Select Committee on Regulatory Reform Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)

15 JUNE 2004

DCFO ANDY MARLES AND SDO NIGEL CHARLSTON

  Q20 Dr Naysmith: One of the points you raised in the original consultation was the number of additional premises which will fall under the scope of the RRO. Have you received any additional information about the number of premises likely to be involved?

  Mr Marles: I know my own authority, for example, does have an indication of the total number of premises that are now involved, and it is right there are a lot more.

  Q21 Dr Naysmith: Where does that come from? Your own authority has had an indication of that.

  Mr Marles: It has actually come about, interestingly, through some work that we undertook, again with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, in the Fire Service Emergency Cover model, the FSEC process. I do not know whether the Committee members will have come across that, but that is an ODPM piece of work to produce a computer-generated model of the built environment. Some of the data that you need to build that model actually relies on the number of premises other than domestic premises, so we have a fairly good indication of the number of premises that might be covered by the order. You are right, it is significantly more than were covered by the Workplace Regulations and the Fire Precautions Act.

  Q22 Dr Naysmith: Does that come through the regional office, this sort of discussion that enables you to identify which premises are going to be involved?

  Mr Marles: We get indications through things like the Ordnance Survey address point, which can actually cover the number of premises that have addresses that are not domestic, and you can do other things like the valuation office data sets, and they actually give you the number of houses that are paying non-domestic rates, for example, so you get a fair indication of the number of premises you might be looking at.

  Q23 Dr Naysmith: It sounds as though you are already pretty involved in this process even before the legislation has gone through. How far do you think these new requirements will stretch the resources of fire safety departments?

  Mr Marles: Perhaps I could answer that in a roundabout way, but I will get to the answer. With the modernisation of the fire service to which Mr Evans referred, one of the things we have been tasked to do by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is to produce an integrated risk management plan. That is about a fire authority understanding the risk in the built environment and in the domestic field so they understand the risk of fire and rescue to persons. If you take the health and safety analogy: there is a hazard called "fire", there is a hazard called "road traffic accident", and there is a risk-reduction process that you can implement to reduce the risk in both those situations. In doing that—again, to use the health and safety analogy—in this instance, the first control measures to put in place are community fire safety on the one hand for domestic premises and legislative fire safety on the other hand to reduce the risk to the built environment. If you take those as your key control measures, you have in the authority a set of resources, and that set of resources are pointed at community fire safety, legislative fire safety and ultimately intervention: so something gets a fire, firefighters appear on fire engines and reduce the risk back to the norm again. The way the authority uses its resources and points them at the three different key methods of reducing risk in the community depends on the risk. If an authority has a high risk in a built environment, it can put more resources towards that risk reduction methodology. If we are losing lots of people in houses in the domestic risk, we could put more resources towards that. In a sense, the authority in the past did not have any flexibility at all. If you have this many buildings and you need fire certificates, that many buildings need fire certificates and you need that many officers to instigate that regime. Under this methodology—and that is why we like this methodology—it allows the authority to be flexible in the way it targets resources against risk. But you are right in what you say: if all these new buildings that are now taken are high risk, an authority will have to place more resource against that to reduce the risk in that particular area.

  Q24 Dr Naysmith: It sounds as if you are a bit of an enthusiast.

  Mr Marles: I am. Very much so, yes. It is a useful piece of legislation. I chair a committee for CFOA. It has a horrendous name: the Regulatory Reform Order Policy Development Working Group—which is the type of work we do. Mr Charlston is a member of it, and that is why I bring him with me, and they are a very enthusiastic bunch of practitioners in the British fire service. Every time we look at this law we see more and more how it can actually be implemented to make the built environment safer.

  Q25 Mr Brown: Again, as I asked Mr Evans, fire-fighting equipment and emergency exits. Do you agree with the FBU that the words "where necessary" should be left out of articles 13 and 14 of the draft order?

  Mr Marles: Yes. I could barely put it any better than Mr Evans has put it, to be honest. I will not repeat what he said because we are fully signed up to those arguments that the Fire Brigades Union use. Our concern is, with his, that if you leave the words "where necessary" in, the only people who will determine it ultimately are the courts. More work for the judiciary. There are some good standards about, and my learned friend next to me will tell you some of those standards if you wish and the sorts of levels of equipment that we might require in buildings, but that would not be onerous. To be honest, if you look at the buildings now, most of them have got them in anyway, so it is not a new requirement in that sense.

  Q26 Mr Brown: Following on from that, do you think the minimum fire safety requirements for buildings as contained in the Buildings Regulations should appear on the face of the order?

  Mr Marles: We have some concerns about the Buildings Regulations which we will pass through to the appropriate committee. They at the moment are talking through the review of Part B of the Buildings Regulations and we are making those concerns known. Other than that, this legislation works quite well if the Buildings Regulations work well in the first place in making them safe as built—hence it is "safe as built". This is one of the arguments that Mr Evans talked to you about with plans—the plans of the "as built" building remaining with the building and becoming part of the risk assessment. You can then see the connection of built-to-manage building afterwards and maintaining that level of safety discriminatively. The concern always has to be that somebody builds a building without Buildings Regulations approval, or that Buildings Regulations do not equip the building properly in the first instance, and then we are trying to put the building right afterwards. Of course, under the Fire Precautions Act, there is a statutory bar that if a building was built and the Buildings Regulations have got it wrong, we could not do anything about it—and we ended up with a sub-standard building. At least under this order we feel that we can still probably get the building right, even if it is put up wrong in the first instance with some flaws not picked up by Buildings Regulations.

  Q27 Mr Lazarowicz: You have asked for guidance on the meaning of the term "serious risk" in Article 29 of the draft order that relates to alterations notices. Could you tell the Committee how you think serious risk should be defined?

  Mr Marles: I think I am looking at the sort of risk that is controlled by engineering solutions in building. Big complex buildings these days have engineered solutions—it might be sprinklers, it might be smoke controlled systems—which all have to interact in the right way to allow people to escape—and, in some instances, to allow firefighters even to attempt to put the fire out, as it were. Those are the sorts of buildings that give fire officers the biggest worry in terms of serious risk. I do not know whether Mr Charlston would wish to add anything to that.

  Mr Charlston: Mr Marles is correct. We believe there are certain categories of building, particularly in the multi-storey shopping centres, where the line from what can be classified as safe to dangerous conditions is very fine. We believe we should be informed if they intend to carry out material alterations, even if the material alterations may be covered by the Building Regulations. It is that type of building where the facilities within that building are essential. We think that would fall into the category of requiring this alterations notice.

  Mr Lazarowicz: I am sure that if the witnesses wanted to send in their suggested definition of the term later that would be useful.

  Chairman: Yes.

  Q28 Dr Naysmith: What qualities would you regard as necessary in someone required to complete a fire safety risk assessment?

  Mr Marles: We have some concern about it because the word "competent" does not appear in the legislation in terms of the person undertaking the risk assessment. There is a definition of competence in the later article. I think we could sign up to that, although I would have to look at the actual wording. There is a definition and it is to do with equipment and those sorts of things. It does actually define a competent person there and we could quite well live with that definition. It is quite a generic definition.

  Q29 Dr Naysmith: You are happy with it.

  Mr Marles: Yes, if it is just read across.

  Q30 Dr Naysmith: Could you tell me the sort of features you think someone like that should actually have, if someone is described as a competent person.

  Mr Marles: They have to have an understanding of fire, the way fire behaves, the way that building reacts to fire, so they can understand the risks that are created. It is very similar to the risk assessment that you make with all sorts of other places these days and the health and safety law. Those generic principles carry across. I do have one concern, and this should be alleviated in the guidance document—and once I see the next version of the guidance document I will be looking for it—the fire risk assessment is not just another risk assessment; it is quite an important risk assessment. If you get the risk assessment in a factory wrong over some guard on a lathe or piece of machinery and somebody unfortunately loses a finger or an arm, all those sorts of things, or ultimately gets killed by that machine, that is one person at risk. Horrendous though that is, if you get a fire risk assessment wrong, many, many people can be at risk. That is the concern. That is the one little niggle I have about this piece of legislation, that if we are not careful it just gets subsumed into all the other risk assessments, and I still think it is probably one of the most important risk assessments the responsible person has to make in any field of health and safety legislation. But I think that could be handled in the guidance document and we await the next version with interest.

  Q31 Dr Naysmith: It sounds as though such a person needs training.

  Mr Marles: For larger premises, I do not expect the responsible person to be an employee of the premises—unless they employ somebody in a company, for example, a big company.

  Q32 Dr Naysmith: So you would expect them to be an employee of—

  Mr Marles: I could quite expect them having to bring in some kind of specialist help in a very, very big, engineered solution building. Because the engineered solutions are quite complex and interact on each other and unless you understand that interaction . . .

  Q33 Dr Naysmith: How do you think such people are going to emerge?

  Mr Marles: I guess the guidance document would give the responsible person, the employer or employee, whoever the responsible person is, that kind of guidance, to say, if it is a little corner shop, "Just make sure your means of escape are okay and that you have some extinguishers" or whatever the document says. They can handle that, it is quite easy to understand—it is not rocket science, as it were—but for the bigger premises, they are going to see this and say, "I don't think I can handle this." It is about understanding something of the building and there are other health and safety duties. They would get a feel for what those issues are and whether they need to bring in expertise. But the big companies employ these sorts of people anyway.

  Q34 Dr Naysmith: I am interested in your evidence on the small corner shop. Are you suggesting that people there are going to have to get a consultant in?

  Mr Marles: No. Not at all. One thing—and we are again trying to assist the ODPM—of which we are very conscious is that the big multi-national companies across Britain have in the past made comment: "If I build my store in South Wales, I get one level of enforcement; if I build it in London, I get another level." And the local authority partnership scheme developed by CFOA and others has tried to come to terms with that. One of the things CFOA is keen to do—hence the committee I chair—is to come up with documentation and policy that could be run right through the British fire service. Every chief fire officer and fire authority can sign up to that document. Of course they are autonomous. If they do not wish to, they do not have to, but the majority will because the work is done for them and they can sign up to it and we will get this level of enforcement all across. One of the key things we are keen to develop with ODPM is the guidance document. We are actually trying to produce at the moment a short, three- to four-page "This is what RRO means to you" kind of document that we can give to ODPM and ask, "Do you think that hits the spot?" That is the sort of document that I think the little corner shop will need—and that is all. They will not need a 120-page guidance document. The big, multi-level premises with engineered solutions will need the big document.

  Q35 Dr Naysmith: That is quite important to this Committee because one of our duties is to try to reduce the burden, not to create new ones.

  Mr Marles: Of course. I understand.

  Q36 Dr Naysmith: For clarification, you are quite happy with the most recent definition of "competent person".

  Mr Marles: Yes.

  Q37 Dr Naysmith: In the latest version.

  Mr Marles: Yes.

  Chairman: There are three different groups of words that we have been concentrating on in the last few minutes: "serious risk"; "competent person"; "risk assessment". They are all quite crucial.

  Dr Naysmith: And "where necessary" as well.

  Q38 Chairman: Do you think what we are looking at now is just about right?

  Mr Marles: Yes. We are quite confident that this piece of legislation will work, will extend this sort of control to a lot of other premises and bring those into some kind of legislative regime. I do like the four strands of the legislation, which I think sometimes we forget when we get the detail. The four strands are: protecting people; protecting the environment; protecting property—which is something that has never much been there before; attempting to do something for firefighters when everything else has failed and they have gone in to try to reduce the risk back to normal.

  Q39 Chairman: Mr Charlston, you have sat listening for a while, so, before I ask Mr Marles my final question, is there anything you feel you would like to say on any of the points that have been raised?

  Mr Charlston: No. Although we have worked together, Andy has taken the lead. I have no more comments.


 
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