My Lords, I was not expecting to be in what the Romans called a frigidarium for this stage of the Bill. It is positively bracing. I am sure that as the week wears on we will get a slightly more normal temperature. It is already slightly better, so it clearly just takes a bit of time.
I will try to capture each group of amendments in three words or fewer. I am going to call this group the “widening the scope” group of amendments—that is three words. I will go through each amendment in turn. In practice, I have sympathy with every idea that has been put forward. However, I would like noble Lords to consider that the more we widen the scope, the greater the risk that we will actually fail in the first duty of any Government, which is to keep people safe. Our focus has to be based on what it is reasonable to expect from a new regulator in the Health and Safety Executive. So, although I have sympathy, I will resist this group of amendments, because, when we talk about high risk, the scope has to be necessarily tight in order to give the HSE the chance to grow as a regulator and to implement this regime properly.
However, I thank noble Lords for their contributions to this first group of amendments. I believe that this is a landmark piece of legislation and a necessary one. I can feel the broad support that it has from all sides of the House, and I look forward to further debates in Committee. There has already been good discussion in this grouping, and I am grateful for the commitment from all noble Lords to improve the Bill and to reform building safety more generally. I have listened to the concerns raised by noble Lords and I thank them for their helpful contributions. As I said, I will respond to them all in turn.
I start by talking about the fire which the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, mentioned. It is true that it was a staggeringly awful fire, even though there was no loss of life, and the noble Lord captured that very well in his speech. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to learn the lessons of the near misses, if you like, so I have met Geeta Nanda, chair of the G15, who I have known for some time. She is also the chief executive of the Metropolitan Thames Valley housing association, which manages Richmond House within Worcester Park, which consists of 23 households of shared owners. I have also met Dean Summers—on Zoom; I have not met him in person—who took over from Sean Ellis, and I had a meeting with him as the new managing director of St James.
It is fair to say that Richmond House, which was built in 2011 by the Berkeley Group—St James is part of the Berkeley Group—was built in a shockingly bad way. It was built without internal compartmentalisation and certainly would never have passed the building regulations at the time. There was also inadequate fire-stopping, which is one of the reasons why the fire spread so quickly. Candidly, it is absolutely right that
the Berkeley Group pays for its replacement and addresses all the losses suffered by the shared owners. I am very interested in that, and I have asked for a report from the housing association and Berkeley on progress on doing precisely that. The building was not built in line with building regulations, so it should not have happened. It is a four-storey building and is under 11 metres, which, according to the building regulations, should not have been able to happen, so we have an example of someone having signed off a building that should never have been signed off. That is the lesson of Richmond House.
Sometimes regulation does not work. That, for me, is the lesson. The other lesson is that fire is a tragedy, not just when you lose lives but in the opportunities lost. This Bill does a lot to make housing overall safer, and we will have much better housing stock over the next 30 years than we have had in the previous 30 years.