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 activitybuilding
inspections, satisfying itself that premises are okayand
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".
|