Local Government and Housing Committee

Okay. So, are there any declarations of interest for committee members for today's meeting? There are not. Okay. As usual, the meeting is bilingual of course, and simultaneous translation is available. Public items are being broadcast live on Senedd.tv and a record of proceedings will be published as usual. I'm not sure—. Siân, do you need to be absent from this meeting between 10 and 11 o'clock this morning?

No.

No, you don't.

No, I'm here now.

Everything is now fine, isn't it?

Yes, thank you, yes.

Okay, well, it will be good to have you with us throughout the meeting, Siân. Diolch yn fawr.

Right, so item 2 on our agenda for this morning is our third evidence session with regard to the Building Safety (Wales) Bill, and I'm very pleased to welcome here, giving evidence before committee this morning, David Wilton, who is chief executive officer for TPAS Cymru, the organisation representing housing tenants in Wales. David, thank you very much for joining us in person. Perhaps I might begin with some general questions before we bring in other committee members. Firstly, in terms of this building safety Bill that's proposed by Welsh Government, what is your overall view as to whether this legislation is needed or not?

It's certainly a good Bill. We can maybe talk about some tweaks along the way, but tenants have been involved in this right from the start, working with Welsh Government officials. We've run our own sessions, called Tenant Voice Cymru, to input into the original White Paper and into this draft legislation. So, overall, yes, very supportive of it. I would argue for a couple of amendments, but that's what we are here for. But it's a good piece of legislation. It was needed to wrap up that post Grenfell and move us forward in Wales.

Okay, thank you for that, David. Welsh Government is taking, or proposing to take, a different approach from England. One aspect of that is to include buildings below 18m high in the new regime that's proposed. Is that something that you're supportive of?

Yes. I think England has a different issue. It has big high-rises in big urban cities, and that's right for them. I think Wales has a different type of housing stock and the type of things we're building now, looking around Cardiff and Swansea, we needed to take a more pragmatic look and look wider than just your classic high-rise towers. Building safety affects a lot more buildings than just your classic high-rise. So, I'm very supportive. I think it is the right solution for Wales, and let England do their solution, if that makes sense.

Okay, thank you again for that. In England, the building safety—. Oh, sorry, Lee. Yes.

Can I ask, just on that specific point—?

Yes.

So, Wales is going beyond where England is going.

Yes.

Given that it is an integrated housing market, just thinking in terms of the knock-on effects this could have on supply and additional regulation in Wales, do you think that's proportionate? Are we searching for a problem that isn't there?

No, I think building safety is much more than your classic, and tragic, Grenfell scenario. Good building safety also makes things cheaper as well, because, at the moment, we've got issues with insurance with buildings, fire risk and things like that. If you've got this Bill that actually involves residents and telling residents they're involved in it, you'll have a better outcome, and the property management company charges should be cheaper and stuff like that. If people are involved, you find it easier, so—

But they have those issues, they have those smaller buildings, in England too, and they're not going to be subject to regulation—

Because I think they have literally hundreds—I don't know what the figure is for England, but hundreds of high-rises. That's what they've got to tackle first, and that's what society in England wants to tackle, because you can't have another Grenfell, you know. I think there's been some good work in Wales so far already with cladding and things like that, but they've got such a big problem with their high-rises—

Which we don't have.

No, we don't.

So, why are we going and looking for problems that they're not?

We're not. We're trying to make buildings safer. I was in Swansea yesterday in a smaller property, and we were looking at this tenement flat and, 'I'm not sure how to get out of this building in a fire.' That doesn't make it any more—. In fact, because of the nature of that one in Bon-y-maen, I think there's more of a risk than some of the high-rises now that have dry risers and the cladding's been taken off and things like that. We need to make buildings safe, and I think it brings trust back to it. We monitor things like—. Sorry, I'm going off track.

No, that's fine, David. Carry on.

We monitor things like Reddit and Facebook pages, and especially down the bay, right round here now, there are parents going, 'My daughter's thinking about moving to Cardiff. Is this building safe?' and things like that. We shouldn't be having these conversations. There's a lot of lack of trust, I think, in buildings of multiple occupancy at the moment, and I think this Bill will try and bring trust back to that market.

I'm just testing the arguments here.

Yes, I know.

So, I understand that, but we are creating a set of extra regulations that are not going to be present in England, which will put us competitively—. It'll give us a higher cost base than England. Is the market in a position to bear that?

I think so, because there is a cost in fire safety, but also I think insurers will look much more favourably at Wales now. As with 20 mph and things like that, if you look at it, actually, if you create a safer environment, other costs should adjust. We've got too many waking watches and all sorts of things at the moment in buildings in Wales. I think this will bring more confidence to the market. We're going further than England, yes, but also we'll see better outcomes for residents, and that will reflect in property prices, the rental market, the whole thing.

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, David. In England, the building safety regulator will have to convene a residents panel and consult with them on certain matters. The Welsh Government has told this committee that they intend to keep consulting with residents regularly, but they do not feel a statutory duty to consult is needed. This is something that's very important for TPAS, David, isn't it? So, what's your view on the Welsh Government's position?

It depends how this shakes out in terms of this. The original proposal was 22 local authorities. I don't think anyone believes that we'll have 22 different authorities, all regulating them. My understanding is there'll be about four or five in Wales. We need to see that detail, I think, before we can understand: do we need a committee? Obviously, I believe in resident engagement, but that doesn't mean to say it needs to be supercommittees. England has a big regime there, and they're going to have this regulatory committee with tenants involved in it. Great—I'd like to see the detail. The next phase of this is how these local authorities club together—that's my understanding of what's going to happen—and how they intend to hear the resident voice.

So, you'd want to see what—

I'd like to see it at those regional levels. I don't think we need to have a supercommittee just for the sake of it. I think it's a little early at the moment, until we see what happens. I don't think there are going to be 22 committees—sorry, 22 licensed authorities. It'll be inefficient.

So, just—[Interruption.] Go on, Lee, yes.

The point is that the Bill allows for that to happen.

Yes, it does.

So, do you think the Bill should not say that, and should actually set the expectation of a smaller number of regional bodies?

Yes, my concern has always been about the 22. I was never in favour of that, because, firstly, you've got places—Ynys Môn, say—that don't have those types of buildings, of category 1 and things like that. I haven’t seen all the data on it, but I know there are places in Wales that don’t have category 1 buildings. So, you’re going to need to see some sort of concentration—. It needs to be in line with—. We tested it with some tenants and they talked about it being in line with fire authorities, which is one thing, but that’s only three.

So, do you think the Bill should say that we should do this on a regional basis?

Yes. It would be much more—. What that is, whether it's three, five, six, I don't know enough. I think it has to reflect the three, but in somewhere like south Wales, where it’s so big, you might want to chop that one up, and also—

Well, we are creating corporate joint committees for other issues. Would it not make sense to reflect that structure?

It’s got to reflect the fire one, that’s the key, but, under that, I think there’s got to be a certain number—Cardiff, probably, in its own right, but it could take on, say, the Vale of Glamorgan, or something like that. I think there have got to be some practicalities. But the local government people, I think, can work that out between them, unless you see a need in the Bill to find that. But there have got to be some practicalities—like north Wales is a big region, but, equally, it doesn’t have the high-rises.

Lesley.

Just coming back, I’m probably a bit more cynical; I think you could end up with 22 different—

Really, yes.

Oh yes, absolutely.

That's where local government reform has been before, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely. So, just picking up on what Lee has said, do you not think it should actually specify it in the Bill?

I think, as we're having this conversation, it does make sense that we need to narrow that down. Twenty-two would be inefficient and I think it would be—. Yes.

But you wouldn't want to recommend a particular number.

No. I think there are certain practicalities. The classic is what you do with Powys. I mean you start in Brecon and you’re suddenly in north Wales, aren’t you? Where does that fall? There are better people to work that one out.

Okay. David, is there anything else you'd want to say about what the Welsh Government ought to do to make sure that residents play a role in shaping the legislation and the guidance? Is there anything in particular that you'd like to see?

Residents have been involved so far. As I say, we’ve done a lot of work. I think the next phase now, which concerns me, is these resident engagement plans that they’ve all got to produce, the building owners. It doesn’t actually say that you’ve got to engage residents in the first place to develop your plan; you literally can just write your resident engagement plan, and it just says, 'Communicate'. It doesn't actually define what 'communicate' is either. I think, after Grenfell, there was that feedback and campaign for involving residents. And so, the tweak I'd like to see on those resident engagement plans is that the residents are actually involved in shaping the plan in the first place, rather than just, 'Here it is'. I think that's a minor tweak, but it would make a difference to the effectiveness of resident engagement plans.

Yes. Okay, David, thanks for that. Lee Waters.

Thanks. Just on the theme of residents, the Bill currently does not take into account the vulnerability of residents. It makes its assessment on the buildings, not on the people in them.

Yes.

Do you think that is the correct approach?

No. I understand there was an element of, with legislation, 'How much can you get in in one thing before the end of this term?' I was disappointed. I think there were a lot of things around vulnerable people, evacuation plans, people with disabilities. I think there was some detail somewhere—I'll have to check—that talked about, 'They want to come back to it', but, again, it goes back to how much you get into one Bill. It comes across—. We had a lot of tenants in our sessions talk about personal emergency evacuation plans and things like that, and wanting more confidence that that was taken into account in building safety and evacuation. But whether you get it into this, or whether it needs a separate piece looking at—

Do you think, in terms of the way the categories are drawn, the vulnerability of the people in them should be taken into account when making those categorisations?

It's difficult, because a safe building is a safe building if you get it right. So, you can have more vulnerable people in a building. If they're more inclined to fire risk, I think that's going to affect any type of building. So, no, I don't—. I think evacuation plans are a different thing to the allocations.

So, you're broadly content with the Government's approach to this Bill.

Yes, but evacuation needs to be solved. If it's not in this Bill, somebody's got to do some work on it.

Okay. Similarly, in terms of remediation of existing risks—because, again, that's not covered; the Bill doesn't do anything to help buildings currently in a poor state—do you think the Bill has got the right balance struck on that?

The argument was that there was already work and the remediation was a separate piece of work, and—

What's your view?

My view, I don't see the point of having it. It needed to be two pieces, I think, because the remediation—. The thing we've been quite annoyed about—and it's a different piece of work—is the fact that developers are still developing without remediating their existing buildings. Tenants keep saying, 'How are you allowing these people to build, when they haven't fixed their existing buildings?', over and over. I'm not sure this would have been the Bill for that, but I think somebody needs to stop some of those developers from carrying on, using public land, public subsidies and not fixing their buildings.

But, in terms of this Bill, you think the balance is right?

The danger is—. Would I have liked to see it? Yes. But the danger would be making a super-Bill, wouldn't it, with everything in it.

Well, with respect, we're trying to scrutinise this Bill and to make recommendations to the Government on whether this Bill should be changed or not. So, what do you think should happen with this Bill?

At this stage, I think it would be a challenge to put all that in.

Well, that's the Government's problem. We're here to provide scrutiny to the Bill. Do you think this Bill gets the balance right?

If it could be done, something around the remediation and enforcement should be there, if I was able to do that.

So, you don't think, as currently drafted, the Bill gets the balance right?

Yes, I think. There's a lot of things in life you could put into these things, yes.

Sorry. I'm not clear.

No, no.

Is the Bill, as currently drafted, right, or do you think it should be changed?

There are things I would change in it, yes. And that's one of them.

Specifically on remediation?

I think there could have been tougher penalties to stop.

Okay.

Lee, just before you continue—. Siân.

I was just going to pursue the same questioning, really, because last week we had stark evidence that the remediation just isn't happening, and there's a feeling that stronger sanctions are needed for the developers.

And tenants have said that over and over again.

But we need legislation to do that, and doesn't this present an opportunity for—. Okay, when we started on this, maybe there was hope that the remediation would have happened, but it's not happening. So, is there an opportunity in this legislation now to actually put the enforcement on the remediation, because it's been so slow?

Yes. I don't see it in here, no.

All right, Lee?

Yes. And I just want to finish, again for the record, to check that you are happy with the three categories of building, based on height and number of storeys.

Yes.

You are. Thank you.

It's practical, based on Wales, yes.

Okay. Diolch yn fawr. Peter Fox.

Just talking about residents a bit now, do you think that the Bill achieves the right balance between residents' rights and their responsibilities? We know that there are parts in the Bill that are sort of prohibiting residents from doing certain things. Is the balance right?

Can I answer in two parts? I think, personally, it is balanced. What happened in the tenant sessions, though, there were tenants expressing concerns of—. Remember, in America, they talked about HOAs, home owners associations, or something, and giving citations and things like that. There was concern from some tenants that building managers and things like that could use this part of the Bill to almost—'maliciously' is not the right word—over-punish tenants. You could have just left your bike outside your apartment whilst you're getting something in—citations, in that American culture, you know, of HOAs. I'm not saying I agree with it, but that's something, as tenants, they've brought up in the sessions.

Yes. Thanks for that. Do you think, then, there's sufficient support in place for residents, especially those who might have extra responsibilities? Does it need more support putting in place? Will they have enough?

This is new territory for, I think, especially, private sector buildings, in terms of resident engagement and things like that. I've got concerns how they're going to do that. We would like to support them, because we've been doing this in social housing for years. How do you make sure that you're communicating to different, diverse communities? How are you communicating to residents and leaseholders? That's another key point. The original stuff always talked about leaseholder engagement. They might not be the people living in the building. It does now talk more about residents, and that's been an amendment that's happened in its evolution. But resident engagement and leaseholder engagement are two separate things. So, they may not be the same people—the person who owns the flat.

Absolutely. So, do you think the Bill has the appropriate level of transparency on building safety information?

No. It talks about a fire certificate—fine—in a prominent place, but I think there's more about, 'What's the complaints process?', in terms of the authorised person. There's a lot more that needs to be done on that, because, as it stands at the moment, the responsible person is just a named corporation or limited company. In the tenants' sessions—I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit, Chair—the tenants didn't like the fact it was just a limited company. It could just be 'Shell Corp 2020' or something like that. They wanted a name above the door, a bit like a licensee or something, 'Who is the person responsible?', and that should be in the transparency sections. It might still work for 'Faceless Corp' or whatever, but it's about having a named person above the door. That came up over and over in tenants' sessions.

That's helpful. That's a strong, strong message there. And then, Chair, the last one from me, really—

Did you want to come in on this point, Joel?

I can come in straight away or—

Come on in, Joel.

Thank you. It was just a question about that accountable person. Has there been much information about what that would entail? Because you mentioned that it could be a corporate body, or it could just be an individual who lives in the flat itself. Has there been much direction from the Welsh Government about how that accountable person would be appointed? How would they be trained to do the role?

How I read it is that a body is the accountable person. There are responsibilities for that body in there, and they do have to have certain training and things like that. That's fine. But the tenants themselves were like, 'It's a "Faceless Corp" address—care of fancylawyers.com or something—it doesn't mean anything.' It needs a name—somebody's got their name above the door, like a licensee. I'd very much love to see that as an amendment—that somebody has to be named within that body.

I can see that, David. That's a strong point, because the Bill requires those accountable persons to put systems in place for the handling of residents' complaints. They've got to be seen to be accountable.

They're still an employee of 'Faceless Corp', but there's still a name, yes.

Yes. I think you've been pretty clear there that the whole transparency bit needs to be bolstered and strengthened, certainly around the identity of the accountable persons and the systems they're going to need to put in place.

We're seeing an evolution as well of things like building passports. There are other issues, electrical safety and other things, in social housing. Building passports allow you to see certain things—fire risk, damp assessments, all sorts of things—and they can be set at different levels for the resident to see; the leaseholder could maybe have more about the breakdown of things—service charges, things like that, because they pay that. That's where I'd like to see the next phase.

Do you foresee tensions where you might have a building with several private tenants in there and trying to determine who is the accountable person? Or there might be perhaps—

It's still the building owner.

Yes, but there could be four or three independent owners and one tenant. I think there's a lack of clarity, in my mind, about how accountable people will be put in place and managing that.

That's the bit—. Again, it just says that the fire safety certificates and stuff should be prominently positioned in a hallway or something. Actually, it needs to be the details of the accountable person, it needs to have the complaints processes, the resident engagement plan. We see things now—developments like QR codes and things like that, to be able to access things. That's how social housing has gone. I think we're playing a big catch up in the private sector. I know it's getting the balance right with costs and stuff like that, and social housing is a different relationship, but I think this is a little bit limited on some of the transparency.

Yes, because there might be one tenant in a block of owned, so the owner of that premises would be the accountable person in that regard. Yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions, I think, around a lot of that.

And different engagement, as I say. There's going to need to be leaseholder engagement and resident engagement as part of those development plans.

David, in terms of building passports—they're in use at the current time, then, are they?

Sorry?

Building passports, as you describe—they're used at the current time, then, are they?

Yes, they're developing—. It's a newer process, but it allows a document library, and it can be tiered for different levels. It's been kicking around for a while in different countries and in the private sector. I think we're going to have to go there in time, whether it's social housing or the private sector. Certain documents need to be shown or be made available. Insurance certificates—'Have my builder and owner got a valid insurance certificate? I can see it in the passport.' Some people won't want to access it, that's their right, but some people need to see the fire risk assessment and things like that. Dame Judith Hackitt was really critical after Grenfell, when she heard about tenants having to put in freedom of information requests to see certain information about the buildings they were living in. They couldn't see the fire risk assessments and things like that. That's not a good place. Some of this will come out of this Bill, but I think there's further to go in terms of passports.

Would you like to see that building passport approach in this Bill?

I hadn't really thought about it. It goes back to how much you can get in the Bill, but it's the way we're going to have to go anyway, whether it's in this Bill or a future housing Bill—the passports. We've done it with tenants and they quite liked the idea. They accept it's not about seeing everything. Social housing has got a challenge at the moment with electrical certificates—some of you might be familiar with it. That may have been a place where some of those things could have been filed easier, rather than sending out reams and reams of paper that people don't read.

Lee Waters.

I just want to test this idea of where the threshold lies between what is a reasonable level of regulation and what is an unreasonable level. You mentioned you'd ideally like to see a named tenant have—

A named building—

An accountable person, sure. In a smaller block of flats, that would be a tenant, presumably.

No, it would be the management company, probably.

Okay. Well, sometimes the management company is the tenant.

Yes, true.

So, at what point on these three categories we have—? Do you think that should apply to all categories, or should there be some kind of cut-off—

That's a good question.

—and what should the cut-off be?

That's valid. I don't think anyone would argue against that, in a category 1 building, you need a named person who is qualified and who is the accountable person. I accept that, in a block of four or something, you've got your directors who are managing the building between them. Good point. Do we need, then, a named person, if it's just between the four of them? No, maybe not. It's something we could test with people, but I imagine the tenants would be more understanding of something like that because—

We're scrutinising a piece of legislation here and you're making an argument for amending it. We need to be less casual about where we apply these things and where we don't apply them.

But it's a good question about—. Well, that's the point of category 1, 2 and 3.

Yes.

Not everything applies in this Bill to category 2 and 3, because it's not appropriate.

Yes.

I accept what you're saying—it's about appropriateness. I would say you would need it in the ones and twos. I don't know—I'd have to think about that on the threes. But, yes, that's—.

Okay, thank you.

Okay. Are you content with that, Peter? Yes. Siân.

Thank you. We have touched a little on this already with regard to new rights for people who need support to self-evacuate immediately. The White Paper included those proposals. You said earlier on that you felt that perhaps we needed to consider these aspects. So, do you believe that this Bill now, which follows a different path to the White Paper, needs to do more with regard to those residents that need additional support to evacuate a building? Is that something that would happen in this Bill or are you talking about—?

Yes, and we put that in our response. Some people call them PEEPs—personal emergency evacuation plans. The evacuation plans were something the tenants, a number of them—. A number of people who came to our sessions had disabilities—they're the ones who had the most concerns. They're the ones who were asking, 'Is it stay put, or how is it going to get me out of this building?' And that was one of the issues with Grenfell—people being trapped there, being told that it's safe and to stay put and things like that. So, yes, I think I've said already, I'd have liked to have seen more around that. I don't know if that was convenience, time, or whether it needs a separate piece of work, but I would have liked to have seen something more on that, and I think I've put that in the response.

Because it states in the Bill, I believe, that it requires accountable persons to take all reasonable steps to ensure they can escape.

Yes.

But you want something stronger than that, perhaps, in the Bill around—. How would that look? How would something stronger than that look?

I think it goes back to rights under the Bill and for the regulatory authority, or whatever that turns out to be, to be able to enforce that on the regulations so that they can see how they're doing it, what they're doing, and it involves, then, the fire and rescue service, the local authority—it needs a joined-up approach. This is not on just the management company. It's a much more grown-up approach that's needed. How do I see it happening? That's it, I think, by—

So, the Bill needs to be more specific in terms of involving the other agencies and having a plan, a proper plan, not just leaving it up to the company.

Yes. The property management company, or whoever it is—they're not necessarily the people to decide on the best evacuation processes. They've got to be involved.

That's quite clear, thank you.

And we've already discussed the strategy for residence engagement. So, do you feel that residents need to be a part of creating that strategy, as well as one being created?

Yes.

And that perhaps needs to be put in the Bill as well.

Yes.

Okay. For category 1 buildings, but what about 2 and 3?

The main responsibility is on category 1, and it has to be. Fortunately, we don't have lots of them, but it's still the category 1 that needs that resident engagement, and it needs to be co-produced. It needs many more residents involved in developing the strategy in the first place, and I think that's what I've put in my evidence and what came from the tenants: ‘Don't just tell us, involve us.’ I've got an example, if you're interested: I heard last week from the north-east of England, where they had issues with fire doors being wedged open, things like that, and people drilling through. They took those residents to a fire-door factory, and showed the difference when doors are propped open or you've compromised the door with a spy hole, and things like that, and the tenants were like, ‘Wow’, and it totally changed. It's that engagement that can change to positive behaviour. And that's where I'd argue, although it's regulation, it might actually deliver more positive outcomes, which are safer buildings, safer insurance, things like that, when you have good resident engagement. I understand your concerns, but I think the positives of good resident engagement and being involved actually might bring management charges down, it might bring insurance down and things like that.

Moving on to a different area, which is the costs, do you believe that the Bill is strong enough to avoid passing excessive costs for conforming with these new safety measures on to residents?

Truthfully, it's not my area of expertise, but we're not quite clear how it's going to work in practice afterwards. Are we going to have 22 authorities? Are we going to have one or two? At one point I was in a conversation with someone who said that, because in Rent Smart Wales we managed—. Cardiff, then, was the host, and everyone else then contributed to it. Until we see how that is—. There are going to be costs to that. Local authorities bear costs on all sorts of stuff, don't they, as part of their duties. I'm not 100 per cent clear how the local authorities are going to recover those costs and how they're going to pass them on. Truthfully, it's not my area of expertise. It's resident voice I've been more concerned with.

Well, I'm thinking about the actual installing of new measures, and then how do we avoid those costs seeping through and becoming part of management fees et cetera? Are we able to do something in the Bill to avoid that kind of situation, thinking that there’s also other legislation in the offing, isn't there? There's the leasehold reform stuff, which will make it more transparent if Wales brings new legislation in, according to what's going on in the UK. So, is there anything in this Bill that we can actually pinpoint to make sure that the costs don't accrue to the tenants?

I don't know at the moment, truthfully. It goes back to how many authorities we have. There are certainly ways we can help with this new legislation. I know from my own organisation that we work with all the local authorities in Wales. We would want to support them. We've learnt a lot about resident engagement, tenant engagement. That's literally what we do. So, how can we help these building managers do resident engagement has got to be something we'd want to be working with and helping them. We also want to install best practice; we want to give templates and things like that, rather than everyone reinventing the wheel and increasing costs.

In terms of the fire safety costs and things like that, it's not my area of expertise as to how that's going to work.

Can I just bring in Lesley for a moment, Siân?

I was just going to pick up on that point, actually, that Siân raised with you around tenant participation. For me, it's a no-brainer in any walk of life if you can engage the people who are going to be affected the most. You also said that it could—or it 'might' I think was the word you used—bring insurance down. And again, maybe this isn't the piece of legislation to make sure that tenant participation is improved, but have you any evidence to show that that could happen? Because money talks, doesn't it? That could be a very important thing.

I worked in financial services for many years before I saw the light. It's about risk, isn't it, and buildings that have good resident engagement and residents following that resident—. So, fire certificates coming back clean, residents are on board—it has to affect risk, doesn't it? And I haven't got the evidence that that's going to work, but we know we've seen it from other sectors, other projects that, in time, you will see improvements. Because it went through the roof afterwards—waking watchers. Insurers didn't have full trust that those waking watch people were actually awake, and things like that. We need to bring those insurances down. That's what drove up service charges that, probably, your constituents contact you about. It's how we bring service charges back down. The only way to do that—. Yes, there'll be more work for the property management, but we need to bring back down the insurance.

Siân, are you content? You are. Okay. Lesley, would you like to continue then?

We've heard your views already around the accountable person, and certainly the evidence you gave us was very specific. Is there anything else you want to say—? I thought the idea of having a name above the door, like a licensed premises, is very straightforward and everybody would understand that. I was just wondering if there's anything else you wanted to say about the principal accountable person that this Bill, obviously, creates.

No, I think it goes back to now seeing how it pans out in practice, if this goes through, and working with those accountable people. Like I say, I want to see them involving the tenants—the residents, sorry, the leaseholders. No, I don't think there's more I want to say on that.

Okay. You've also referred to category 1 and 2 buildings—you definitely agree with them being registered. Do you agree with the Welsh Government, as it's proposed in the Bill now, that category 3 buildings won't be? Are you content with that?

Yes, they're a different level. We're talking smaller buildings, more local arrangements. It doesn't need to have thick documents and engagement plans and stuff like that.

So, you agree it's a proportionate approach.

For the moment, yes. And I think it goes back to evidence. Let's see what happens about that. If, in time, we're seeing that there are still issues and things like that, maybe that's something—. But I don't see the point of adding it in at the moment because, as I say, we've got to see how this pans out and fix the worst things first.

Okay, Lesley. And Joel James. Joel.

Thank you, Chair. It was just the one question from me, really. You mentioned earlier briefly about the Hackitt review. Obviously, one of the recommendations there was a building safety regulator, which they're looking to bring in in England, but this Bill doesn't propose to do that. And it looks at then maybe the local authorities or fire services taking on that role. I know from your written evidence tenants have expressed concern on whether or not local authorities will have the resources to do that, and I just wanted to get your views on that. Is that the right way forward?

It isn't how I would have done it. It feels that we're lumping more things on local authorities. Equally, they know their areas. They do know their patches. They've done a lot of work with fire and rescue services. Is one authority—? Rent Smart Wales worked—or it's still evolving, but it's been a success. I still am behind the idea of regions. As I say, I think I've made it clear already that I don't know what those regions are. There are people who need—probably cleverer people—to work that out. But I do see how—. It goes back to that I think we're going to see different interpretations, and that slightly worries me. So, where is the one person—is that Welsh Government—overseeing those things, or are we just leaving it to the local authorities to interpret this? Is it Audit Wales? Is it—? How do you scrutinise these new authorities, whatever they are?

Obviously, you mentioned that the Welsh Government's looking to go above and beyond what they're doing in England with this legislation. I just wanted to pick your brains again: is there anything that's happening in the rest of the UK that you think, 'Well, actually, this could be included within this'?

Not in this. The remediation was much different in other places. Certainly, Scotland, and parts of England, took a more aggressive stance. On this part, I think it's sensible. I think I've said already that I think this is appropriate for Wales. I don't think we need—. We have different challenges and different types of buildings. The things we're building—we're not building the size that England has in city centres and stuff, the skyrises.

Okay. Thank you, Chair.

Okay, Joel. David, is there anything else at all that you'd like to mention or bring to the attention of committee?

No. I don't want to really repeat anything I've already put in evidence, because you've already got that. Like I say, I've been supportive of this, and tenants have been supportive of it, but I think there are little bits we could improve on it. We'll see how it goes through.

Okay. David, that's great. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming in to give evidence to committee this morning. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual accuracy. Diolch yn fawr.

Cheers. Thanks.

Okay. We will break until 10.30 a.m. Diolch yn fawr.

Welcome back to committee. We've reached item 3 on our agenda today, which is our fourth evidence session on the Building Safety (Wales) Bill, and we will be hearing from professional bodies. I'm very pleased to welcome—joining us here in the committee room—Dr Henry Dawson of the housing advisory panel for the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and Cerys Clark, policy and public affairs manager for the Chartered Institute of Housing Cymru, and, joining us virtually, Gary Strong, global building standards director for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Welcome to the three of you. Thank you very much for coming in to give evidence to committee this morning. Perhaps I might begin with some general questions before we turn to other committee members. Firstly, what is your overall view of whether this Bill is needed? Who would like to begin? Yes, Cerys.

CIH Cymru welcomes the publication of the Bill. The Grenfell Tower tragedy was one that should have never happened, and this Bill will help us take the steps to ensure that a similar tragedy can never happen again. This proposed legislation will be a key part of the new strengthened building safety regime in Wales, ensuring that individuals can feel safe in their home no matter what type of home they choose to live in. So, it's very much welcomed by ourselves.

Thanks for that, Cerys. Henry.

Similarly, the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health is very pleased to see this Bill coming through. The Bill is very much needed. Some of the issues we'd have with the fragmented regulatory approach, which led to Grenfell, are being addressed very effectively by the Bill, with a focus around risk assessment, the defining of an accountable person and responsibility pathways, appropriate documentation and an increased focus on tall buildings, where we have a need for extra regulation.

Okay. Thanks for that, Henry. And Gary.

Good morning, everybody. Sorry I can't join you in person. So, the RICS very much welcomes this Bill. We've had the experience obviously in England of the Building Safety Act 2022 and the regulatory reforms. Post Grenfell, I have been leading on the response for the RICS to the Grenfell Tower fire in particular, and also, globally, I chair the United Nations International Fire Safety Standards Coalition, supported out of Geneva. So, we've been watching the regulatory reforms across many countries, and we do very much welcome the response by Wales to the building in occupation phase in particular. We've seen some of the gaps and perhaps areas that have slipped through in England with the Building Safety Act, so we very much support this and what the ambitions of the Welsh Government are. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Gary. Okay. The Welsh Government's decision to take a different approach from England is obviously very significant and a matter of scrutiny for this committee. One aspect of that is to include buildings below 18m high here in Wales, in terms of the regime that's proposed. Is that something you support or not?

Certainly, the CIEH sees the logic behind the—. If you look at the fire statistics, the risk in buildings that are below 18m is not broadly dissimilar to that above 18m. So, it does make sense, as they have an awful lot of similar problems, to bring them within this regime and also to have a tiered approach, with the category 1, 2 and 3 levels for buildings in this new Bill. The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health has some concerns around the inclusion of HMOs in particular in the Bill, in particular the potential for overlaps with the Housing Act 2004, with additional and mandatory licensing and the housing health and safety rating system. For the regulator, it's often helpful to have multiple tools that you can draw upon in order to address health risks in these properties, but this may be confusing for landlords and tenants in these situations.

Okay, Henry. And Gary.

Yes, thank you. I think we generally support the lowering of the height thresholds. Height itself is not a determinant of risk, and one of the things we've always been quite critical of is trying to determine risk in buildings by simply describing it by its height, but in the absence of any better determinator, we do welcome the lowering of the high thresholds into categories 1, 2, 3, and we've long campaigned, actually, in England, for that to be the case. So, we do welcome it. Obviously, Wales is different from England in terms of more low-rise buildings than there are in England, and if you look at the Home Office statistics around fire and rescue services, on the fire incidence, the majority of fires occur, actually, in low-rise buildings, not in high-rise buildings anyway. So, we do welcome the categorisation.

The only caveat to that, I would say, is that you do need to look at the risk more carefully, and if you just have a simple cut-off of buildings up to 11m, 11m up to 18m, and 18m and above, that sometimes can miss out quite high-risk buildings that may not fall neatly into those categories. So, for example, a building that is 17.5m is just as risky as one that is 18m, in our view, and likewise for category 3 as well. So, we would recommend, perhaps, either through secondary legislation or through guidance, et cetera, that there is more support around that in terms of what is the definition of a riskier building, if it doesn't necessarily sit neatly within those categories. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Gary. Cerys, did you want to—?

Yes. We agree with the three categories. It reflects, again, the different height of buildings that we have in Wales. We would have fewer super high-rise buildings; we tend to have blocks of flats in lower levels. But the risk needs to be considered slightly more—that it shouldn't just be on the height of a building. We need to consider the type of resident that's in there as well. Research has shown that, if you're an older person, you are more at risk as to there being a fire in the building, or then being safely evacuated from that building. So, it's whether, if there's a category 3 building, purely to provide older persons' accommodation, that should, by virtue, be a category 2 building just because of the extra risk that that poses for an older person to be able to safely get out, and to reduce that risk for an older person living in there. For some people, we incorporate that risk, rather than just by the height of a building.

Okay. Thank you very much for that. Henry, you mentioned some difficulties, as you see it, with those HMOs and existing regulatory requirements and what the Bill proposes. In general, is there anything else any of you might want to flag up with committee in terms of difficulties with this Bill and its integration with existing regulatory requirements? Is it generally a good fit, or are there other examples of where there are problems? Cerys.

We need to consider, especially around the new rights and responsibilities for residents, how that integrates with the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016, to make sure that those rights and responsibilities are contained within that renting homes Act, and it doesn't negatively impact on that existing piece of legislation for landlords. So, as we've got these extra rights and responsibilities around fire safety, structural safety, how can we integrate that appropriately into existing legislation around your tenancy agreements within those buildings?

So, you think it could fit, then, Cerys, could it?

It could fit, but I think it just needs to be made clear how it fits, so that if there is an impact on the renting homes Act, then that is clearly stated, so that landlords are aware, actually, if you have a tenant or a contract holder in a high-rise building, then these rights and responsibilities are also relevant to them within the fit-for-human-habitation rules. So, it's about how that integrates, to make that clear for landlords who need to then implement this new legislation as well.

Okay. That's fine. Gary.

Thanks, Chair. I think, just to reflect on that as well, we support exactly what's just been said. In terms, for example, of temporary accommodation and all types of accommodation, it depends on the proportionality approach that you're taking to this. So, what we don't want is to have people completely overwhelmed for low-rise—two-storey, for example, I'm thinking of—homes, where there may be only a few residents, but it falls within the provisions of the Bill and, therefore, there is a very onerous responsibility for whoever it is in terms of a responsible person or a principal accountable person or an accountable person, and the admin and bureaucracy that goes with that. People will just feel overwhelmed and not be able to comply with the legislation. At the end of the day, we welcome the legislation in terms of trying to improve building safety in the built environment, but what you don't want to then see is that, because it's so bureaucratic, people actually aren't able to comply. My inbox fills up with people on a regular basis coming to me in England and saying, 'We simply don't understand what it is that we're supposed to be doing here. Can you help us? Because it seems so bureaucratic, we can't find our way through the myriad of legislation that exists.'

And I think, in Wales, with the experience that we've had in England, I would recommend that there's a simplified process, particularly for the low-rise buildings that may only have a few residents, and just trying to make that easier. We know a lot of buildings are sometimes single-tenancy HMOs and some are not, and if you end up with a two-tier system, that's not going to be helpful to either the local authority or to anybody—you know, central Government—in terms of improving building safety. So, I think it just needs to be a very proportionate approach.

And I would recommend as well, from the experience we've had with the building safety regulator in England, that proportionate guidance is also published at the same time as the actual Act goes through, assuming it gets Royal Assent, so that there's proportionate guidance there straight away. What we've experienced in England with the Building Safety Act, for example, is that there wasn't that guidance in place and people were just left floundering as to what it was they were supposed to be doing, and they actually still are to some extent, as well. So, some of those gaps that may be spotted between various pieces of the legislation—it's been mentioned already by other speakers—I would recommend that the guidance—. And we can help with that; the RICS is willing to help. We've got a long track record of working with Welsh Government officials. We can help bring that guidance together to support people as to when the Bill goes through to Royal Assent. Thank you.

Thank you, Gary. It's always good to have an offer of help as well. I'm sure the Welsh Government would appreciate that.

Okay. Just a final question for me before we bring in other committee members. Housing supply, as I think we're all aware, is a huge issue in Wales and the UK and far beyond. Is there a risk this Bill could negatively impact on housing supply in Wales? Henry.

I have some short comments on that. We don't think that it will have particular impacts on housing supply overall as the rules apply uniformly, but one thing that we have noticed is that there's likely to be an increase in housing costs, as we see increases in service charges and ground rents that are required in order to meet some of the needs of this piece of legislation, and those will be passed on to occupiers. And so, our concern is around that, particularly as it will—. We've seen wage inflation—we've had an increased need for a fairly small cadre of fire safety and structural safety experts in England. And so, where we have that coming up in Wales, we're likely to see quite high costs for compliance with the Bill. In particular, we'll see a kind of bolus of need for these people with specific expertise at particular points around the registration cycle. And so, that's likely to drive costs, which will then, ultimately, get passed on to the occupiers of buildings, affecting cost of living.

Siân.

So, you're saying that the Bill doesn't prevent that from happening, and maybe there should be something in the Bill that could prohibit or at least have some effect on not passing on the costs to the renters or the leaseholders, et cetera.

Good question. I think that there's—. The Bill is ultimately creating some additional costs. The Bill has the ability within its gift to mitigate some of the impact of that, and that might be through a phased introduction. There are various ways that that could be done. But it's about trying to reduce that bolus of need for the professionals in the area, which has led to the inflation of wages that you're going to see when lots of people need a fairly limited workforce to carry out particular tasks at certain points on the five-year registration cycles.

We did hear previously from a representative of tenants in Wales, Henry, that it's possible that, in having safer buildings, some costs might come down—insurance costs, no need for waking watches and some of the other measures that are in place at the moment. Do you see that possibility as well, or—?

I think, as we gradually make our way through the retrospective works that we need to do on the building stock, then we will see a reduction in some of those additional costs, particularly with some of these short-term solutions that are necessarily very expensive. So, yes, I think we will see some reduction, once the Bill has set out the fire risk assessments, the structural risk assessments, and the building safety measures that are required. But they will, ultimately, still have to be implemented, so I'm not sure the Bill will make a substantial impact on speeding that process up, but it might make it more structured and organised. But this is not something we've had plenty of time to debate.

No. Okay. Gary.

Thanks, Chair. I was just going to make the point around the cost, actually, and the estimation of costs. I would say this, as a surveyor, wouldn't I, but costs, sometimes, have an awful habit of being higher than people anticipate at the outset. And I think that's been some of the case, actually, in England as well, that the estimated costs of introducing the Building Safety Act, for example, have actually exceeded what the estimates were, and we see this on a regular basis. So, I wouldn't underestimate the costs of implementing something like this, and unintended costs sometimes creep through, as has just been mentioned.

One point about the waking watch though, is that my understanding is it's not included within the Bill, so the costs of waking watch can be quite high, and it's not included in the building safety fund either. So, that is a direct cost, which people may still be incurring right now, for example, that needs to be looked at in particular, because that's not helping residents if they're having to fund those costs directly through their service charges. Thank you.

Okay, Gary. Thank you very much. Cerys.

I think it needs to be planned out so that it doesn't cause any delays to developing homes. We're already hearing from our members, through our sector snapshot reports, that delays in the planning system, due to lack of capacity, are already causing delays to development. So, there is a risk that these new building safety responsibilities could take resource from other areas within local authorities. We need to make sure that we resource our workforce sufficiently to ensure that there are no delays in the system, and that is really vital. That's something our members are saying. We need to have that workforce resource within the system to make sure that this doesn't cause any delays to planning or to developing, to make sure we are building the homes we need to end the crisis.

Thank you, Cerys. Siân.

Surely, we're talking about two different workforces here, aren't we? We're talking about skilled planners and then building safety. They're different workforces, so not necessarily will it impact on the slowness of planning applications getting through.

We've got, in addition, where across the border is also implementing building safety, a finite resource for workforce. So, you're going to have the Wales system and the English system all trying to get building safety experts in from the same pool, and there aren't enough there. Currently, there is a skill shortage with fire safety, with building safety. So, that needs to be appropriately resourced to make sure that, across the border, we've got enough people to implement this much needed legislation, and within both pieces of legislation. But when you've got two pieces of legislation trying to work from the same pool, and we're hearing that there isn't enough resource there currently, that's what could cause then the delays.

Yes, but that doesn't affect the planners, does it?

It affects local authorities, so it's about your local authority budget. So, if you need to increase your resourcing of building safety, that money's got to come from somewhere, and I think that will be the issue. And not every local authority is going to be impacted the same. So Cardiff, Swansea, Newport—those urban local authorities—will have more need for building safety regulation because that's where the high-rises are built. But if you've got a rural local authority, that might not be there. So, there's that disproportionality in the implementation and expense as well, but it's all coming out of one budget, so you need to make sure that that resource is there across the local authorities so that everybody gets the right sized workforce that they need.

Okay. Gary.

I was just going to make the point, Chair, around resources, and I think it's really important that the local authorities are adequately resourced for this new regime coming in. Again, coming back to the experience we've had in England, a lot of local authorities have had a massive skill shortage. They've had a massive number of people leave local authorities, from building control in particular, because of the compulsory registration to become a registered building inspector. So, there is an enormous skill shortage going on across the whole of the UK, actually, and, to the point just made, we need to make sure that there are the sufficient experts in the country able to deliver on this building safety regime, and that may impact on delivery of housing, because if local authority registered building inspectors aren't available, for example, that again is all part of it. It may not be directly impacting on planning, but it does, obviously, impact at the stage of actually getting building regulations approval, and any in-occupation changes to a building as well would also need building regulations approval—that's likely.

I think that the point about having adequate resources within the local building authority is really important. The building safety authorities are going to be so important here, that they have ring-fenced funding, that they have adequate training in place for people, that there's succession planning going through for newcomers into the industry as well. And I think that side of things we can obviously help with within the RICS. We've got a number of courses already up and running to help with training, but it's a long tail of pipeline, if you like, of people coming in. I know myself that there's a great shortage of fire safety experts and building safety experts across the UK. And what we don't want to see is that impacting on housing in any shape or form, whether it's new housing or existing housing being renovated or converted or upgraded, particularly around remediation as well. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Gary. Lee Waters.

I'd like to continue that last point. You said that you think that the workforce needs to be augmented. How do you suggest that happens?

Sorry, was that a question for me?

Yes, sorry. If we could start with you, then I'll bring the others in. But yes, please, just to continue your point.

It's a very good point, actually, and it's not an easy one to fix. What we've seen, for example, in England is that there's been grant funding to try and introduce more people into local authorities to undertake building control training at apprenticeship level. But of course, that is probably a drop in the ocean to what's really required in terms of long-term funding. The levels of salaries, for example, paid by local authorities don't compete with the private sector. And so many people have been drifting away from local authorities for many, many years. And actually, the compulsory registration and assessment of competence for registered building inspectors has driven an even greater surge over the past two years of people leaving the industry.

I would suggest that, working collaboratively across Government and professional bodies, we need to try and address that so that more people are encouraged to come into what could be a very vibrant and really interesting career. But of course, that needs a lot of work. It can't be just the local authorities working on their own, because they're not going to have the capacity to do that. I would suggest that needs to be probably driven by central Government, by the Welsh Government here, to try and introduce more people into the industry and develop a long-term pipeline. To be clear about it, there's no quick short-term fix around this. It's something that I think we're going to wrestle with for a good few years.

So just to crystallise the evidence from the three of you, you all agree that there isn't sufficient capacity across the professional sectors at the moment. That's going to lead to a further skills shortage. That in turn will drive price inflation. I think Henry Dawson said in his evidence that will be driven up and that will then knock the cost in the explanatory memorandum off course. And as Cerys Clark said, that will also have a knock-on impact on the capacity of local authorities more generally to deal with the other pressures they're dealing with, not least increase of supply. So just for the record, to make sure we're clear on this, all three of you are sounding quite a clear warning that this aspect of the Bill is going to have an adverse impact that is not being confronted. Is that correct? Is that a fair summary?

Yes, but there's an additional point that I'd like to raise.

Please.

If I can come in, Chair, just to answer that, I would say that it is going to have an impact, and that's why I sounded that warning about the impact assessment costs that accompany this Bill needing to be looked at very, very carefully, because there are going to be costs. I think that what we've certainly experienced in England is that there are unintended costs that people may not necessarily attribute at the outset of any Bill going through Parliament and being accepted for Royal Assent. So, I would suggest that those costs are revisited, because I think that there are going to be unintended costs here.

If you just look at the training aspect alone, for example, of getting more professional people in, more professionally qualified people to deliver on this, it's going to deliver over a long period of time. I would recommend that you don't rush at this. I think that where England probably went wrong, to some extent, was that they tried to rush at it quite quickly and didn't take into account how those costs would feed in down the line. So, I wouldn't say that it's all gloom and doom, but I would just sound that warning bell that there are going to be costs there.

So, proceed with caution. Okay, thank you. Henry Dawson, you wanted to make some additional points.

Thank you. I would echo the statements being made around the consideration of the long-term sustainability of the workforce, not only with the industry side—to skill people adequately in order to comply with the functions that are placed upon responsible people in the Bill—but also for the regulatory workforce. At the moment, local authority environmental health staff have seen a reduction of 41 per cent in numbers between 2010 and 2020, and we're averaging around 2.2 environmental health officers—quite old data now, around 2010—per 10,000 private rented sector homes, and they deal with a whole wealth of other built environment issues. So, at the moment, they're struggling to meet their existing requirements.

We need to think about providing more of them and we need to look at that as a root-and-branch approach, so training the existing workforce up in these new requirements, but also in securing new recruitment into the area, because degree courses are down, numbers on degree courses are down in the area. Looking at our own data from our workforce survey nationally across the UK, we're looking at around four fifths of local authorities relying on agency staff to satisfy basic environmental health functions. We need to think about things like, within the Bill, using fees to allow full cost recovery for the elements of these additional responsibilities placed on local authorities.

We've been asking within Wales for an apprenticeship; we've already got an environmental health apprenticeship in England, but we don't have a matching apprenticeship in Wales, and we've been struggling to get that one going. We need to think about promotion of careers in these areas, but also the wage caps that we have in place in local authorities make it very difficult for the local authorities to provide a wage that is in keeping with private industry. They can earn up to twice as much in private industry, so they move into private industry because it's a more attractive offer to them.

We also need to think about cuts in legal services. Within the costings for this, you need to factor in the fact that legal services in local authorities—. If they're going to be the authority for this, the additional income for them will need to reflect the increased costs that it would take for legal cases. And they're not going to be taking on small operators here; they're going to be taking on, at times, multinational corporations. We're concerned that that's not something that local authorities are equipped to deal with at the moment, with such large-scale cases with such well-funded and robust defences. Something that the Bill could provide for is a legal fund, administered centrally and potentially legal support centrally, in order to allow the building safety authority to take effective action against non-compliant operators.

There is a series of really important practical points there. On that last one specifically, do you have a view on what the Bill should say about discharging it back out of special measures?

At the moment, the only other analogous scheme is final management orders for HMOs under the Housing Act 2004, and they do those in five or—I believe with empty property—seven-year chunks, and then at the end of it, the local authority must apply for another one of these. So, it allows an opportunity every five or seven years for the local authority to review this and discharge it back into private ownership. But ultimately, the only options that are available that come to mind with that would be discharging some of our more draconian powers, such as compulsory purchase or enforced sale due to accumulated debt on the property, in order to move that property into ownership of somebody who's going to manage it effectively.

Those ultimately are the tools that I'm aware of that we have left in order to deal with properties where the current owners refuse to or are unable to manage them effectively. This is something I foresee as being an issue with this Bill in particular, as we have a lot of fragmented ownership of large blocks, large buildings. Often we'll have overseas owners or freeholders that have gone into administration, which may lead to long-term problems with these properties, which can be quite knotty and intractable issues for local authorities to deal with as the building safety authority.

Chair, I think we need to mark this item as particularly worthy of further scrutiny. Thank you for that.

Absolutely.

Just on your more general—

Lee, just before you go on—

Yes, of course.

—I'll just bring Lesley in quickly. Lesley.

Thanks very much. In your previous answer to Lee, you listed a significant number of concerns, but you also came forward with a number of solutions, which is really good to hear. When we had the Cabinet Secretary in front of us for scrutiny, she said there'd been significant engagement around this piece of legislation. I was just wondering what engagement you personally had with the Government as they were drafting this Bill.

The housing expert panel does have a Welsh Government representative that sits on it, and that's the head of environmental health and housing departments for Wales. We have officers from the Welsh Government that come and liaise with us and let us know what's coming through the pipeline and keeping us aware of things nationally. We also have responded to two consultations that we've seen on this, and so we've had a few opportunities to make our voice heard. Some of the issues that I'm raising here have been mentioned in our previous consultations, others are things that I'm raising for the first time today.

Thank you.

Just to pick back up, you've raised a series of examples where the current system can't cope with existing demand, and obviously this Bill is going to introduce additional demand. I just wanted to slightly broaden the question to the issue of capacity of local authorities that Cerys Clark touched on in her point. The Bill as it currently stands allows for 22 different building safety authorities to be created. Given that, as you're saying, they're struggling to discharge their current responsibilities, do you favour the Bill disallowing that and requiring regional collaboration to share skills? You can both answer it.

Yes, there is a lack of capacity, but we don't actually know what that lack of capacity looks like in numbers for each of the local authorities. I think that exercise really needs to be done first: 'This is how big our workforce is currently. Ideally, for us to be able to discharge all our duties and do them well, we need to have this size workforce and then look at how we get our workforce to that size.' And again, it's that disproportionality. We do need to have building regulation that is local, because it's going to be local issues that a local authority would know more than a regional conglomerate, but we just need to have that starting piece of work: what is the lack of capacity currently? We're hearing from lots of different research papers, lots of different membership groups, that we're struggling, but we don't know what we don't know. We don't know what that skills gap is currently, and what we need, and then how we are then investing, making sure that we've got those targeted reskilling initiatives for the existing workforce and ensuring that there are apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships, to bring in that new workforce as people retire out. So, that is a vital piece of work to start with before we have this conversation.

Sure, but that's as well as, not instead of. I think 'conglomerate' is a bit of a stretch. We're talking about a country of 3 million people. So, yes, it should be local, but there's proportionate to local, and given the capacity constraints everybody agrees on, do 22 building authorities seem to be a reasonable response to this problem?

But we also to overcome this with the appropriateness—is it appropriate for a local authority, as the Bill has put in there and feedback, to basically mark their own homework? Is it appropriate for a local authority who's got a high-rise building to be responsible for that management, or should that be for another local authority? I know that's been raised in the building regulations for when we're building the high-risk buildings, that that needs to be monitored by another local authority. That's going to be very difficult to do if you've got a regional building safety authority, because that's going to have to go out to another region, rather than your neighbour, which would be easier to do if it's your neighbouring local authority who has got building safety to monitor—

Assuming that they have the staff. You've just been telling us they haven't got the staff to do that.

But it's about those neighbour arrangements, it's about making sure that we can effectively implement it, but keep that local—

I suspect there are two issues you're mixing up here. One is what is the level of resource to be able to discharge these functions appropriately, and you made strong points about that. The other is: what is the optimum structure for being able to deliver this. And those are two separate points.

Both of them are going to need workforce resource.

Indeed they are, but that's not my question.

The starting point has to be: have we got it, and what is the resource we need now?

Okay, so agreeing that—I agree, so that's on the record—that's not the question. The question is: do you think the Bill as it's currently drafted, which allows potentially for 22 separate building authorities, is the right approach?

Yes.

You don't favour requiring collaboration.

Only when that collaboration is needed so that you haven't got one local authority monitoring a local authority landlord, providing that function for that, or the landlord function and the building safety function.

And you think allowing for 22 potentially separate, varying approaches is appropriate.

Well, everyone's going to be working to the same legislation, so they wouldn't be varying approaches if everyone's working to the same legislation.

Well, if that was true, we wouldn't have variation in any services, because everybody works to the same legislation. Of course we have variation.

But then that's where guidance comes in, and where we—

We have guidance already for all sorts of things, and there's variation, that's the nature of local government, isn't it? Okay, your position is clear, thank you. Henry.

We've been pushing this one around among the managers of local authorities over the last week, and what we've come to is a slightly different position. So, we were thinking, certainly, we want one central portal for all of the applications and paperwork, something very similar to the Rent Smart Wales format that we've got. We found that very effective. It allows better purchasing power for the software that's required, and it allows us to recruit a workforce in order to be able to do things like checking of certificates, which will be very necessary, checking of the paperwork, and some of the follow-up work in administering the information source. Something that has been very appropriately pointed out by our colleagues from the Chartered Institute of Housing is that making some of this information available to the public could be, if that's a central body, a much more feasible prospect.

We were thinking of having three joint inspection teams, very similar to the current joint inspection team we see in England and in Wales. That model's worked very well. Individual local authorities, particularly some of the smaller and more rural ones, are unlikely to have the ready access to the mixture of skills that you're going to need in order to deal with a typical application in this area. We're also seeing variation in the numbers of the properties that are coming out, particularly categories 1 and 2, to areas of local authorities with large urban conurbations. So, we think if you had three joint regulatory teams under the single body, and then those matched their areas with the fire safety authorities, that would lead to a much more straightforward mechanism. The Bill's pretty clear on some mechanisms for the building safety authority to work with the fire safety authority, but it could say a little more, and it could probably be dealt with through guidance, national guidance, on how the two authorities will interact on a day-to-day basis, as that's less clear in the wording of the Bill.

Okay, thank you. Gary Strong.

Thank you. Just coming back to this point about 22 local authorities becoming the building safety authority, the point is that some of these in rural locations may not have the resources, or almost certainly won't have the resources to be able to deal with more complex buildings, and how they share those resources with other adjacent local authorities or a bigger metropolitan local authority is a really important point. Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven’t seen any evidence of any research around any surveys done of the 22 local authorities currently to say exactly what their capacity is and how they’re going to deal with this in the future. Now, that may have been part of the consultation responses, but I haven’t seen it, and I think that’s a really important point. So, before this Bill is enacted, that point I think needs to be clarified so that—there are some local authorities, as we’ve experienced in England, where, effectively, the building safety regulators simply demanded things of them that the local authorities can’t achieve, can’t produce—you don’t end up in the same position here in Wales.

So, I do recommend that there’s some further research around this in terms of what it is that the local authorities themselves actually need, what it is they need by way of resources from central Government to be able to deliver that, where they clearly don’t have the in-house expertise and they’re going to need to collaborate with another local authority. That is absolutely critical to this delivery, because otherwise I think people will be throwing their arms up in horror going, ‘We simply can’t do this.’

Okay. So, can I just clarify that? The three of you seem to all be saying that there needs to be a skills and capacity audit of the sector before implementation. Is that a fair summary?

I certainly would say that. I think that's essential, because you don't want the position we found with the local authorities in England, where they didn't have that audit in place.

Okay, thank you. And Henry and Cerys, can I just check that you both support that?

Yes.

Okay. I just want to touch on one final issue—it was mentioned in the chartered institute's written evidence and Cerys Clark mentioned it earlier, and that's on the issue of the categorisation. We heard in the previous evidence session today the line that a safe building is a safe building, regardless of who's in it. Cerys, you said in your evidence that the research shows that some residents are more vulnerable than others, and that needs to be reflected in the regime, and I think you gave the example of older people and single-parent households. The Bill does not allow for that distinction at the moment. You clearly think that the Bill should be changed to allow higher risk households to be put into category 2, rather than category 3. I just wonder, again, in terms of the unintended consequences of that, could that have an impact on supply? If you were having a higher regulatory threshold for buildings that housed vulnerable people, might that discourage people from coming forward with those buildings for use for those categories and therefore further reduce supply?

I don't think it will further reduce supply. I think we just need to be conscious that, for some people, they need slightly more protection because of vulnerabilities, and making sure that things are in place to make sure that that property is still structurally safe and safe if a fire breaks out. So, if you've got an older person who needs to have a hoist in the property, or they need to have a stairlift or some sort of adaptation, we need to have that process in place that the structural safety is also double-checked after that work is done. Whereas if it's a category 3 building, that isn't necessarily within that.

When we've spoken to members, they've said that we need to consider that risk isn't just about the height of a building, risk is about the number of people who are living in that building and the type of people who are living in that building. So, you could have a five-storey building that's got two huge flats on each floor, or you could have a five-storey building with loads of bedsits. The evacuation time, the risk that that's going to pose to the whole building is going to be very different. So, it's just about making sure that we don't just have this arbitrary, 'Once you get to this height, it's this category.' Well, actually, we also need to consider how we protect those people who are living in those properties.

Okay, let me just test that. It's a fair point, but is whether somebody needs a hoist or not an issue of a social care assessment, not a building safety assessment? Is there a danger that we're overburdening the building safety framework, given that we've already heard about the capacity constraints, to tackle problems that are best dealt with with existing assessments?

I think it should be both. So, part of the Bill is looking at the compartmental—. I can’t even say the word—

Compartmentalisation. Yes, it's a tricky one.

—compartmentalisation of that unit. So, if you're having a hoist in, because somebody needs it, and it may not be an older person, it may be a younger person, anybody who needs that sort of physical—. You need to have in place, if it's a category 3 building, where structural safety risks aren't always considered—that we go in and check that that fire safety compartmentalisation is still in place, to make sure that that property is safe for that individual going in there. So, it's not just putting a burden on other people, it's about making sure that that individual is still safe in their home. That's what we need to consider. The added risk for fire for certain household types—that needs to be considered within it as well.

Sure. All these things are a balance, aren't they? A balance of risks. Isn't there a danger that adding that additional complexity on to a building safety regime is creating too much complexity for the risk presented?

I don't think so, no. Our members have been clear, we need to be looking at the risk of—. The risk isn't just height of a building. The risk is who's living in there and how many people are in that building, and it's going to look very different. But we're not talking about every category, we're talking about category 3. So, for certain category 3 buildings, do we need to reassess, actually, because of the type of residents that are being provided a home within this building, putting extra steps in to keep them safe? The underlying thing is that we need to keep people safe in their homes. We're trying to prevent another tragedy happening.

Okay. I'm just wondering if Gary or Henry have anything to add and whether they agree or disagree with that.

We haven't adopted a position on this, outside of agreeing with the three categories. The only other contribution we could make is there could be some impact on the enforcement focus taken by the regulator. Where we have higher risk properties, it's very typical in health and safety in housing and food safety for local authorities to conduct their own internal risk assessments of the market that they're doing and focusing their enforcement on the higher risk premises, as they see them. So, a very different use of risk assessment.

So, that's how the regime is implemented and policed, rather than changing a regime to try and deal with all risks.

Yes.

Okay. And Gary.

Thank you. I'm reminded during this debate about what happened in England around residential PEEPs, the personal emergency evacuation plans, which some of you may know. It was kept out of the Building Safety Act 2022 and came back later, actually, just recently, in terms of, 'What does that mean?' Everybody accepted that it's a very challenging situation to, first of all, get the data on who actually lives in the building and what their special needs might be, for example, and whether there are vulnerable people. And of course people change, particularly around tenancies as well, on a regular basis. So, keeping the database up to date is a challenge for anybody. But then also, what do you do around those individuals who may have special needs to be able to get them out of the building quickly?

What's come in in England now are the residential personal emergency evacuation plans—RPEEPs, as they're called—and a requirement to put one of those in place for everybody. But that, I think, is not in primary legislation. It's in secondary legislation, guidance, for a reason—because it's quite a difficult thing to put into primary legislation. I think you can deal with it further down the track in terms of secondary legislation and guidance. Trying to deal with it in primary legislation like this is very, very difficult. But accepting that it is a problem—we shouldn't ignore the problem. Some people are vulnerable and will have needs that able-bodied people may not have at all. We do recognise there's a problem, it's just how you deal with it and at what stage, I would suggest.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, Lee, thanks very much. Joel James.

Thank you, Chair. I'm conscious that a lot of the stuff I wanted to touch upon, like the enforcement aspect, has already been talked about. But I just wanted to pick your brains again. You mentioned there about where the local authority is also the landowner—the landlord, I should say. I just wanted to see there about potential conflicts of interest and marking your own homework. Obviously, at the category 1 properties, they can transfer that on to a different authority to enforce. But category 2 and 3 are for them to look into. I just wanted to get an idea—surely, there would be conflicts of interest there. You mentioned also about skill shortages and the lack of capacity. To me, that screams cutting corners and doing the bare minimum. From my experience of local authorities, if they get away with not spending money, they're going to do that. They'll pass it on to other people. I just wanted to get your views on that, really.

Secondly, a question I ask all those giving evidence is about the building safety regulator—you would have thought I would have remembered that, considering how many times I've asked the question. Obviously, the Hackitt review has said that there should be a building safety regulator. In this Bill here in Wales, they're not proposing to do that. I just wanted to get your views on that as well, if I may.

Who would like to begin? Henry.

I propose that having a single, central body and three joint inspection teams would help to address the conflict of interest, which was entirely correctly pointed out by our colleagues here. The funding around this body would really mean, for the purposes of this Bill, that it was an effective piece of legislation or put people through what was, effectively, a large and expensive paper exercise. So, where you have a licensing scheme under the Housing Act 2004, for instance, where the fees are not significant enough, they're not high enough, then that pays for the administration of the scheme, but there's no additional money coming in to pay for the enforcement officers, and also the whole queue of cases you've got going through the courts—some of which will make it to a prosecution and you'll get a cost recovery, and some you will not.

If we have a central body, there would need to be very clear provision made for liaison with local authorities. They'll be important information conduits for them. There will also need to be very clear liaison arrangements between the fire and rescue authority and the building safety authority. For the purposes of how the Bill's setting things out, we think that the enforcement powers that are available to local authorities are broadly appropriate. May I ask, are you asking a separate question on that, or would you like me to make some points in that area?

Only if you'd like to, yes. I was going to ask if you could foresee any barriers to local authorities implementing those enforcement powers.

At the moment, in the way of barriers, in addition to some of the things I've mentioned already, there's a provision within the Bill to be able to request a review of a decision by a local authority. We don't see that as being a necessary step. We don't have it in equivalent areas that we could come up with, and there is already the provision there for the responsible person to go to the residential property tribunal and make an appeal. Any regulator worth their salt is going to be communicating with the person they're regulating with in order to discuss what they're proposing, prior to taking the actions.

I think we need some very clear central enforcement guidance. Quite a lot of this Bill—an awful lot of this Bill—is coming out in regulations, and so we'd be very keen to work with Welsh Government, to support them in some of the ideas that they have around drafting that legislation, and we'd be keen to see that coming through in packets of regulations, so that we can see the overall impact of them, rather than a more piecemeal approach.

And finally, clause 91 of the Bill in particular prohibits the use of a power of entry to residential units to those where the investigating officer has obtained a warrant in advance of the inspection. An analogous power that could be used would be that set out in the Renters' Rights Bill in England, which provides due notice with the power of entry, because if you're going in as a regulatory officer, as an inspector, you're going to need to access multiple residential units in a building. We can always follow up with a warrant, but being able to say that you've got a power of entry to go into a property does help an awful lot on the doorstep.

The final one is, within the Bill, the way that it's worded, it appears that service of notice is on a body corporate, requiring them to be handed physically to an officer of the body corporate, and quite often these are very difficult to pin down. It may be something that we're missing in our initial review of the Bill, but being able to use a paper service with prepaid first-class post would be very helpful, to the company secretary or similar, as we see in other pieces of legislation.

Thank you.

Gary.

Thank you. On the point of conflicts of interest, I think it's quite a concern, actually, that there could be a conflict of interest. Certainly, in the eyes of the public, the feedback we've received is that you have to be absolutely squeaky clean here in terms of not marking your own homework. I would recommend that there is a dispute resolution, an appeals process, put in place that is very robust, so the public can see that, because otherwise I think this Bill could be criticised, that people are able to continue marking their own homework here. Some kind of dispute resolution service, obviously, would need very robust guidance around this point in particular, so that people can see, in the eyes of the public, anyway, in the public interest, that the local authority is not trying to do something on the cheap and trying to get away with something that, ordinarily, another regulator may not allow. So, if it's a process whereby, if there is any dispute, it goes straight to a dispute resolution service, we again can help on that, because obviously we've got an RICS dispute resolution service nationwide as well. We’d be happy to talk to officials about how that might work.

On the second point about the building safety regulator, I think a lot of our members have expressed concern that the building safety regulator regime that was set up in England doesn't apply across the whole of the four nations of the UK. Obviously there's devolved power to the devolved nations, and Wales has decided to do something slightly differently. But a lot of people have said to me that they just find it a little bit disappointing that there's a separate process in Wales. It's been bad enough trying to get our heads around the process in England, and yet now we're going to have a process that's going to be different in Wales.

Having said that, we don't see any objections, as I said at the outset, to the Bill; we support it, and the way it's actually gone further than the Building Safety Act in England. And there have been in the media, as you probably appreciate, quite a lot of concerns about the building safety regulator being under-resourced, and the backlog of applications around gateway 2 in particular.

So, in a way, I'm not really answering the question, perhaps, on where you're going with this. But I think a lot of people would say it would be much easier if the four nations of the UK could just have one building safety regulator. But I appreciate that that may not be an option. Thank you.

Okay, Joel? Siân.

Thank you very much. I won't make a comment on that final point there. Moving on, we have touched on this issue already, namely the Welsh Government's assessment of the costs of implementation, and I think that you've already stated an opinion that you don't believe that the assessment is adequate or sufficient. Could you expand a little on what your concerns are with regard to the assessment as it currently stands?

Cerys.

Yes, I think for me, just looking at it, the total overall costs in the explanatory memorandum just seem to be very low. When we were looking through it ourselves, we couldn't see whether it was considering the cost for housing associations to implement the Bill. Obviously you're going to have local authority landlords, but you’re also going to have registered social landlords who need to implement the Bill. And again, we'll repeat, there's no assessment of current capacity of the workforce and whether that is enough to meet the new requirements, and if not, what investment is going to be needed to increase skills and increase the workforce to a level that we actually need.

Installing new IT systems, that is a huge cost and we couldn't see that in there, especially around the golden thread information, which is going to need to have a dedicated bespoke IT system. That comes along with a cost as well. And wider training needs for housing officers who have regulated multi-occupied buildings in the areas that they manage. So, just on-the-ground people. So, it's not just your building safety people, it’s housing officers going into flats or going into people's properties to say, ‘Actually, there's an issue here, we need to have a look at it.’ It's that training that would be needed to ensure that we know what that looks like.

So, for us, it was just that those don't seem to have been considered, and we would like the financial impact assessment to consider the possible financial impact on housing associations as well as local authorities in Wales.

I have a few points. I’ve already made a number of points around the need for support with legal fees. Also, a joint inspection team would need to be able to hire in experts as they were needed in order to be able to get sufficient evidence if they were building a case or determining a case with a particular operator. I think also we've got some consideration of additional costs that don't seem to be featured in the costs and benefits assessment around the costs of administering the buildings you have to put into special measures.

The costs for local authorities seem to be parcelled out as the same cost year on year, but there would be considerable upfront costs for local authorities as they get to grips with the new legislation and have to train the workforce, and provide additional publicity, if they're to be able to set themselves up in a position where they can then start administering this new legislation.

One of the things, just to point out with this, is very often we get new burdens funding, which helps us with new legislation, and that tends to tail off over time. The explanatory notes of the Bill suggest that the fees for a lot of the activities under this would cover some of the costs, but that devolves the cost for this new Bill largely, in its administration, to the council tax payer if local authorities are covering it. So, there's not really much there in the Bill or the explanatory notes around the ring-fencing of costs and a sustainable and predictable funding model for local authorities, as we believe that regulatory interventions should pay for themselves where possible. So, we'd like to see better consideration of how the fees that are being levied for some of the duties cover the legal action that's required as well as the administration of the scheme. Also, we didn't feel that the numbers were sufficiently high to factor in the additional cost for year-on-year requirements for local authorities. Some of this would be mitigated by having the three joint inspection teams.

So, would you like to see in the Bill that there would be provision so that the costs are clawed back fully through the fees, because, at present, I think that they're aiming to have part of the costs recovered through the fees? But would you like to see that aspect being stated more clearly on the face of the Bill?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay.

[Inaudible.]

Okay. Gary—

Okay, Siân?

I think we've covered this area quite well, haven't we?

Thank you very much. Lesley.

Thanks very much, Chair. Do you think that the duties on accountable persons and principal accountable persons are reasonable and proportionate in the way the Bill is currently drafted? Henry.

We think that they seem appropriate. We just want to note that they're going to need some additional support in the form of training. So, they're going to need a little time in order to learn about the new requirements upon them. We think that's probably going to be of greatest need for category 3s, and I think we're going to need additional publicity for that. But, apart from that, they seem to be appropriate.

Okay, thank you. Gary.

Yes, just to support that, we think they are appropriate. Just on the point of training, it's worth noting, actually, that the building safety regulator have been running webinars for principal accountable persons and accountable persons as to what the role is. A little bit late, I would say, after the role came in, but to my earlier point that if you're going to do this, you need to have the appropriate training and guidance ready to go at the same time as the Act gets passed, so that it's there for people. I do think it is appropriate to have those roles, even for category 3, but it just has to be proportionate, and you do need to make sure that there's sufficient time for people to go through the training, understand the roles, be able to have access to officials to ask queries, et cetera, and also that there's funding from the Welsh Government to support all of this, particularly for some of the smaller local authorities.

Going back to that point about ring-fenced funding, which is the point that I made when we were in the Hackitt final report stage, saying that if you're going to have any extra burdens on the local authority, you do need to have ring-fenced funding and central Government support coming through. So, just to make that point. Thank you.

Hopefully, devolution means that we can learn lessons from England on that first point that you raised then.

Yes.

Cerys, did you want to add—?

Yes, we feel that they are reasonable on those duties. The only potential challenge that we see is for orphan buildings or where it isn't clear who owns the freehold for that building as well, but that's the only issue that we would possibly foresee.

Okay, thank you. In a previous answer, Henry, you referred to the need to, I think the word you used was, 'simplify' some of the duties. So, the Welsh Government are saying that what they're proposing will absolutely simplify and streamline the current fire safety duties. Do you agree with that?

I think where you have—. In these buildings, you’ve got requirements, potentially, under licensing, or more generally, if they come under the category of a house in multiple occupation, if they're a poorly converted block, a pre-1991 building Act block of flats; you’ve also got the housing health and safety rating system applying, and then you’ve got this new piece of legislation and you’ve got the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 applying. So, I think this adds another layer of complexity to them, and I think there’s overlap there. I think they do integrate, but it’s something that gives the regulators more options to take action against properties, where you would need to consider some of the issues you have where you’ve got multiple regulators affecting a single property—there’s a potential for them to all pile in, or for you to have them all looking to each other to take enforcement action, which ends up with a Grenfell-type scenario. And I think that’s something that is definitely concerning with this new piece of legislation.

A lot of this can be navigated through effective guidance, and, ultimately, if you’re bringing in additional duties that will benefit the public’s safety in these larger buildings in particular and in shared buildings, when thinking about category 3s, it needs to be simple for them, but they do need to have some form of interlinked detection, they do need to have some form of formal collaboration for those who are owning flats that are in poorly converted buildings, for instance. So, you do need to have that coverage, but I think they need a lot of support and I think you need to think carefully about the guidance that’s provided to them, and, to some extent, maybe they could be shielded from the technicalities of the legislation and provided with a more simplified single source of information, which, potentially, could be held centrally.

Thank you. Gary.

Yes, thank you. I’m not sure we agree that it’s necessarily simplified; I think there is an added layer of complexity, particularly with category 3 and category 2 buildings here, that’s been introduced. So, I’m not sure that it’s simplifying anything. But I do think, coming to the point about guidance, that the guidance needs to be very clear and it needs to be statutory guidance as well. So, what we’ve seen and experienced in England, for example, is that we’ve had the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government writing guidance on gov.uk pages that looks as if it’s formal Government guidance, but it doesn’t actually have any statutory power or enforcement around it at all. So, I would suggest or recommend that, if possible, the guidance that comes through is in the form of statutory guidance and therefore the local authority, as the local building safety authority, and fire and rescue services and everybody else can really regulate effectively against that statutory guidance. Thank you.

Yes. We’ve had some concerns from some of our members around what is defined on the face of the Bill and what’s going to be defined in regulations and whether that balance is appropriate. So, we’re doing some more work around that with our members and that’s obviously something that, possibly, could be addressed by statutory guidance. But that does need to be looked at—what is being defined on the face of the Bill and what is being left to be defined within the regulations.

Okay, thanks. Henry, you mentioned HMOs. I was wondering if you've got any specific concerns about how this legislation would affect landlords of HMOs, and also if you think it's sufficiently clear which HMOs would be within scope.

I think because there are—. The Bill, specifically the guidance notes, at least—and, forgive me, probably the Bill as well—refers to the different categories of HMOs defined under the Housing Act 2004. However, I'm a housing professional of much experience in this area, so this falls to me quite easily. I think, for people out there in private industry, who very often will have one or maybe a couple of buildings or be reluctant administrators of their building through some joint management companies, I suspect they'll be finding anything apart from the most simple way of defining that very difficult to navigate. Again, some of this can be navigated through shielding them from some of the complexity and providing simplified guidance for them. But the Bill does explicitly separate out single-occupation properties such as a shared house, and it only deals with multi-occupied as being two separate physical units with a full set of the three key facilities—kitchen, bathroom and WC behind one door. However, poorly converted blocks, and then buildings that are not totally self-contained flats, which bedsits come into, are somewhat of a grey area with regards to this Bill. At times, poorly converted blocks, section 257 blocks converted prior to the 1991 building Act that haven't been signed off subsequent to that with improvements—and more than a third of them are rented—may come under licensing provision for additional licensing schemes in Wales, and they will last for five years and then they'll go away again. So, they will get an additional bit of legislation, which will come and it will go.

Blocks that are not completely self-contained flats—so, bedsits or properties that are all self-contained flats, but one of them may, for instance, have a bathroom on a mezzanine floor—will also come in, but they'll come in under mandatory licensing. And when they come in under mandatory licensing, the owners of those will be responsible for that on top of what this requires, and they've got additional fire safety duties under mandatory licensing through the Housing Act 2004.

So, I think the Bill needs to take some very clear steps to say whether they're going to include those within the scope of the Bill, because that could lead to quite a lot of confusion. Also, potentially, given that different local authorities have different requirements for mandatory licensing, there needs to be an effort to align the requirements of this Bill with the requirements of licensing, whether it be mandatory or additional, in order to avoid two bodies asking for different things of the same landlord that are in tension and they're competing.

I was interested to read in your evidence paper around building safety authorities maintaining that golden thread of information, bringing it all together, et cetera. What do you think are the challenges in them being able to do that, and do you think it will require a digital solution? Do you think the digital infrastructure is there already, or do you think something will need to be brought in to do that? Who wants to start? Cerys.

Yes. So, we welcome the introduction of the golden thread. It makes perfect sense that you've got it from spade in ground to a person putting the key in the front door of their new home. That makes sense, but that will need that bespoke digital solution, where all that information can be put in, and can also be accessed by various people as they need to. So, for people who are going to manage the building, they can access certain bits of information. If somebody's looking to move into a new high-risk building, they can access information about that building, so that they can be assured that that building is safe to live in. Any complaints should also be stored within that golden thread of information, so that people understand, 'Actually, this complaint has already been raised, and this is how it was resolved', so that information is there.

Other similar public portals that already exist around registration are the rented homes website. So, there's obviously lots of information that's available to the public, but there's an awful lot of information that's in the back end of the website that other people can access if they need to. So, it's just about how we can replicate something that's already working, but also provides that digital solution from spade in ground to key in front door for somebody.

That's good. Henry.

I think a central product, similar to the platform used by Rent Smart Wales, would be entirely appropriate. In fact, a very similar product could be reworked for this purpose. I may be being over simplistic here, but, having seen their platform—I'm on the advisory panel for Rent Smart Wales personally—there will need to be plenty of manual checks carried out. So, there will need to be a back-office workforce in order to be able to provide for that, and they'll need to have sufficient expertise to be able to carry this out. Again, somewhere central will need—. You're going to need a helpline, and you're going to need bilingual support there, and, in particular, attracting Welsh staff for an effective bilingual position is challenging.

I think the greatest challenge for this is likely to be around managing the General Data Protection Regulation and service level agreements around data sharing. For law enforcement, there is an exemption within GDPR, but, if you try to say that to public sector departments, it very often falls on deaf ears, because they're so risk averse with this particular issue. To some extent, direction from the centre will be needed there, but there may be potential for a clause in the Bill to direct information sharing for the responsible body for that portal.

Okay. Thank you. And Gary.

Yes, thank you. We fully support the golden thread of information. It's absolutely essential—Dame Judith Hackitt referred to it in her final report as being essential as well—so that everybody understands how a building's been constructed and how it has been maintained as well. I think the maintenance part of it is the really important part here, in particular with this Bill, so the operational manuals that exist for that building are not lost in time and are maintained somewhere.

I think the challenges around the golden thread that we've experienced in England are which piece of software do you use. I defer to my colleague there about that the Rent Smart Wales software may be the most appropriate, but it just needs to be consistent across all 22 local authorities, so that the information can be shared, if it's necessary to share information, across collaborating local authorities. So, I think it is essential that service level agreements, the back-office staff supporting it, the inevitable IT queries that you're going to get where the IT doesn't work, I think, are all part of that package. But we absolutely support having the golden thread of information. It's really essential, particularly in this digital age, especially with artificial intelligence coming in as well, that we have full information about our buildings.

I know from my work internationally that, in countries like Estonia, for example, every single building has a digital footprint, with all the information about how it was constructed, who the architect was, what material and products were used. For a country not dissimilar in size to Wales, it's power to the fact that you can do this, if you put your mind to it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, Lesley. Thank you very much. Peter, I wonder if you might ask about the balance between residents' rights and responsibilities, if you could.

Yes. Thanks. The Bill requires duty holders in category 1 buildings to prepare and follow a residents' engagement strategy that promotes residents' participation in key building safety decisions. I just want to know your views, perhaps, on that provision.

We welcome that provision. We believe that there is that right balance between residents' rights and responsibilities, but we feel that there may be possibly an additional duty for a resident to inform the principal accountable person when they are newly moving into a building. It's a simple solution, whether it's a housing association or local authority landlord, or if someone's buying a property within a block, or going in as a private tenant, to say that they have now moved into this building, so they can be then provided with a copy of that residents' engagement strategy and understand what their rights and responsibilities in regards to safety in that building are when they've newly moved in.

There is a need to consider training for principal accountable people, especially those that aren't local authorities and housing associations, on how to develop an effective resident engagement strategy, and how to ensure that that resident voice is essential to that strategy. And that is something that needs to be considered as part of doing that. But we fully welcome those strategies.

Yes. Henry.

I second those opinions, and certainly welcome this provision within the Bill. We think, in practice, it's very likely there'll be some set formats for these engagement strategies, which will be replicated across the industry and then tailored to particular buildings. I think the proof of the pudding will be in the application of the strategy. There is provision within the Bill for tenants or residents to complain and to elevate that complaint to the regulator. Cases of non-compliance are likely to become complex and vague, but the essence of that collaborative approach is there and really important here.

Thanks.

Thanks. Gary.

Yes, thank you. We fully support resident engagement. We think it's absolutely essential. Post Grenfell, the recommendations for resident engagement we've been heavily involved in, and I'm just reminded actually of a recent case of a local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, for example, where the Grenfell Tower fire occurred. They've still not got their resident engagement right, and that's quite shocking, actually. So, I think that it's really, really important, in terms of the public interest here, to have restored public confidence in the running of buildings, that they are safe et cetera, and how they can be involved in the running of those buildings. These people occupy these buildings on a daily basis. They know what's going on on the ground. They're your eyes and your ears—I've always said this—as to what the issues are with the particular building, and there needs to be that resident engagement strategy, right from the very top, from a strategic point of view, right through to day-to-day engagement with the residents in the building. We think it's very essential and are fully supportive of it. Thank you.

Thank you, Gary. Thank you, Peter. Just one last question. We've run over time, I'm afraid, so we'll have to be brief. On the question of remediation of existing safety risks, I think we're familiar with the position of people trapped, really, in high-rise buildings that have been identified as having fire safety defects, and that remediation work is often not proceeding at the pace that those residents, those leaseholders, would like to see. This Bill doesn’t create any new powers or duties specifically to accelerate remediation of existing safety risks. Do you think that’s the correct approach for this Bill, or should this Bill address those issues also? Gary.

Thank you, Chair. I would say, actually, having been involved in remediation since Grenfell Tower heavily across many countries, that it would be a lost opportunity not to put something in this Bill around remediation of existing defects. Here we are, over eight years since the Grenfell Tower shocking tragedy and we've still got unsafe buildings. So, I would fully support any action to try and improve this Bill around remediation, on what that looks for. I know there's the building safety fund et cetera, and applications are encouraged, but I think it's still slow progress. So, anything that can be put in the Bill to improve and hold developers to account, contractors to account, building owners to account for improving rapidly the safety of their buildings, should be included in this Bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Gary. Henry or Cerys, would you like to offer a view on that?

I think there are plenty of available powers at the moment under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and the Housing Act 2004, which, between the two of them, will cover the buildings affected by this Bill. This Bill will make it easier to use those, because at the moment it's exceptionally complex trying to serve legal notices in order to bring about repairs under those pieces of legislation, because it's very difficult to work out who is ultimately responsible. And when you're serving notices, you're serving them in the hundreds, which takes a considerable amount of time.

I think, if we had further measures around remediation within the Bill, we would risk further overlap between the clauses of the Bill and the existing regulatory regime. We're keener to see consolidation rather than duplication in areas, and so if there's provision within the Bill to allow for consolidation of some of those powers around remediation, then that would be something that we'd be very interested in. But aside from that, ultimately we agree with my colleague from RICS, to say that anything that gets the measures undertaken by the building owners is something we would welcome.

Okay. Thank you, Henry. Cerys, anything to add?

Nothing further to add on that. I think it's been covered. Thank you.

No. Okay. Well, thank you, all, very much. Thanks very much Henry, Cerys and Gary for giving very valuable information and evidence to committee this morning. It's much appreciated. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual accuracy. Diolch yn fawr.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Item 4 is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public from the remainder of this meeting. Is committee content so to do? I see that you are. We will move to private session.