My Lords, this series of stand part amendments relates to Clauses 80 to 84 and would delete the building safety manager from the Bill. This is my first attempt at tabling amendments so I am nervous about the procedural aspects, but I hope to explain why I have come in on, as it were, this issue in particular. How I came about it is telling in relation to some general concerns that I have about the Bill, specifically Part 4.
Like some of us here, I came to this whole issue based on being a leaseholder and being part of a group of noble Lords who were horrified at the awful impending tragedy of leaseholders being forced to pay crippling remediation costs on the back of the response to the Grenfell tragedy. Many of those egregious injustices are now being addressed—some of them in this Committee.
However, in my speech at Second Reading, I raised a different set of concerns about adopting a zero-risk approach, including that risk aversion is in danger of creating zealotry beyond the bounds of what is reasonable, practical or desirable. If the Bill’s aim becomes to eliminate all risks, that itself has its own risks and creates a new set of victims. For example, if safety is turned into panic, it can lead to an ever-spiralling demand for safety outside the bounds of common sense. This could dangerously destroy confidence in both the construction sector and the high-rise housing market, and could create new layers of bureaucracy that hinder rather than help.
Rather to my surprise, my speech at Second Reading led to a group of leaseholders contacting me to say that they shared some of my concerns. Campaigners from the Tower Hamlets Justice for Leaseholders group and Friends in High Places explained that they understood because they felt that, as Covid has proved, it can be difficult in situations involving safety to agree that less should be done—but sometimes less should be done. This proposal for building safety managers for every block is just one of the concerns that the group has about some of the Bill’s unintended consequences. As the campaigners say, it imposes costly layers of bureaucracy on them while giving sweeping powers to managing agents and freeholders and inflicting yet more pain on leaseholders, with provisions such as building safety managers threatening to turn this into what they call “another EWS1 fiasco”.
All the provisions in Part 4 seem to assume that the problem of residential fire safety is a lack of appropriate people and processes checking for fire risks in every possible instance. However, perhaps the real problem is the competence of the people who are already in place and the enforcement of rules and regulations that already exist, rather than making up lots more or creating new roles. As the leaseholder group notes, writing into law that every building will have to appoint a building safety manager is a duplication of the role of the existing managing agents and building managers, and proceeds from the false assumption that these housing blocks are “like barrels of oil needing almost daily surveillance and supervision to ensure that they don’t burst into flames at any moment.”
The truth is that fires are relatively rare, but they cannot be prevented altogether. The priority of this Bill should be to build in adequate safety systems and then maintain those properly so that residents can evacuate as quickly and easily as possible should fire occur. Instead, these clauses create an unnecessary duplicate role that will—guess what?—yet once more, financially cripple leaseholders.
The Government themselves estimate that the cost of a building safety manager will be £60,000 a year per block. For Lucy, in a block of 33 flats, this will add £1,818 to her annual service charge. For Ruth, in a block of 19 flats, the building safety manager costs would add £3,157 a year to her service charges. It is not clear, either, whether that £60,000 estimate that was on the Government’s website has factored in employers’ national insurance and pension, plus the 20% VAT that an employing company would have to add to the charge. That would bring the cost to £85,000, in which case Lucy’s annual service charges would rise by £2,575 and Ruth’s by £4,473.
It is not clear exactly whether that £60,000 figure still stands, because the fact sheet explaining the building safety manager’s average pay of £60,000 a year was rather quietly removed from the Government’s own website after 5 pm last Wednesday. Luckily, the leaseholders have screenshots, which I have here if anybody would like to look at them. I am hoping that this is a positive sign that the Government are going to scrap the policy—delete the policy just like the web page—or at
least water it down by turning it into a function that can be met by existing managing agents and property managers, and not treating it as a separate job.
With the words of the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, ringing in our ears, he has warned that
“too many buildings are declared unsafe”,
and that many of the problems associated with the cladding scandal have been caused not by unsafe buildings but over-zealous inspectors and nefarious players
“seeking to profit from the current crisis”.
We should have those words in the back of our minds when we ask key questions.
4.11 pm