My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for his clear introduction to his amendments.
Noble Lords may remember that the Minister said at Second Reading that
“Dame Judith called for a complete overhaul of the system, and her recommendations underpin the Bill, with a golden thread that will ensure that, henceforth, people remain safe in the homes that we build for them. The Bill is unapologetically ambitious, creating a world-class building safety regulatory regime that holds all to the same high standard.”—[Official Report, 2/2/22; col. 916.]
We certainly applaud this ambition, but making high-rise residential buildings safe requires much more than action to stop fire spreading. There is also an urgent need to prevent those fires from starting in the first place and to look more broadly at what building safety means. We therefore support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, which are designed to make buildings safer and to increase resilience. As the noble Lord said, it is important to improve protections and safety for firefighters and for residents, to give people more time to evacuate the building and to make it less likely that the building itself will be completely destroyed.
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Turning to Amendment 2, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, the Bill sets out major regulatory and legislative reforms in the construction sector. Central to those reforms, as other noble Lords have said, is the golden thread policy that is intended to provide a framework to encourage transparency of information relating to all building safety matters, from the inception of a project to its completion.
The golden thread is also designed to encourage more collaborative working within the industry and to support much-needed culture change, and to increase competence and capability by the sharing of working practices, updated processes and information management control. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, therefore raises an important point in her amendment, because if the Bill is to be truly transformative, and if we are to be truly successful, the Government need to bring industry with them and so need to take account of the needs of those running the businesses and working in the industry.
The Opposition strongly support Amendment 4, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. Safety is currently undefined in the Bill, so it is simply not clear whether people’s health and well-being should be considered by the building regulator. This lack of clarity is unhelpful, because the safety of people is generally defined as an absence of health risks or harms. By broadening the definition of safety in this part of the Bill, the amendment provides an opportunity to look at the risks beyond high-rise buildings and fire and to address housing health and safety issues which the Bill’s title claims to address.
The Town and Country Planning Association’s written evidence on the Bill points out that health risks and harms such as air pollution, overheating and noise pollution, as well as more indirect issues such as poor
accessibility or walkability, insecurity, lack of access to green space, and cramped living conditions, are not covered by the Bill but undermine people’s well-being and health and, ultimately, their safety. I therefore hope that, as the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, requested, the Minister will welcome the amendment.
It is a shame that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has got stuck in Penrith and is unable to be here. He has my absolute sympathy; I struggled to get a train in from Carlisle this morning and was quite fortunate to make it here at all, so I wish him well. His amendments tie in with the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, including Amendment 9, to which I added my name.
Higher risk is not just about height. It is about the actual construction of a building and its safety standards, and about who lives there—about the vulnerability of the residents and their ability to escape, particularly taking disability into account. The Bill leaves a range of fire safety issues unresolved, from the lack of a national strategy as to how to evacuate high-rise buildings to the absence of a requirement to plan for the escape of disabled residents. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, says that, whenever she enters a building, she immediately thinks about how she can get out. I am sure that that is not something that the rest of us do automatically. The noble Baroness also talked about the complete lack of understanding about the needs of people with disabilities and some of the ludicrous suggestions that have been put forward.
We need a change to the definition of high-risk buildings to ensure that the scope of the new system includes all supported accommodation as well as residential care homes, regardless of height. The profile of residents is a significant contributor to the risk of life, and we believe that all buildings with vulnerable residents must be adequately scrutinised. The definition of high-risk buildings has been modified in the Bill and now includes care homes and hospitals that meet an 18-metre height threshold, but that still excludes vulnerable people living in buildings below the threshold, and if that threshold is reduced, more buildings will still come in below that. That means that those people will not have access to vital protections under this new system. We know that supported accommodation tends to be more in low-rise and medium-rise buildings, so this issue needs to be looked at. I want to reinforce that point: the risk to building safety should be defined by actual risk, not by some arbitrary cut-off.
Amendment 9 seeks to ensure that the Secretary of State, when revising the definition of a high-risk building, has regard to the ability of residents to evacuate a building. I hope that noble Lords and the Minister have listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the powerful comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and will recognise the importance of this provision. I urge the Minister to offer his support.
I was going to ask the same question that the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, asked about when we are likely to see a response to the consultation on personal emergency evacuation plans. It would be extremely helpful if the Minister could provide an update on that. Does he also have any information as to whether the Government will commit to making
PEEPs statutory requirements for any buildings covered by the fire safety order for residents who would have difficulty self-evacuating? With that, I hand over to the Minister.