Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of a specific fund for waking watchers for unsafe high-rise residential buildings with a complex structural integrity which potentially require both waking watchers and alarms.

The National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) has been clear in its guidance published on 1 October 2020 that, where a building moves to a simultaneous evacuation fire safety strategy, building owners should move to install common fire alarm systems as quickly as possible to reduce or remove dependence on waking watches. The Waking Watch Relief Fund follows the NFCC guidance that alarms are safer and more cost effective. The specification of suitable alarm systems is set out in the guidance for the Fund which also follows NFCC advice. Alarms must meet that specification in order to be funded or if not give evidence as to why from the Fire and Rescue Service.

The Fund is specifically designed to remove the need for waking watch only. When waking watch is replaced with a common fire alarm system the NFCC guidance states that there may still be a need for a 24-hour presence of one or more trained persons to undertake the role of evacuation management – which is a different requirement and will depend on the individual circumstances of a particular building. We anticipate that in most circumstances the evacuation management role is not required, or it may require a reduced number of staff from a full waking watch. However, neither a waking watch or an alarm system is an adequate substitute for the swift remedial action which is why the Government is providing over £5 billion in grant funding for the remediation of unsafe cladding systems.