Building Safety Bill – Part 4 – 100% Hackitt

“It was like a convicted drunk driver emerging from the court and asking you to sign a petition for stronger enforcement on the roads.”

Let’s wind forward to 2018.

Grenfell should have been the disaster that would lead to major changes in the construction industry – and it has. Those changes are being debated by Parliament as I type. Back in 2018 though as we saw the images on TV the fingers already started to point the blame. Whose fault was this? Who allowed this to happen? As it emerged it was a council building, owned and managed by them and with the building Control done in house it seemed obvious that any changes would need to focus first on the Local Authority system.

Surely Local Authority Building Control could not survive such a catastrophe unscathed – but no, quite the opposite. L A B C took a robust position and fought back. Unbelievably their management managed to stand up in Parliamentary circles without any shame and talk themselves up.

In August 2021 in the Grenfell enquiry we’ve heard that LABC was endorsing the products used on Grenfell. It was sponsored by manufacturers. That of course has now all vanished from the website. We covered much of this in a previous post but it’s important.

But not as important as the fact that L A B C managed to hijack the Hackitt report.

Remember the “100% Hackitt” campaign?

Remember everyone falling over themselves to add their signature to the cause?

That was L A B C. Don’t bother trying to find the website as its been taken down.

It was like a convicted drunk driver emerging from the court and asking you to sign a petition for stronger enforcement on the roads.

On the blog is a video of Lorna Stimpson, C E O of L A B C, telling an audience at the House of Commons about how private sector building control has no ethics.

Guess what? Many private sector employees are ex-L A B C.

Are they also without any competence?

Many private sector staff have moved to the L A B C. How did they manage that with such low standards?

Everyone claps. Nobody objects. Nobody saw through the façade. Who after all would not support a proposal for safer buildings?

This is quoted from F C A magazine:

At the launch (of 100% Hackitt) , Lorna Stimpson, Deputy Managing Director of L A B C and a qualified Surveyor, spoke passionately about her experiences, recounting how developers can shop around to find the building control supplier – generally private sector – that best suits their needs. In one recent example, the developer of a £60 million scheme of high-rise tower blocks stipulated just 10 inspections at a cost of a few thousand pounds for the entire project, which Lorna rightly believes is both “ludicrous and dangerous”.

It is ludicrous. It is also non-proven. It’s a story.

It also implies that the developer has asked for a quote specifically for 10 inspections… which just doesn’t happen. Someone doesn’t understand how the quoting works in the real world.

The L A B C were not convincing everyone, but then they didn’t need to. They only had to convince Dame Judith Hackitt.

The Hackitt review is flawed. In the past any disasters were reviewed by a retired judge –Hillsborough is a prime example. The judge would be used to sifting evidence, listening carefully and weighing up what happened and the measures needed to prevent it reoccurring. The judge was not an expert from a specific field or else they could be perceived as biased. They exercised an analytical mind to derive a solution without any preference to any side.

The subsequent reports they produced were in plain language, understandable and made sense. They make good reading even now and yet were often ignored at the time once a precis has been issued. They should be read in full – they are admirable works. Lord Justice Taylor made sense from the chaos and arrived at solutions that in the end transformed modern stadia.

Dame Judith Hackitt too is a remarkable woman who previously was chair of the HSE for a decade. She has a very good background. She’s not a judge however. She looked at the problem through the lens of a Health and Safety perspective and from the viewpoint of the public sector. She dismissed the private sector from the review as they were not directly involved in Grenfell. It had no role to play in that project but reading between the lines you can see that she believed it had somehow contributed to the dumbing down of regulations. The evidence she collected would obviously include statements from L A B C. The fact that a developer could choose their own auditor was surely a bad thing. Wasn’t it? In fact she found it outrageous. Such a thing would never happen at the H S E.

Ask a structural engineer if a building will collapse. “Yes”, they’ll reply, “eventually”.

And that’s the problem – the bias.

Instead of bringing the expertise together to create a holistic service she allowed LABC to hijack it.

Yet every day the private sector beavers away.

• Architects design buildings.
• Engineers design structures.
• Approved Inspectors audit projects.

The private sector fly your planes and make sure they are safe. They drive the trains. They check your car, check your teeth, check your new home you want to buy, check your old home if you want a remortgage. Do I need to continue?

The final Hackitt report is right in so many ways but zero in on the Building Control aspects and it’s clear that there is misunderstanding. A flaw in the thinking. That last bullet point above is not understood.

Unfortunately, Building Control as an industry / profession is often misunderstood. The person responsible for the building is the person building it – the developer. Just as the person building it is responsible for the safety of those building it.

If there’s a fatal accident on site the H S E step in. Quite right.

Building Control though is about auditing the development to ensure “….as so far as can be ascertained that the work complies with minimum standards.” It’s not an approval system. It’s not there to guarantee the building won’t fail. It’s often compared to being an M O T process looking at key safety issues on your car. The M O T inspector is a registered person employed by a private company (the garage) who is not checking “optimum” or “desirable” – just minimum he or she can see on the day, like the tread on the tyres. Plastic undertrays can hide corrosion but the MOT inspector will not dismantle your car to check.

Ultimately its your responsibility to have a roadworthy car.

By the way do you think that Wizzair or Ryanair have lesser checks on their aircraft than Emirates or B A? Do less reputable builders really hire a cheap Approved Inspector to just sign anything off?

“Picking your own Building Control Provider is like marking your own homework” says the L A B C.

No – it’s giving the developer choice – choice just like you can pick Garage A or Garage B to do your M O T. Is Garage B really taking a bribe? Is Garage A really more competent? Why are there no public sector M O T stations?? Why no public sector architects? We should be told.

Joking aside, the professional Approved Inspector is there to do a job like the private doctor, the D H L driver, the M O T inspector, the public sector building inspector, the H S E inspector. Their portrayal as pirates raking in cash as they allow buildings to be built defectively is absurd. That ignores their core professionalism, the reviews they are subjected to, their CICAIR scrutiny, plus the fact that as Approved Inspectors are businesses none want to be exposed to such risks. If you run a small company of 10-20 staff would you knowingly employ people who didn’t know their job and seemed dodgy? Those staff are usually given short shrift and are soon weeded out.

So where are we now?

Well, The Building Safety Bill has emerged as the guiding legislation that will solve the problems in the industry for high rise buildings. It proposes that the H S E has powers to regulate, that developers have to get approvals for their designs as part of the planning process and it generally tightens up the system.

The Building safety Bill has good intent and even most approved Inspectors would concur it makes sense for larger riskier buildings to have additional scrutiny. Yet that could have been simply made law and the existing BC system could have been reinforced. Instead the HSE route has been chosen to oversee the process of checking the suitability of HRRBs and we wait to see if the intention that private and public sector BC bodies can be utilised does in fact happen.

Developers have remained quiet on all this. Pummelled by COVID, subject to materials shortages and just simply trying to keep afloat has meant many are oblivious to the fact that their world is about to change. Eventually the penny will drop and it will be too late. Remember when you had no choice but to use the local authority for your Building control? Remember that guy who used to come out in that old clapped out Ford? He smelled of beer… yeah, him. Well, he’s coming back. He hasn’t got a drinking problem now and he’s leasing a Mercedes A Class – but it’s still him. You can get hold of him through the council switchboard. He works Tuesday to Thursday as he’s on contract. Most of the full time employees have left. Yes, he’s the Head of Building Control there.

And the future?

Hopefully – One Voice.

Tune in to (probably) the final part of this blog to find out our thoughts.

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