My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for raising an important issue. There is confusion and concern around these EWS1 forms and assessments. There is confusion—which I will come on to, following on from what the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, just said—and there is certainly concern from leaseholders. Either they wait for ever for these external wall structural assessments, or those who do them err on the side of caution because of the way that they were brought in as an emergency measure following the awful Grenfell fire.
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I looked on the RICS website to find out what it is saying. The Minister has said several times that EWS is gone because PAS 9980 has been introduced. There is a question-and-answer section on the RICS website, and one question is:
“Does the PAS 9980 … replace the need for an EWS1 form?”
The answer is:
“No. The code of practice for external walls is for building surveyors and fire engineers who will need to carry out mandatory EWS fire risk assessments … as part of the Fire Safety Act.”
It goes on to discuss the Fire Safety Act and the need for fire risk assessors, which my noble friend Lord Stunell has raised many times. Qualified fire risk assessors are an absolutely basic requirement for EWS assessments and the Fire Safety Act, and we do not have enough of them. In the discussions on that Act in Committee and on Report, I remember he brought the figures on how long it will take to train them—it was years. That did not fill me with hope that this was going to happen any time soon. So there is a logjam of issues here, which is why this amendment is important.
The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, has said quite a lot about what the RICS folk have said, so I will not repeat that. But the trouble with this is that there is a logjam because of the lack of fire risk assessors and there is confusion about EWS and PAS, and the leaseholders are bearing the cost—I am fed up with them bearing the cost for issues that they have not created.
I am very supportive of this amendment, because all it asks us to do is think about all of the issues and come back. Perhaps the Minister will commit to writing
to all of us to put our minds at rest that the Government will create a lot of good fire risk assessors or de-risk some of the issues—this is the problem—that have been created by this emergency measure, although I understand why it was done. With those brief words, I hope that the Minister will respond positively.