David Simmonds

With the leave of the House, I will close this debate for His Majesty’s loyal Opposition. It has been a very constructive debate, with a wide range of contributions from Members. I congratulate all Members who made their maiden speeches. It was striking that they covered a huge range of different issues which have been debated and will be debated in this Parliament. I was particularly struck by the expertise shown in areas as diverse as local government, housing, electronics and support for refugees, all of which, I am sure, will play a significant part in the future. I would also like to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) for his very entertaining maiden speech. The hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) made some observations about the Hackitt review and the liability of construction material manufacturers for the consequences of significant problems in the buildings in which their materials are used. As the Minister said, the £5.1 billion building safety fund, which was put in place in the previous Parliament, is a significant step towards addressing those concerns, but it is clear that that is just one example of the many issues that need to be addressed. I have a list of points to put to the Minister, and I hope we will be able to work constructively together as we take forward a variety of legislation. A couple of Members touched on personal evacuation plans. A consultation took place in 2022, in which a wide variety of stakeholders were invited to express their views. A key concern raised by the Local Government Association—I declare an interest as a parliamentary vice-president of that organisation—was that current legislation implies that there is a duty on local authorities and social housing providers to anticipate, without having to be asked or informed by residents, the needs of those who may require special arrangements for evacuation in the event of an emergency. It is clear from feedback across the sector that, where there is no expectation that a tenant or an occupier will advise a particular individual or authority, that presents a significant challenge. I suggest to Ministers that as they bring forward the Government’s response, that issue is addressed with a high degree of clarity, so that everybody knows their responsibilities and where they stand. I was struck by observations made by a number of Members about particular challenges, including issues with fire doors and latent defects in buildings, which may not be spotted at the time of a building regulations inspection. I have personal experience of working in a local authority that commissioned a school; we discovered afterwards that the fire doors, which looked robust and solid, only went up as far as the suspended ceilings that had been installed by the contractor. In such an example, the individual doing the building inspection may need to have a significant part of the building taken apart so that they can carry out their duties and see what needs to be done. We need to ask ourselves how we can ensure that that enforcement is seen as reasonable by contractors and can be resourced effectively by local authorities, so that latent defects in items such as fire doors and fire stopping do not arise and create risks that simply cannot be effectively managed for the future. A number of Members made reference to the longer-term history of the current set of building safety challenges. I am well aware, having been in local government throughout that period, that the approach taken by the previous Labour Government was to create arm’s length management organisations for housing. Some Members, including the hon. Member for Burnley (Oliver Ryan), made particularly positive references to the last Labour Government’s retrofitting programme. I simply urge Members, as they begin to think how they would wish to resource some of this work in the public sector building stock, to ensure that we do not see a return of that approach: “Let’s create arm’s length management organisations, load them with the debt so it isn’t on the Government’s books, and then expect them to carry out the work.” The number of arm’s length management organisations has diminished. There was a time, under a previous Labour Government, when local authorities could not access that funding unless they set up an arm’s length management organisation. A small number of those organisations remain, but the vast majority of local authority areas have determined that it is more efficient to do this work directly and in-house. Having a higher degree of control, visibility and accountability for that work is a step forward, so I urge those who might be tempted by the view that arm’s length bodies are the way to leverage additional funding into the sector without it appearing directly as a cost to Government to avoid that approach. We should be absolutely clear about the route for the provision of those resources, and about the accountability for them. In her maiden speech, the hon. Member for Chippenham (Sarah Gibson) made reference to flooding as an example of an additional issue that gives rise to building safety and resilience challenges. Although it was not touched on in today’s debate, we also need to reflect that this House has in the past had to get to grips with issues such as the impact of legionella and the significant building regulation changes needed to ensure that very vulnerable residents are not placed at risk by a failure to carry out the proper inspection of building safety systems, and has had to ensure that building regulations and installed systems are functioning as they should to keep people safe from that particular risk. This wide-ranging debate has touched on many different elements of the building safety and resilience world, and I hope that that will inform Ministers’ thinking. However, I have a particular question on which I want to press them for an answer. At the beginning of the debate, we heard from the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney (Rushanara Ali), about the decision to return to, or enable, the use of the EU standards relating to construction materials. I know that mention of EU standards has a triggering effect on some Members; it does not have that impact on me, because I am a strong supporter of close co-operation with our neighbours. I think that the Minister was probably referring to the written ministerial statement of 2 September, in which the Government announced the decision to remove the end date that had previously applied—the date by which CE-marked construction materials could be sold within the UK market—and to allow those products to continue to be supplied to that market with no end date. That strikes me as a reasonable decision, but I should like to have a specific assurance on one point. The EU regulations on the fire safety of construction products date from 2015, and those are the relevant regulations applying to products that meet the CE-marked standard. That was, of course, before the Grenfell Tower disaster occurred. UK regulations were updated in response to the disaster by the previous Government, in 2018, and took account of the specific risks relating to construction materials that were identified in the initial phases of the report. May I ask the Minister to assure the House, from the Dispatch Box, that following the Government’s decision to set aside the end date by which only the CE mark was required and to allow UK standards to be effectively set aside, the standard of the products that are imported to the UK meet at least the 2018 UK post-Grenfell fire safety standards? Otherwise, there is a risk that products that we would not be satisfied to see installed in buildings and that have given rise to serious concerns in the past may continue to be supplied to the market because they meet those EU standards, even though they may not meet the new UK standards.