Building Safety Bill (Seventh sitting)

Siobhan Baillie Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

I am interested in the point that the Minister is making and in how the penalties for obstructing and impersonating compare with those for obstructing and impersonating other officials.

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for asking that question. For example, if an authorised officer of the Building Safety Regulator is obstructed, a level 3 fine of £1,000 may be levied. That compares with a similar fine for obstructing a police officer. However, given the nature of policing, the warrants held by police officers and the threats and difficulties that police forces can sometimes encounter, it is also possible for one month’s imprisonment to be imposed on an obstructer of a police officer. We have tried to make sure that the penalties are proportionate, and I trust that the Committee will agree that they are.

Having said that, I trust the Committee will see that clause 21 and schedule 2 enable the Building Safety Regulator to carry out its functions effectively, drawing on the expertise and involvement of local authorities and fire and rescue services. Clause 22, which we have just debated, enables the punishment of those who seek to obstruct or impersonate authorised officers, and I hope that the Committee will agree that these are good and proportionate clauses. I commend them to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 21 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill. 

Schedule 2 agreed to. 

Clause 22 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 23 

Provision of false or misleading information to regulator 

Question proposed,That the clausestandpart of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Siobhan Baillie]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I am a lawyer, so I would say this, but I agree that it is super-important for disputes to be dealt with properly. That was a key plank of the Minister’s explanation of the clauses. I am also pleased that a right of appeal to the court remains, but I will be interested to hear from the Minister how the Government will ensure that the regulator reviews decisions and whether there has been any assessment of how long reviews can take. We know that the issues are incredibly complicated, so there should be some investigation into that now and an ability for the regulator to check their own homework and for us to do so too.

When a developer lodges an internal review against the Building Safety Regulator’s decision within the prescribed period, the explanatory notes to the Bill say:

“The Building Safety Regulator decides the most appropriate form of review and how comprehensive the review will be.”

If the developer is not content with the final decision of the BSR, it can appeal that decision to the first-tier tribunal and that is what we were discussing earlier. The thing that shone out for me when we heard from the witnesses, particularly those affected by building safety concerns in their own homes, was the lack of trust in a range of policies and the legislation. It is therefore incumbent on us all to create the trust so that those people are able to rely on what we are doing. We have talked about transparency in the dispute resolution process and that is obviously key, but I would like to know a little more about how we will ensure that good transparency runs through the disputes process.