Under scrutiny: the Building Safety Bill

Government & Politics

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Under scrutiny: The Building Safety Bill

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In her latest report on the progress of the Building Safety Bill, FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin focuses on the scrutiny of key aspects by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee

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n the last issue of FIRE, the NFCC, FBU, National Housing Federation, the Construction Industry Council and the Association of British Insurers shared their initial views on the draft Building Safety Bill.

Now that parliament is back in session, it is time for MPs to start their scrutiny and hold the government to account. The first stage of this process began with the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee, which met on September 14 to hear evidence from a range of witnesses.

Clive Betts MP is the long-standing Chair of the HCLG Select Committee and will oversee a line by line scrutiny of the draft Bill. The committee will be making recommendations to the government about how building safety can be improved and whether the draft Bill does enough or if changes should be made to it.

To assist this process, the committee is calling witnesses to provide evidence and already over 200 organisations have written to the committee offering to do this. There will be ten evidence panels with expert witnesses providing their views to the committee.

The first online evidence panel session heard from Sir Ken Knight, Chair of the Grenfell Tower Independent Expert Advisory Panel, and Roy Wilsher, Chair of the NFCC.

Clive Betts started off the session by asking: “Do you think the Bill as drafted will prevent another Grenfell from happening?”

“It’s the beginning of systemic change in Building Regulation and lays the foundation for long-term reform and regulatory oversight,” said Sir Ken. He went on to focus on how the legislation is being presented – a combination of both primary legislation (where the draft Bill becomes an Act of Parliament) and secondary legislation (based on provisions contained in the Act). This point was also well made by Graham Watts who wrote in last month’s FIRE feature on the draft Bill.

He noted the reliance on secondary legislation for much of the detail and how it does not have as much scrutiny as primary legislation. “I don’t object to that,” he said, “because it avoids what I have heard called the fossilisation of our existing Building Regulations that have had so little change for such a long time. It allows some flexibility for the future.”

Like Sir Ken, Roy Wilsher acknowledged the detail will emerge from secondary legislation and is not yet known, but he will be seeking clarity on a number of areas including, scope, payment and resources.

Responding, Clive Betts made it clear that his committee would not be passive and wait for the secondary legislation to emerge. “We ought to be flagging up in our

“It’s the beginning of systemic change in Building Regulation and lays the foundation for long-term reform and regulatory oversight” Sir Ken Knight, Chair, Grenfell Tower Independent Expert Advisory Panel

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recommendations what we think is going to be needed not just in this Bill but in the legislation to follow.”

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Building Safety Regulator Moving on to look at how the Building Safety Regulator will operate, the Chair asked whether the Health and Safety Executive is the right place for it to be located.

“The advantage of the HSE taking over that initial part of the regulator is that they have a vast historic experience of COMAH regulations and are well established in that field.”

Sir Ken said the main problem for the HSE is the skills gap.

There is a lack of fire engineers already and even more will be needed to work in the HSE for the new regulator. He does not want to see a situation where one part of industry is poaching fire engineers from another: the overall volume of fire engineers needs to increase. However, he did not offer any solutions as to how this might happen.

Later in the session, Roy Wilsher returned to the point about the dearth of fire engineers and shared what the NFCC has been doing to address this point. “One of the things we have been talking to government about is the number of fire engineers, which is linked back into

academia and the number of universities that offer fire engineering degrees which is very, very few at the moment.

Our education and training systems need to catch up with this new regime as well.”

The scope of the draft Bill is of great interest to the committee. Dame Judith recommended that legislation should apply to buildings over 18 metres in height; the draft Bill reduces the height to 11 metres, meaning that many more buildings are affected by the provisions in the legislation. This of course links to the points made above about the number of people qualified in areas like fire engineering who will be critical to the scrutiny of a building at all stages of its life cycle commonly known as the golden thread.

Expanding on this point, Sir Ken said: “The scope of the regulator must consider, in its broadest sense, the highest risk.” That would include care homes, hospitals and other high-risk occupancy buildings. Sir Ken and Wilsher were in agreement on this point. Should that end up being the case, then the strain on the accountable person and the building safety manager to find the right people with the right skills will be even more acute.

“We ought to be flagging up in our recommendations what we think is going to be needed not just in this Bill but in the legislation to follow” Clive Betts, Chair, HCLG Select Committee

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Government & Politics

“Our education and training systems need to catch up with this new regime as well” Roy Wilsher, Chair, NFCC

Digital Golden Thread The committee was interested in how the digital golden thread would work in practice and heard from Sir Ken that it is not an entirely new concept, with Building Information Management (BIM) already a well-established practice across the construction industry.

He provided a useful summary of how the trail of information that runs through the lifecycle of the building provides an opportunity to add in the fire risk assessments and changes to fire safety provisions once the building is handed over to the responsible person.

As the discussion above about competence demonstrates, it is important to have consistency and certainty and that is where British Standards can be helpful. The Building Regulations Advisory Committee (BRAC) is working with the Industry Safety Steering Group (Chaired by Dame Judith Hackitt) and government to develop them.

Interestingly, the draft Bill will abolish BRAC and be replaced with a new body called the Building Advisory Committee. Should this new body not be up to the job, it could find itself abolished too as the Secretary of State can do that through secondary legislation powers in the draft Bill. Sir Ken pointed out this anomaly during his evidence and hoped that the committee would look at that in more detail as it continues to take evidence.

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Accountable Person Mary Robinson MP asked whether there be specific duties related to fire safety on the face of the draft Bill.

Wilsher responded by highlighting his broader concerns about duty holders. “We now have an accountable person and a building safety manager under one regime and a responsible person under the fire safety regime. We think a principal accountable person that you can hold to account is where we should be aiming.

Whether that is achievable straightaway, we don’t know.”

He went on to make a comparison. “The Health and Safety Executive always look for an accountable person if there is a breach of health and safety. We think the same should apply here.”

Sir Ken took a different approach in response to this question and talked about how the draft Bill describes the built environment industry and how that description excludes the manufacture of products to be used in buildings. He makes an important point here as that would of course include all the fire protection and firefighting measures. He says it is a gap and a missed opportunity.

Expanding on the questions about duties relating to fire and rescue services, Bob Blackman MP asked about the relationship between the building safety manager and the Fire and Rescue Service and whether there should be a duty to co-operate.

Sir Ken was supportive of this idea. “I see no reason why it shouldn’t be. There is every intention for co-operation and consultation, but I think making it clear there is a duty to consult or a duty to listen would be the opportunity to do just that. There is an expectation on all sides that you would want this to happen, for those responsible for the building to come together to find the best solution for the safety of the occupants.”

Wilsher concurred. “We welcome the duty to consult and extending that to the duty to co-operate can only help.”

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Competence There is a lot of work taking place to address the issues of competence and how that relates to building safety.

Sir Ken said that he was pleased to see the government fund the development of British standards in the area of competence: they are sponsoring standards related to the roles of principal designer, principal contractor and building safety manager. He added that work on third party accreditation alongside this work is going to be really important.

He offered the committee a reminder about the relevance of all this to public safety. “The building regulators perform an absolutely important role for not only ensuring that people are being held to account and the buildings are safe, but the occupants are satisfied and feel safe. And that the public know that these plans [for buildings] are properly scrutinised and built as they were designed to be built and are safe.”

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Transformational Change This hour-long session was just the first of many evidence sessions and it already shows that there are key areas of the draft Bill that need more work. Some of the issues were highlighted by the organisations who took part in the FIRE feature last month and will no doubt form the basis of their own evidence as they too attend as witnesses in future evidence panels.

There is a danger that the same points will be made over and over to the exclusion of smaller, more nuanced points like the ones that Sir Ken makes about definitions of the built environment or the apparent demotion of the advisory board.

One of the problems of select committee hearings is that witnesses do not always answer the question posed but use the opportunity to get across what they actually want to say. That is not a revelation but the practical reality of this type of scrutiny and also downside of the virtual world. It is so much better when the witness is physically in front of the committee and there is more opportunity to probe and ask follow-up questions.

This first session felt staid and rather too deferential; hopefully over time the committee will be more challenging and really get to the heart of the draft Bill so that it can put forward a robust set of recommendations that will improve and strengthen it and get the transformational change to building safety that is so urgently needed. www.fire–magazine.com | October 2020 | 13