Former government building adviser Paul Morrell has criticized ministers’ muted response to a building safety report published in April.
Test for a safer future, written by Morrell and legal expert Anneliese Day, questioned whether regulators would be able to enforce higher standards and said certification bodies had failed to review their operations after Grenfell.
But on Monday (November 27), Morrell told the Housing, Communities and Equalization Committee that ministers had been slow to react to the report, despite having commissioned it. The former Whitehall adviser said he had barely spoken to the government and the industry has also been kept in the dark about potential regulatory changes.
“The review was published in April, we had a meeting with the department the day it was published and until last week that was the only engagement we had,” Morrell said.
“An important matter [is] how well does the industry understand what’s next.”
Asked if the slow response was a concern, Morrell said: “Yeah, more so [the government not] relate to the industry. The hard work must be done by the industry. The worry he has is not knowing what’s coming.”
Mr Morrell compared the uncertainty over the future testing regime to the confusion in recent years over the phasing out of CE certification after Brexit.
“There was a mess made with changing the marking of EU products in the UK,” Morrell said. “Some people spent a lot of money and lost some credibility. The regularly recurring concern is “how do we know, if we start doing this work, it won’t pull the rug out from under us like before?”. The industry absolutely needs a direction of travel.”
Morrell also said it was “pretty definitive” that there would be a duty on manufacturers to say their products were safe, but that there were “massive complications” in making that effective.
“What needs to be done to satisfy that? That’s a lot of work [and] could be happening now.”
He added that ministers had suggested they would not directly address the points raised in the 174-page report.
“The original terms of reference included a government response, but when I asked in September when I could expect to see one, the response was that the public position was that there would be no response.
“Last I heard there was no intention of responding directly to the review, which is disappointing. There will be a change leaflet issued before or after Christmas, that’s what we’ve been told.”
When Day, who appeared at the committee by video link, was asked whether ministers were doing enough to strengthen the conformity assessment process, he said: “They need to respond to our report, period. We need this to happen soon.”
Building products companies had backed the review’s findings, he added. “The industry welcomes the opportunity to create something new, more understandable and safer.”
Morrell warned that the crackdown on product safety needed to be led by the right people.
“In the absence of enforcement, with the lack of clarity of requirements, you get an ethical drift of behavior in the industry, and some of that has gone beyond the drift, to the point of crashing,” he said to parliamentarians
“There is no fear of an effective enforcement regime, but a real concern if the eyes and ears of this are on trading standards, which made it very clear to us that they don’t have the resources and the skills and that they really don’t want to do that.”
Day added: “A trading standards officer told us they could tell if a bottle of wine was compliant but they had no idea. [with] a building
“There is a general consensus that building control might be better suited to deal with this, but it would need to be adequately funded and resourced to be effective.”
The Department of Levelling, Housing and Communities has been contacted for comment.
