Fire Safety Bill — House of Lords, 2020-10-29
Topic: Housing
Lucy Neville-Rolfe (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, first, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate, and I am especially grateful to my noble friend Lord Shinkwin for his very moving example. I also express my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for their support The Minister has confirmed that discussions are ongoing on insurance, warranties and other issues, which are important, but I point out that those relate largely to the future rather than the past. We have a past problem in this area—I describe it as "frozen"—which is obviously the reason for my probing amendment This afternoon, there has been a recognition that there is a problem here. Perhaps I could go backwards, thanking the Minister for his answers. I particularly thank him for his answers on the impact assessment, which were very satisfactory. On the website, you come up first with the impact assessment for the fire safety order, but that is the main impact assessment anyway. I was quoting extensively from it and I think that he will find it very useful, but it shows the volume of premises that we are talking about—those under 18 metres or 11 metres—so we have a problem The Government are rightly focusing a lot of attention on high-rise flats. The money that has been made available —I think that well over £1 billion was mentioned—is obviously welcome, and that has been focused on trying to get the cladding sorted as far as possible, because it is a great area of tragedy. However, the point about Committee is that you need to look at the detail of the regulations and make sure that you do not cause problems in other areas. Obviously, fires tend to start at the bottom of buildings—I very much understand that—but I think that you need to look at the risk, and my questions were specifically linked to that. It is a case of trying to make the system as sensible as possible so that, for example, responsible officers can, in appropriate circumstances, carry out risk assessments. At the moment, that does not seem to be happening. It seems that they are not doing it because they are worried and are trying to get in a consultant, and that leads to the "frozen" problem that I described I would be very happy to talk further about some of those points and the workstreams that the Government are looking at. I felt that the Minister was saying, "We are going to be very fierce on fire safety and I care about fire safety", but if a lot of people suffer perverse effects as a result, you have to think about how you are going to help them too, and how you are going to deal with that That is why I was slightly disappointed in the response to the amendment. It is only a probing amendment, so the fact that it does not quite work is not surprising. I am not an expert in this area. However, I am an expert in trying to balance consumer and business interests to get sensible regulation through this Chamber by looking at the detail. I would be very happy to help in any way I can to try to make sure that we solve some of these difficulties, either through later amendments or by coming up with something particular here. I emphasise that this issue is urgent; it is not something that can be left for another year.