My Lords, I too am indebted to my noble friend Lord Marlesford for alerting me to this. I am absolutely horrified—particularly in light of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff—about the real problems behind carbon monoxide poisoning. I take it that this regulation relates to smoke alarms and to alarms that will identify carbon monoxide. They are two separate things.
My mind then begins to race ahead and I think, “Wait a minute—does anybody know that we should have these alarms?”. Surely every house and flat in the country should have them. If the situation is as serious as we are led to believe, and I am sure that it is, this is important. I live in a purchased flat in a block of flats and last year there was a fire in one of the flats. The whole flat was burned out. There was no alarm—or rather there was a smoke alarm in the flat, but it did not matter. I have a smoke alarm in my flat that goes off when I burn the toast, which happens quite frequently. I go down to say that I am terribly sorry for the alarm, but actually it does not ring outside my flat. I could be burned to a cinder along with the toast. Only when it is eventually noticed from outside that there is a fire, or smoke coming out, will an alarm be sounded throughout the whole building. It is so haphazard. The fact that this is being looked at today will benefit somebody—all of us could benefit from it—if people begin to think about the issue in depth.
I also found the report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee upsetting, even where in the first paragraph it says that these regulations could not be scrutinised until our first meetings in the new session were convened in May, when we came back. This is really unacceptable, particularly when I go round saying how wonderful for scrutiny the House of Lords is.
We all agree that we are the ones who scrutinise the legislation. Nobody else does it as well as we do. No other Parliament in the world does it as well as we do. Yet we do not do it. This is crazy.
My other point is about press notices. I draw the Grand Committee’s attention to paragraph 7.3 of the Explanatory Memorandum, which states:
“Given the diminishing returns from public information campaigns, it is therefore necessary to supplement them with regulations”.
I really think that the regulations should make it absolutely imperative that smoke alarms and anti-carbon monoxide alarms are installed and regularly checked. There are tenancies that last for five years or 10 years. Some last for 12 months. What is being said here is that the alarm has to be sure to be working only at the beginning of the tenancy. That is stupid. There must surely be some form of measure to ensure that alarms are investigated or assessed annually, or maybe even triennially.
If you have a car that is more than three years old, it has an MOT every year. This kind of check is just as important. Dangers do not stem just from these wonderful combustion systems. The fire in our block of flats was actually caused by the overheating of a computer charger. The whole thing more or less blew up. The benefit now is that we have been alerted to the danger. I was certainly never alerted to it. Instead of taking pride in the fact that we scrutinise everything, we can say that with the diminishing returns from public information campaigns we are alerting people to the need for checks and assessments. Surely people need them anyway.