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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