Late last year, the new government’s Queen’s Speech saw building safety and fire safety bills introduced, with the latter setting out to ‘learn the lessons’ from the Grenfell Tower fire. The Building Safety Bill would ‘place new and enhanced regulatory regimes for building safety and construction products, and ensure residents have a stronger voice in the system’.
It aims to ‘learn the lessons’ of the Grenfell Tower fire and strengthen the ‘whole regulatory system for building safety, including fundamental changes to the regulatory framework for high-rise residential buildings’. This first bill is also said to aim to prompt changes in ‘industry culture’ in order to ‘ensure accountability and responsibility and ensuring residents are safe in their homes’.
The main elements include an ‘enhanced safety framework’ for high rise residential buildings, ‘taking forward the recommendations’ from the Hackitt Review as well as ‘going further’ in certain areas. It would provide ‘clearer accountability and stronger duties’ for those responsible for high rise fire safety ‘throughout the building’s design, construction and occupation’, with ‘clear competence requirements to maintain high standards’. The bill would also give residents a ‘stronger voice in the system’, ensuring concerns ‘are never ignored’ and that they ‘fully understand how they can contribute to maintaining safety’ in their buildings.
Other elements include strengthening enforcement and sanctions to ‘deter non-compliance’, hold the ‘right people to account when mistakes are made, and ensure they are not repeated’, as well as developing a ‘new stronger and clearer’ framework providing ‘national oversight of construction products’, in order to ensure all products ‘meet high performance standards’.
It will develop a new system to oversee the ‘whole built environment’, local enforcement agencies and national regulators working together ‘to ensure that the safety of all buildings is improved’. Finally, it will legislate to require that new build home developers ‘must belong to a New Homes Ombudsman’.
The Fire Safety Bill meanwhile aims to ensure that ‘an appalling tragedy like Grenfell can never happen again’, and ‘hints’ at supporting the findings from the inquiry’s first phase (), with ‘main benefits’ said to include providing residents with ‘reassurance’ that lessons have been learned as well as making it clear that building owns and managers know they are ‘responsible for assessing the risks of external walls and fire doors’.
Its main elements include a clarification that the scope of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 ‘includes the external walls of the building, including cladding’ and ‘fire doors for domestic premises of multiple occupancy’. The ‘relevant enforcement powers’ to hold both building owners and managers ‘to account’ would be strengthened, while a ‘transitional period’ for these two roles – or the responsible person – and the fire and rescue services would assist in placing infrastructure.
The NFCC stated that it was ‘pleased to see building safety remains a key focus’, with chair Roy Wilsher commenting: ‘I was pleased to see the vitally important area of building safety referenced in the Queen’s Speech. The government will be taking forward all 53 of Dame Judith Hackitt’s recommendations and has accepted - in principle - the findings of the Grenfell Inquiry phase one report.
‘It is essential this work happens at pace to ensure people feel safe in their homes, while dealing with the broken building regulations system. This simply cannot be allowed to continue; I will be pushing for this to happen. NFCC will continue to work with government to push this area of work forward, while calling for increased protection resources to make it a reality and to ensure fire services are given the addition resources to undertake this work.
‘The newly formed Protection Board is going some way to build on this. However, to make significant change, there needs to be significant investment. The work to remove dangerous cladding needs to move much more quickly, as people across the country are living in clad buildings. The recent student accommodation fire in Bolton was a stark reminder of the need to build and maintain buildings properly and the need to address timber-frame building fires which have also been prevalent this year.
‘I look forward to working with the government in the New Year to push this work forward and see changes made for the better, addressing the broken system and increasing public confidence.’
The NFCC also noted that building safety measures ‘must not be treated in isolation’, as ‘the whole system needs addressing and actions arising from the Hackitt report need to be implemented’, and on the Fire Safety Bill it added that the fire and rescue services ‘will need the powers and resources to implement this proposed change in a professional manner’.