The government should bring responsibility for all functions relating to fire safety into one department under a single secretary of state, the final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report has recommended.
The report, which found the housing department at the time of the fire was “poorly run, complacent and defensive”, also recommends that a single body should be established which is responsible for all aspects of regulation related to fire safety in the construction industry.
Both the regulation of the construction industry and the functions within government relating to fire safety are “too complex and fragmented”, according to the report.
At the time of the 2017 fire, the Department for Communities and Local Government was responsible for the Building Regulations and statutory guidance, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was responsible for regulating products and the Home Office was responsible for the fire and rescue services.
Building control was partly in the hands of local authorities and partly in the hands of approved inspectors operating as commercial organisations, enforcement of the law relating to the sale of construction products was carried out by Trading Standards, and commercial organisations provided testing and certification services to manufacturers of products.
"This degree of fragmentation was a recipe for inefficiency and an obstacle to effective regulation," the report says. And it says regulation responsibility “remains dispersed”.
To address this, it says a single body should be formed, led by a construction regulator, which is responsible for all aspects of fire safety regulation in the construction industry. The regulator would report into a single secretary of state who is answerable to parliament for all aspects of fire safety.
The report says the fragmentation of responsibility for regulating the construction industry is also “currently mirrored in the range of government departments responsible for matters affecting fire safety”. Fire safety functions are currently exercised by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and the Department for Business and Trade.
These functions should all be in one department under one secretary of state, the report says.
These two reforms “should improve the quality of government by providing an administrative environment in which information can be shared more quickly and more effectively between teams responsible for different aspects of the work and facilitate communication between the regulator and the department”, the report says.
“It should also ensure that greater emphasis is placed on ensuring the safety of the built environment and that policy is developed in an holistic and coherent way.”
The report adds that the minister responsible for fire safety functions “will need to be able to turn for advice to someone who has a good working knowledge and practical experience of the construction industry”.
It recommends that the government appoints a chief construction adviser and that they should have a “sufficient budget and staff to provide advice on all matters affecting the construction industry”, including:
- Monitoring all aspects of the department’s work relating to the Building Regulations and statutory guidance
- Providing advice to the secretary of state on request
- Bringing to the attention of the secretary of state any matters affecting the Building Regulations and statutory guidance or matters affecting the construction industry more generally of which the government should be aware.
The government previously had a chief construction adviser, from 2008 to 2015, when the role was scrapped under then-prime minister David Cameron’s anti-regulation drive.
The report also calls for it to be a legal requirement for the government to maintain a public record of recommendations made by select committees, coroners and public inquiries and the steps taken in response. If the government decides not to accept a recommendation, it should record its reasons for doing so, the report says.
At the time of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives, DCLG had no system for recording recommendations made by public bodies or keeping track of its response to them, the report said.
The report also suggests improvements to how government prepares for emergencies.
It says the Civil Contingencies Act should be reformed so that the secretary of state can intervene “promptly and decisively” in an emergency. It says the government’s powers in sections five and seven of the act to intervene in response to an emergency “are far-reaching but they do not enable it to intervene promptly or decisively when a Category 1 responder is failing to rise to the challenge”.
Category 1 responders are organisations that are at the centre of the response to emergencies and are subject to the full range of civil protection duties. These include: emergency services, such as police, fire, and ambulance services; local authorities; and NHS bodies.
The report says the act should be reviewed and consideration given to granting a designated secretary of state the power to carry out the functions of a Category 1 responder in its place for a limited period of time.
It adds that the current guidance on preparing for emergencies is contained in several documents, “all of which are unduly long and in some respects out of date”. The guidance should be revised, reduced in length and consolidated in one document, the report says.
Keir Starmer, speaking yesterday in the House of Commons, said the government will look at all 58 recommendations "in detail" and respond to the recommendations within six months.