Building Safety Bill

Lord Crisp Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, I commend the Bill and very much welcome the concurrent announcements on funding. I come to this from a health background. Health, housing and buildings are intimately connected. However, I have to say that I have been on a learning curve and have talked to a lot of people over the past few days, including architects, builders and others.

I have heard about exactly what the Minister, my noble friend Lord Best and others have commented on: the crisis in construction. As some have said to me, there is a race to the bottom, with people getting away with what they can and a culture in which clients stand back and architects no longer have responsibility for quality. As one person said to me, quality has been devolved to the contractor, so people are marking their own homework or, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, said, shifting blame from one to the other. This is a systemic issue and not about individuals. I am delighted that the Minister and the Government have ambitions to address that system.

I recognise that the immediate focus is on high buildings and the response to Grenfell, that the matter is urgent and that this has been a long time coming. However, there is a tension here between that short-term ambition and the wider remit of the Bill. Like other noble Lords, I have enormous sympathy for the families of those who have died and am deeply moved by the stories we have heard in your Lordships’ Chamber and elsewhere—as well as by the pressure and problems that people have faced over the past four years, waiting to know what will happen to their investment, home or whatever. The Bill cannot avoid these wider issues and I do not really think that the Government want to.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and other noble Lords reminded us that the Hackitt report talked at length about culture change and the need to force things to be done differently. I welcome the framework that has been developed around accountability, responsible officers and the golden thread. I should be interested to understand in Committee and on Report how those will be worked out in more detail.

We also need a change in how we think about safety—not as a narrow technical concept about freedom from immediate injury but as something much broader, perhaps more common-sense, linking to health and well-being. It should be a concept that people would recognise. If they were thinking about safety in buildings, they would think about damp, cold, poor air circulation and buildings where falls are likely to happen on the stairs, as well as fire and electrical faults that cause fire, and much more—a wider concept of safety. All that is, of course, appropriate to the Long Title of the Bill, which is to make

“provision about the safety of people in or about buildings and the standard of buildings”.

There are links here to so much else across government and to Bills that are coming or are already in front of your Lordships’ House. That is particularly important at a time when we perhaps move on from the pandemic, when we have seen the importance of people’s homes in their lives. If there is a vision for this country, it must include decent homes and buildings that are safe in all the aspects that I have talked about. After all, homes are part of the fundamental foundation for much of our lives.

There are obvious links with the Health and Care Bill going through the House. A number of noble Lords mentioned the importance of the links between health and housing, recognising that until 50 or 60 years ago health and housing were covered by the same Secretary of State. There is overwhelming evidence of the relationship between people’s mental and physical health, and the design of their homes and neighbourhoods. That is set out by Public Health England and includes a wide range of structural and place-based factors, from the need for active travel and walkable streets to reducing air pollution, and to minimum space, accessibility and light standards. It is said that all that costs the NHS in the region of £1.4 billion a year, but what is the wider cost to individuals and society?

As regards the levelling-up White Paper and other Bills to come, we all know that people on lower incomes tend to live in poorer-standard homes in poorer environments and have poorer life expectations as a result. I will not, at this stage, ask the Minister how this Bill intersects with the new policies for levelling up, although no doubt that will come up again in Committee.

In Committee I will raise an amendment on safety having a wiser definition—something more like freedom from the risk of harm arriving from the location, construction or operation of buildings that may injure the health and well-being of the individual. The Building Safety Bill is an opportunity to change fundamentally the way we deliver homes and places with multiple benefits to people—a real culture change. Putting safety, in the sense that I am talking about it, at the heart of decision-making would be a positive legacy from the challenges of the pandemic and a response to the tragedy of Grenfell, and would match the ambition at the heart of the levelling-up agenda.

On that note, it is my great privilege to hand over to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester for his valedictory speech.