Siobhan Baillie
Main Page: Siobhan Baillie (Conservative - Stroud)Building Safety Bill (Seventh sitting)
Siobhan Baillie Excerpts(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Christopher Pincher
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West and concur with his sentiment that we must ensure that the Building Safety Regulator has the flexibility to do its job properly and the enforcement powers to ensure that all players across the in-scope sector recognise the importance and veracity of those powers.
As we move through the Committee’s deliberations we may disagree on matters of scope, but I hope that as we build the Bill—clause by clause and schedule by schedule—the House, of which this Committee forms a part, and the sector will recognise the powers that we are creating for the Building Safety Regulator and the importance of the law.
The hon. Member for Weaver Vale asked a couple of questions about clauses 21 and 22. He will know—he has heard me say it before in this Committee—that it is the responsibility of the Building Safety Regulator to build multidisciplinary teams that include local authority resources, fire and rescue service resources and those of others. We believe that the duty on them to co-operate will ensure the right level and that the right skills and expertise are available to the regulator.
We are working closely with the Health and Safety Executive to identify appropriate training arrangements for authorised officers. The powers available to authorised officers are very similar to existing powers available to local authority building control, the HSE and so on. We do not believe that new and further training and skills will be required, but I take on board the hon. Gentleman’s point about training.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned enforcement and penalties. We believe we have struck the right balance in the penalties that apply to the obstruction or impersonation of an authorised officer of the Building Safety Regulator. If he rereads the explanatory notes, he will see that impersonation of an enforcement officer acting on behalf of the Building Safety Regulator is subject to a fine not of £1,000, but to an unlimited fine. If someone were to obstruct the regulator or an enforcement officer, the fine is £1,000. We have created that differentiation because we want to make it clear that impersonating an enforcement officer is a much more grave offence than obstructing an officer, even though that is an important offence in itself.
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 impersonating 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.
Mike Amesbury
Again, we welcome the ability to request a review and the provision for a first-tier tribunal, which will create the necessary expertise going forward. The detail of quite a lot of the provisions is left to secondary legislation, so will the Minister expand on some of that? Would he also provide some clarity on the persons directly impacted and an example of when the regulator would intervene because it is not happy with the work carried out by the developer? In what circumstances could the developer apply for a review?
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.
Christopher Pincher
I am obliged to my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud and the hon. Member for Weaver Vale. We are clear that the process should be as collaborative as possible. We want it to be fair and transparent. When disputes arise, we envisage that the first stage of that dispute will be an informal discussion between the parties. That is normally part of the process that the HSE employs in other examples. If there is an internal review and if that is followed by an appeal to a first-tier tribunal, all those discussions and decision points will of course be publicly aired in the normal way.
What we want fundamentally to ensure is that the BSR has the flexibility to do its job effectively and to build casework and a casebook of knowledge and expertise that it can then use in cases as they develop. That is one of the reasons why—to answer the question from the hon. Member for Weaver Vale about secondary legislation—we are employing statutory instruments largely through the affirmative procedure. That will give the Commons in Committee and in the full House the ability to scrutinise, debate and vote on the issues. Fundamentally, it allows us as the Government, on the recommendations and advice of the BSR, to improve legislation rather than write it into the Bill and thus require further primary legislation should we find that events and examples arise to require that. We are trying to be flexible.