Select Committee on Regulatory Reform Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witness (Questions 65-79)

29 JUNE 2004

MR TONY TAIG

  Q65 Chairman: Can I welcome everybody to this morning's session of the Regulatory Reform Committee? We are here to scrutinise the proposal for the Regulatory Reform of Fire Safety Order 2004 which the Government laid on 10 May. As I said at the last evidence session, this Committee's job is to assess the proposal for the Order against the tests laid down in the Regulatory Reform Act and in our Standing Orders. At the end of the process, we will recommend whether the draft Order should be laid before Parliament unamended, whether it should be amended before it is proceeded with or whether it should not be proceeded with. We have already taken evidence from some of those who have made submissions to us, particularly the Fire Brigades Union and the Chief Fire Officers' Association, and this morning we are to hear the risk assessment expert, Mr Tony Taig, and the Minister at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Phil Hope, who will also be joining us. Mr Taig, you are very welcome and I believe you want to make a few comments before we put questions.

  Mr Taig: Yes. I am not by any means an expert in fire and in how local authorities and fire authorities work. I have spent most of my life working in risk management, in safety critical industries, the environment, food and agricultural and other spheres. I am a generalist rather than a specialist in fire. I have been involved working with ODPM, looking at the feasibility of the government's general process of reforms to the fire service. I advised the ODPM Select Committee last year and I have been involved in integrated risk management planning development for the Fire Service. Overall, I am a strong supporter of a risk based approach to managing risks. It is generally better than an approach that does not explicitly look at risks. I am generally a strong supporter of goal-setting regulations. I very strongly support the intent of this Order. I think there is a lot of devil in the detail. If you are going to have goal-setting regulations, you need to be very clear where the goalposts are and we have not seen those yet. They are not laid down in the Order. You need some kind of reference framework so that you can tell overall whether you are getting better or worse than you used to be, and finally, if you are going to be goal setting, if you start laying out some specific requirements, you need to be careful that you have not delimited what the enforcers and regulators can do by not mentioning some other important things and I think there are some gaps.

  Q66 Chairman: At the end of the questions, if there is anything you feel you want to add that we have not covered, by all means say so. If there is anything when you go away from here that you feel you wish you had said, if you wish to submit it in writing, please do so as speedily as possible because we are against a fairly tight time schedule and we have to pull the report together on this proposal in three weeks' time. Are there any protections in the 1971 Act which the proposed Order does not cover?

  Mr Taig: In principle, no. In practice, possibly yes. I do not know enough about how the law works. It seems to me that there are some areas where this Order starts itemising some specific requirements and is incomplete in the necessary sets it itemises. I do not know whether the intent of the Order takes primacy over the detail it starts to itemise or whether, by itemising some things, it has thereby excluded some other things that the regulators and enforcers might look at.

  Q67 Chairman: Fire certificates give some assurance to the public that the premises where they are working or staying have taken adequate precautions against fire. The risk assessment regime will not require fire authorities to issue fire certificates. In effect, persons carrying out risk assessments will be certifying themselves. How do you see that?

  Mr Taig: That works very well in lots of other walks of life where I have been involved. What we need is some satisfaction that the inspection and enforcement regime is giving you equivalent or better safeguards than the old certification regime. I notice in the attachment to the Order from the ODPM, it says that it is at the Minister's discretion to demand some form of inspection and enforcement proposals from fire authorities and to be satisfied with them, but it is not written into the Order that they have to be provided. It is implicit. You could not have an integrated risk management plan that did not involve a fire authority spending a substantial chunk of its resources inspecting and enforcing against these regulations.

  Q68 Dr Naysmith: Are there any clear benefits under the present system that will be less as we move to the new proposals?

  Mr Taig: I am not aware of any specifically. My key concern is that there is definitely a risk of loss of confidence if we do not have some visible, transparent means of seeing how enforcement and inspection are working. There is nothing to stop there being such a process here, but there is nothing to require it either.

  Q69 Dr Naysmith: Do you think there should be?

  Mr Taig: It should not be necessary because it should be implicit in the other arrangements the Government is putting in hand for reform of the fire service, but I am very conscious, if you suddenly free people from constraints and go into a self-certifying, goal-setting regime, if you are not careful about the things that you require, particularly about having a basis for monitoring how well you are doing, you can very easily drift off into a fairly anarchic world where people are doing different things and you have really no oversight of how well you are moving forward in different areas.

  Q70 Dr Naysmith: Do you think that is a real risk?

  Mr Taig: Yes.

  Q71 Brian White: Some of the things some fire authorities have done have been quite innovative. Is not the risk of your prescriptive approach going to prevent some of that innovation?

  Mr Taig: I am not arguing for a prescriptive approach at all. Yes, there is clearly a risk in this move. That does not mean it is a bad thing. I think this move is a good thing but the risks need to be clearly identified and managed. I am 100% behind the move to a less prescriptive approach and there is a great opportunity to free up resources that are doing very low benefit things by fire authorities and to spend them doing much more beneficial things.

  Q72 Mr Brown: I am sure you would agree that the fire certificate regime is well recognised. Do you think there is a danger that the proposed regime to be imposed on businesses could become just another risk assessment and it may be given a reduced priority?

  Mr Taig: That is very unlikely. If you look at what a fire authority does with its time and resources, it does this kind of fire certification activity—building inspections, satisfying itself that premises are okay—and it does fire prevention, community safety activity, and it does response and rescue activity. The whole thrust of the Government's reform is to push it to the left of that area, to be spending more time on prevention and making sure that the premises are okay so that we have to put fewer resources proportionally into the response and rescue. If you take the thrust of everything the Government is asking fire authorities to do, it says to me you should be emphasising this area of your work, not de-emphasising it. If you look by analogy at what has been happening in the integrated risk management process, the fire authority is not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater and throw fire certification out of the window. They are going to take as their starting point for their inspection and enforcement regime the stuff they have always done. I would imagine, because they will be very reluctant to take risks, that they will be very slow to move away from that and they will only move away from that when they can clearly see some better practice established.

  Q73 Brian Cotter: From the point of view of a risk assessment specialist, are there any weak points in the proposed risk assessment regime?

  Mr Taig: Yes. The obvious one is that at the moment we do not know where the goalposts are. You cannot leave it to a million premises and their duty holders and however many thousands of fire inspectors that there are to make their own judgments as to what is a satisfactory level of risk or what is a suitable set of precautions for facing a different risk. You must have guidance on that. This Order is very heavily following the Health and Safety at Work Act in the way it works. It has two things that we do not yet see here. The first is a series of codes of practice and guidance that spell out to people: these are the benchmarks we expect people in different circumstances to be able to meet. They are perfectly free to come up with something different but it is terribly important that the regulator provides a recipe for people so that they can know when they are compliant and when they are not and the enforcer can know when they are compliant and when they are not. We have not seen all that yet. That is going to be very important to pin the Minister down on as to when we are going to see all that. If you are going to manage risks properly, you need to give your enforcer and your regulator all the powers that they need across all the types of precaution that are sensible to manage risk. You need to be able to influence preventing fires from happening in the first place, limiting them spreading and putting people at risk, helping people get out to a place of safety and helping them be rescued reasonably safely by the firefighters or other people. This Order itemises various bits across that spectrum of sensible things but it does not, at the highest level, give either the enforcer or the regulator powers to require whatever they think is appropriate across that spectrum. For example, as the Chief Fire Officers' Association has pointed out, it does not itemise anything about arrangements for preventing the spread of fire. Although that is built into the building regulations, if it did slip the net, under these regulations it might be possible to interpret this Order as saying that firefighters do not have the power to go back. It is not very explicit about prevention. Risk is defined here as "the risk of something", which is a bit tautologous. It does not really define risk and in so far as it does it defines safety as "safety in the event of fire". That means if the fire has already happened. It does not define safety to encompass preventing people ever being exposed to fire in the first place. You could argue under this that you inspect premises, find the arrangements for preventing the spread of fire are appalling, that there is flammable waste and stuff all over the place, dreadful fire hazards, and you might yet argue that the authority did not have the power to go and tell them to sort if out. I am not quite sure what takes primacy here and whether the intent of the Order would take primacy over the wording, but to me it is dangerous if you say, "We are going goal setting" and then you start spelling out some particular requirements but you leave out some other important ones.

  Q74 Chairman: You are aware that we are considering a draft. This Committee has to report and will make some suggestions as to whether the government should amend it, strengthen it or delete something. If you were in such a position, would you be saying to the government, "You need to spell out a bit more in some cases" and, if so, what?

  Mr Taig: I would be saying, "Keep it much simpler." Get a high level of stuff up front and make sure that takes primacy over all the detail that follows. What this is saying is duty holders must do a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and, on the basis of that, they must devise and implement and maintain some appropriate arrangements to prevent fires arising, prevent them spreading and putting people at risk, facilitate people getting out and facilitate rescue. If that came first and took primacy over all the rest, I am very happy for them to itemise specific requirements in specific areas. I am just a bit concerned that, without saying that first, by itemising some things you then delimit the scope of the Order.

  Q75 Brian White: You referred to the analogy of the health and safety legislation. That took about 20-odd years before it became effective. Are we going to have to wait another 20 years for this to become effective?

  Mr Taig: It took 20 years before the regime had fully changed to reflect the Health and Safety at Work Act. The same might well happen here but I do not think it took 20 years to have an effective regime in place instead because, under all the legislation that the Health and Safety at Work Act replaced, lots of enforcing bodies used to carry out enforcement activity. After the Health and Safety at Work Act, the default was that they all carried on. Gradually over time, they evolved what they did to be more focused on risk and less prescriptive. The short term effect was that you did not notice very much change and I would be very surprised if it was any different here.

  Q76 Chairman: Where can you say you did not see very much change?

  Mr Taig: I was not there in 1974. I started work in 1977 but the general view would be that in some specific industries where the Health and Safety at Work Act gave the regulator power to establish a specific licensing regime that had not been there before, like the offshore industry, the nuclear industry and major hazard chemical industries, there, you saw rapid change. In most other ordinary workplaces, the sort of places that are inspected and enforced by local authorities, change was not rapid.

  Q77 Chairman: I worked in a very large factory for a very large responsible group, Mullards/Philips. We saw a massive and very rapid change. For years, things had been totally unprotected prior to that legislation with glass overhead suddenly having wire cages and it was absolutely incredible. Everybody had a responsibility for safety, including the workforce. It had a dramatic impact on the number of accidents.

  Mr Taig: I have spent all my life arguing that that kind of change produces those kinds of effects.

  Chairman: There was an extremely dramatic reduction in accidents in factories, very speedily.

  Q78 Mr MacDougall: There is an issue between relaxation and continued commitment. Is there not a danger that fire authorities may decide to divert their attention and resources away from the continued commitment that exists at present under a real Act situation? Therefore, if you want to quote the risk assessment, the risk becomes greater and that becomes a much more threatening environment.

  Mr Taig: That would be bad management by the fire authority. The thrust of what government is asking fire authorities to do is to focus more energy on things that will prevent fire and reduce risk at source. The matter of this Order is exactly that kind of area. The message I think the Government is sending is that we are giving you more flexibility here but we are not at all saying we do not want you to take this seriously. If I were the Government reviewing any integrated risk management plan that was not very strongly focused on the inspection and enforcement regime of premises, I would be very upset. I would be taking measures to make damned sure they changed it.

  Q79 Mr MacDougall: Do you think the temptation is greater, given this relaxation?

  Mr Taig: Temptation, when you look at a fire authority, is the other way. In the past, fire authorities have not been a place where people locally have to make very difficult decisions. Frameworks are decided centrally. All they had to do was to check with the Chief Fire Officer that he was following the centrally laid out rules and guidelines. Then they could all sit back and relax and feel that their bottoms were covered, if you like. In the new world, it is fire authorities who will be accountable for decisions to vary established practice. Far from fire authorities being bursting to throw the old recipes out of the window, fire authorities are much more likely to be thinking, "Goodness me, I used to have a lovely big recipe down the seat of my pants and now I do not any more. The last thing I am going to do is accept a proposal from my Chief Fire Officer to chuck away two thirds of what we used to do and shift the resources somewhere else, unless I have really strong evidence that it is going to work".


 
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