My Lords, this group covers three big issues—residents’ engagement strategy, access to properties, and the third part, relating to government amendments, some of which have not been moved today, on construction products and liabilities. My noble friend Lord Stunell will wind up this debate, using his expert knowledge of many of these issues, so I shall restrict my comments to the amendments about residents’ engagement, access and a little bit about construction products.
I completely agree that there has to be a residents’ engagement strategy. One of the learning points from the terrible Grenfell Tower fire was that residents wanted a voice and tried to make their voice heard, but it was not listened to. Their voice may have been heard, but it was certainly not listened to—and it was certainly not acted on.
As the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, has pointed out, there is a big part of the Hackitt report which references the importance of the residents’ voice, and of listening to and acting on what they say. They are the folk who live there. They are the people who daily see what goes on. Their voice must be heard so, whatever else we do, I hope that we will strengthen those clauses about resident engagement. Picking up on the point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, we need residents’ associations to do that. We cannot force them to exist, but we can put the onus on the freeholder or the accountable person to ensure that there is some method for the residents’ voice to be heard.
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The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, referred to a friend of mine, Councillor Rabina Khan, with whom I have had a meeting about these very issues. She is absolutely right: leaseholders are tenants when it comes to rights but owners when it comes to the bills that are passed over.
Obviously, I support Amendment 50A. I think this issue will come back on Report. We should seek any way we can to strengthen the power of the residents’ voice, because that is vital to the safety of buildings.
The amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, are about access to dwellings. It is an important issue. It is about where we put the balance between rights and responsibilities. There are additional responsibilities when one lives in a building shared with many others. Those who try to restrict access for gas safety checks, for instance, are potentially putting everybody else in that building at additional risk.
My understanding is that there is already requirement of landlords—I do not know about freeholders or managing agents—to write to obtain permission for access for a stated reason, be it gas safety checks, electrical safety checks, boiler safety checks or whatever. It would be good to know—perhaps the Minister can respond on that—whether that is an essential duty also of a managing agent or a freeholder as the organising company for a higher-risk building. Will they have to do that? If so, that might allay some of the fears that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, laid out before us. Those points were well made; we have to balance those rights and responsibilities. The question is where it finally ends up. Maybe that is one way forward.
Finally, I turn to Clause 128 and construction products—which I have raised before, and I shall do so again. I believe that the Government have tabled an amendment to the clause which I do not think will be moved today. What I am concerned about is not necessarily the ins and outs of construction products—the details of it—but who does the testing and who does the certification. Who is responsible? This is the theme that I have come back to again and again: who will be accountable for these products? The Bill documents
make reference to the Office for Product Safety and Standards. They talk additionally about the responsibility being passed to trading standards at some time in the future.
Currently we have a Building Research Establishment, which was put into a charitable trust in 1997, I think. It has a duty to—indeed, its whole purpose is to—test building products, particularly for flammability, as it happens. I want to understand where this now fits into the testing of products. Then there is the British Board of Agrément, which is supposed not only to do testing and certification but to see how products work when they are put together in a building and whether they retain the features that have been certified individually and separately. Again, Grenfell exposed that—the cladding was there but the insulation was awful. It is about how the products fit together. That is what those bodies currently do, so where does that fit into this office of product safety and standards? Will it use the research expertise of both those bodies to come to a conclusion about product safety? How will that work?
Then there is the business of trading standards. It was not clear to me whether this meant local government trading standards and how they would be involved. They certainly do not have that expertise currently. Funding cuts have resulted in a contraction of their scientific laboratories, which did a lot of high-level testing of products; I am not sure whether they have that expertise currently for construction testing of products. This is not clear. I know that they will have responsibility for enforcement, but if you enforce you need to have a bit of expertise as well. I would love to understand from the Minister how those fit together.
I raise this because it was at the heart of what happened at Grenfell. Were products used that were flammable? If I remember rightly—I will check the British Board of Agrément’s report—the certificate issued said that the cladding was flammable. Somebody ignored that or put it away somewhere. We need to understand this, because it is critical to future building safety that any new builds have construction materials that are safe for the purpose for which they are to be used—and safe in conjunction with other materials in the building. I need to understand how that will be done and who will finally be accountable. Who will put their name at the bottom saying, “I take responsibility”? Otherwise, those buildings will not be safe.