has some level of control in a premises to ensure that they identify the fire safety risks for the building for which they are responsible and, if necessary, put the relevant precautions in place.

I understand the Government are looking to the building safety Bill to address the issues raised in this amendment, and I agree that that would be a more relevant place to consider them. I also understand that the clauses, as drafted, would stop all remediation costs being passed on to leaseholders, including those that one might expect to be covered by service and maintenance charges, such as safety work required as a result of routine wear and tear. There is a further concern that the amendment, as drafted, could delay the implementation of the Bill itself and crucial measures to improve the fire safety regulatory system, including delaying recommendations from the first phase of the Grenfell inquiry.

I am, however, pleased that the Government are paying for the removal of unsafe cladding for leaseholders in all residential buildings of over 18 metres in England. As Dame Judith Hackitt, the independent adviser to the Government on building safety, has said:

“Statistics show…that buildings above 18 metres have a four times greater risk of fatality in the event of a serious fire than lower rise buildings”,

and these buildings are rightly being prioritised for funding. For lower-rise buildings of between four to six storeys, there is a lower risk to safety, and leaseholders will gain the new protection of having cladding removed with a generous scheme to pay for it through a long-term, low-interest, Government-backed finance arrangement, where leaseholders never pay more than £50 a month for cladding removal.

I appreciate that nothing can compensate for the horror of the prospect of being liable for the costs of remedial work following the joy of moving into one’s home, bought on the entirely reasonable assumption that the block it is in would have been built correctly. However, given the complexity of this issue and the fact that leaseholders face paralysis, this does offer a route forward. I believe that these measures will help provide some certainty and confidence in this part of the housing market so that the affected flats can be bought and sold again, which would be a significant step forward from where we are at the moment.

For these reasons, I hope that the Fire Safety Bill can reach the statute book quickly, together with the building safety Bill, so that we will have a comprehensive set of measures in place to correct past wrongs and also to move forward safely.

[Suzanne Webb (Stourbridge) (Con) [V]]

I welcome the steps the Government are taking to improve fire safety, including through this important Bill, which is critical in clarifying that fire risk assessments are updated to take account of external walls and flat entrance doors. The Bill provides clarity as to what needs to be covered in fire risk assessments and empowers fire and rescue services to confidently take enforcement action and hold building owners or managers to account if they have not complied with their duties in respect of these parts of the building.

The Bill is an important first legislative step in implementing the Grenfell inquiry phase 1 recommendations and one part of the Government’s major building and fire safety reform programme, which I warmly welcome. Building safety is the Government’s priority, and I am pleased that there is now an independent expert panel convened after Grenfell to consult on fire safety issues.

My concern over the amendments is that they would not be cost-free and would render the Bill legally unsound, so the Government would be unable to proceed. We would not be able to give fire and rescue services the powers they need to keep people safe. These powers have been needed for some time, as Grenfell has shown us, without any doubt. We would also not be able to proceed to implement the Grenfell inquiry phase 1 recommendations, and that would be a travesty. For the bereaved or for those who have worked closely with the survivors, to say that delaying this Bill would not be a welcome move is an understatement. There is clearly a lot at stake in not implementing this Bill. The Grenfell enquiry reinforced the fact that the Government needed to do more, and so to stall on this Bill would not reflect the Government’s own commitment to never see such a tragedy again.

On whether leaseholders should have to pay for defects, it is clear that there has been a lot of substandard work that should never have been passed and had circumnavigated fire safety standards. We need to recognise this by holding those responsible to account. None of us wants to see leaseholders foot the bill. We need to see the sector step up and foot the cost of the remediation. We should not forget that the Government stepped in and put £5 billion against these issues, not forgetting the extra £3.5 billion. This is £8.5 billion to support leaseholders in a very difficult situation. Leaseholders in buildings over 18 metres will not have to pay for the cost of remediation, and those in buildings between 11 and 18 metres no more than £50 per month, compared with what could have been thousands of pounds.

I wanted to speak in this debate as I strongly echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), who spoke so passionately earlier. We need to just get on with this Bill; surely we owe that to her constituents.

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

Any debate about fire safety should not just be about cladding, nor just about buildings over 18 metres high, as residents of the four-storey block, Richmond House, which burned down in just 11 minutes in 2019, would testify. Nor is just about leaseholders, as the students and tenants, as well as leaseholders, in the Paragon building in my constituency found when they were evicted last October with one week’s notice as their blocks were found to be too dangerous to live in. Both blocks were built by Berkeley Homes. Nor is it just about residential housing, as those in student flats in Bolton found when fire crawled up the sides of their building.

The fire safety crisis did not just start with the tragedy at Grenfell Tower; it has been growing for years. As a result, hundreds of thousands of residents and users of thousands of buildings live in fear of being caught in a fire, and leaseholders face bankruptcy in having to fund the costs. In her report on building regulations, Judith Hackitt summed up a

“mindset of doing things as cheaply as possible and passing on responsibility for problems and shortcomings”.

One could start with the deregulation of the building and fire safety standards that began in the ’80s, when building control services were opened up to the private sector so that building inspectors now price for work on the number of visits, so fewer visits mean a cheaper bid. Developers have been cutting costs for years, going for the cheapest materials and corner-cutting again and again on site. Then we have had the growing skills crisis in the construction industry. The Government ignored the recommendations of the inquiries into the Lakanal House and Shirley Towers fatal fires almost 10 years ago. Even now, there is the inability to train and accredit qualified fire safety inspectors who are needed to inspect the properties that in fact should never have been signed off as safe to occupy in the first place.

As I said, the scope of this Bill is far too limited. It is fiddling while too many of our constituents and their homes are at risk of burning, and leaseholders face unaffordable costs. Responsibility for sorting this should lie with those who are responsible—the Government and their friends in the construction sector. As other speakers have said, the Bill hardly scratches the surface of the crisis. It does not even implement the recommendations of phase 1 of the Grenfell inquiry.