My Lords, I am so grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for tabling the amendment and bringing this important matter to the attention of your Lordships. I well know that the noble Lord is an active member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety & Rescue. He kindly brought the honorary secretary of the group, Ronnie King, to see me last week so that I could hear more about this matter, and I am very grateful for that opportunity. Mr King was a senior firefighter and has now dedicated himself to trying to save even more lives by campaigning on issues of fire safety. He wants more people to install sprinklers. He wants the barriers that might stand in the way of the installation of more sprinklers to be knocked down. The amendment would result in fire suppression systems, known to most of us as fire sprinklers, being referred to explicitly in legislation as water for firefighting.
I understand that a key driver behind the amendment is the problems that can arise between fire sprinkler installers and water undertakers when connections for fire sprinkler systems are required. Those problems include undertakers requiring meters to be installed on the connections, smaller connection sizes than would be ideal for the fire sprinkler system and requirements for internal storage.
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The intention behind the amendment is to refer explicitly to fire sprinklers in the legislation to make those conversations easier and therefore facilitate more fire sprinkler installations. As fire sprinklers are not referred to directly as water for fire-fighting, they can default to being classified as water for non-domestic use.
I am happy to put the facts on the record. The Water Industry Act 1991 already states that water companies cannot charge for water for firefighting, so water used in fire sprinklers cannot be charged for. I do not believe that fire sprinklers need to be explicitly referred to in the legislation to be counted as providing water for firefighting. Plainly, that is what they do.
That is not to say that there is not a problem here, but I must say that I think that the problems which we have been made aware of would not be affected by whether fire sprinkler connections were explicitly defined in legislation as connections for firefighting. The water industry and the fire sprinkler industry have worked together to create a voluntary protocol, with the aim of it being used to inform individual water companies’ policy on connections for fire sprinklers. The protocol is designed to assist the conversations between water companies and fire sprinkler installers by providing guidelines regarding the requirements for connections.
I am aware that a previous version of this protocol was not always followed by companies, and that has led to the revision of the document. I put on record that the Government are very supportive of that
document. I propose to write to all the water undertakers to demonstrate that support and to encourage them to update their policy documents.
Having heard about those problems for myself, I have asked my officials to follow this up with Water UK, the body which represents all the water companies. Water UK also supports the protocol and wants to make sure that it works. It recognises that, although all the chief executives of water companies are signed up to the protocol, we need to make sure that its guidelines are properly understood at an operational level. Water UK wants to work with us and the water companies to ensure that the protocol is followed and to eliminate those problems.
I hope that I have managed to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and hope that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.