My Lords, Amendment 3 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Pinnock. The Bill was of course discussed at Second Reading and is a long-overdue framework Bill, with a potential reach far wider than the high-rise residential blocks at the centre of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. I thank the Minister for the very open-handed way in which he has talked to Members on all sides of your Lordships’ House about the Bill and its intention.
We know that every multi-occupied home is in scope, from terrace houses to high-rise executive duplexes. It will impose significant duties on a scarce group of professionals—fire safety engineers. It will also impose significant duties on building owners of many different levels of professional competence and probity, and potentially it would impose significant costs on the occupiers of homes—renters, leaseholders and owner-occupiers—as commented on in the previous discussion by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.
In other discussions today, we shall be looking at the functions and duties in more detail, but the intention behind Amendment 3 is to probe whether the Government have understood nearly clearly enough how much work they have to do before the Bill can become operational.
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The current evidence is that there is nothing like enough capacity to deliver a regime that covers all the accommodation in scope. There are not enough professional fire engineers to make assessments, and there are not enough fire safety officers in the fire and rescue services to check and inspect all the premises. Indeed, according to Home Office figures, the numbers of these have actually fallen over the last 10 years; and we will probably need to double the number of fire officers with those competences in the fire and rescue services. I detect a little bit of teeming and lading with the numbers of those two vital groups. The Government seem to see more assessors being recruited from the fire and rescue services, and, at the same time, more fire safety officers being recruited from the fire engineering profession to boost the fire and rescue services. Where will the new people who are going to be needed come from, and how soon can their training and professional experience be brought up to a suitable level?
The making of fire assessments, the checking of those assessments and their monitoring will be a very big task, and it will be front-loaded: the biggest surge in these assessments is going to be when the regulations come into force, when hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of assessments become mandated for the first time. There are not enough “responsible persons” either, with the requisite skills and information to do a decent job of overseeing and maintaining a good level of safety in each set of premises. That in itself is a massive challenge for landlords and managing agents and the staff they employ.
Further down the track, there will be a surge of remedial work to carry out the necessary alterations. One estimate supplied to me and probably other noble Lords by the British Woodworking Federation—I thank Mr Murray Stuart of the BWF for these figures—is based on the fire door inspection published in June. It said that only 24% out of a sample of 100,000 currently installed fire doors proved to have third-party certification and were installed and maintained correctly. That is 75,000 fire doors for a start that may not pass muster under the new regime. There are, of course, millions more doors than that in total, and if three-quarters of them also prove unfit for purpose, we can predict that the installers and tradespersons with the right skills will be in very short supply as well. The new recruits and the new skills cannot be materialised overnight. Beyond that, the supply chains themselves may well be stretched. I note in passing that none of those things is going to get any easier with the closing of routes for employment via the European Union. Amendment 3 places a duty on the Government to consult on all these matters and to make a proper assessment of them, and to report on them to Parliament as a preliminary to the new regime coming into force.
Perhaps today, or in a letter to follow up, the Minister could tell us the Government’s current assessment of the capacity of the fire and rescue service, the fire
engineering profession and the construction industry to deliver on the workload that the Bill will impose. Can he tell us how he intends to boost recruitment and training, and phase in the introduction of the scheme so that those at highest risk are covered first? Will half-baked and gimcrack assessments be weeded out thoroughly, and urgent work prioritised? How much does his department expect it all to cost, and who will be paying for it?
I understand that the Minister might be reluctant to accept Amendment 3 today, but I am expecting him to assure your Lordships that everything is in hand and that various steps are being taken, et cetera. However, for those of us—I think that is everyone in the Committee—who wish success to this Bill, there is an uneasy feeling that, in fact, the Government have not yet got everything in hand, and that they are at risk of a severe overreach that would bring the regime into disrepute. More seriously, it could fail to achieve its key objective of making people’s homes safer, leaving us with a framework Bill that proves to be more of a hole than substance—more red tape than safety net—and still leaving us a long way from tackling, let alone solving, the problems that the Grenfell inquiry and Dame Judith Hackitt have identified. I beg to move.