My Lords, it was with concern that I read the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s 31st report in relation to the very matter that the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, with his usual precision and excellence, has outlined: namely, the question of the building safety regulator.
It cannot be very often that a committee comes up with statements such as:
“We consider that the Supplementary Memorandum provides wholly inadequate justification for giving the Secretary of State such a broad Henry VIII power to—”
and the third bullet point under that is,
“determine what functions the regulator will have”.
It could have added “and modify them at will”, because that is in fact what the situation is. It goes on to say,
“we consider that Amendment 467D contains an inappropriate delegation of power that should not form part of the Bill”.
It could not be clearer.
The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, set about providing a whole series of logical and technical explanations to this. However, there is another explanation, and this is my take on the back story of what is really going on here. Throughout the process, post the Grenfell tragedy, the Government have sought to manage risk and control what might otherwise be seen as unacceptable political and economic fallout. Ever since their own consolidated advice note of January 2020, admitting in so many words that many of the issues found at Grenfell Tower could affect other buildings of any height, they have sought to delimit the ongoing and subsequent damage that that caused.
This spawned a reference to the department’s technical advisers and a resultant independent expert’s statement of July 2021. That sought to identify and justify that buildings under 11 metres were of an inherently lower risk. This in turn triggered an approach to RICS to amend its EWS1 scheme and its advice to mortgage valuers. We know the outcome of that was greeted with significant ministerial disapproval.
Clause 213, on at least one level—I am not going back over all that—could be seen as an attempt to silence or modify the views of independent professionals to align with the Secretary of State’s thinking or to cancel concepts of commercial risk assessment. Amendment 467D, for its part, could be interpreted as seeking to make sure that risk assessment and remediation via the building safety regulator is toned down. This would at least fit with differing standards under the Government’s pledged remediation contract, of which we have heard a great deal in recent months, and a fair interpretation of the Building Safety Act 2022 standards.
I leave it to your Lordships to consider whether these are, as I suspect, connected in some discrete or perhaps not so discrete policy aimed at managing risk and potentially seeking to outrun market sentiment. All I say is that Governments will never succeed in outrunning market sentiment; to suppose that that might happen is tantamount to saying that you can walk on water. From that point of view, I do not get it.
I remind the Committee, first, that low-rise does not equate to acceptably low-risk. The independent expert’s statement came 11 months after a disastrous fire at four-storey Richmond House in the London Borough of Merton, which was apparently not seen as fit to mention. Secondly, whatever the various machinations, blame-shifting, smoke and mirrors or other activities, it is government policy that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of home owners, many of whom have written to me, being unable to mortgage or sell their properties and facing enormous recurring charges for insurance and other measures. If the Financial Times is to be believed, leasehold flats are now falling seriously out of favour in the marketplace. This is just when increasing densities, and indeed more housebuilding and better use of scarce urban sites, are called for. It is a matter of government policy that we should build more homes.
The genie is out of the bottle and is not going back in. Around 15 months ago, I said in the context of the Building Safety Bill, as it was then, that the Government needed to get ahead of the curve in dealing with this. They have not done so; they are labouring in the wake of events. This is not good enough. It makes the building safety regulator substantially the sole control of the department, as opposed to being an independent body like the Health and Safety Executive. I just add that it was changing the health and safety regime a few years ago that radically changed injuries and fatalities on construction sites. Therefore, it has form and a track record. This approach to the building safety regulator is totally unacceptable, as far as I am concerned.
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