DFS 17 - National Landlords Association

Thank you for the opportunity for the National Landlords Association (NLA) to contribute to this consultation.  The NLA believes that the safety of tenants and landlords’ properties is paramount and we support efforts to increase safety of tenants.

I will structure our remarks along the three questions contained within the consultation:

What are your views on the general principle that legislative competence in the area identified in Matter 11.1 be conferred on the Assembly?

We welcome the Assembly Member’s work to increase fire safety in Wales, it is an important area with the very real ability to save lives and property damage.  As such, it is sensible that responsibility for this area be devolved down to the bodies that can best ensure effective results.

What are your views on the terms of the proposed Order? For example, are they too narrowly or too broadly drawn? Will they allow for the future implementation of the policy proposals as outlined in the Explanatory Memorandum?

The Order, as currently drafted, runs contrary to the spirit of the existing regulatory regime for fire safety.  The basis used within non-domestic premises, as set in the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO), is that of active risk management on the part of the person in control of the premises.  The onus is on ‘responsible persons’ to do whatever is necessary (to the satisfaction of the appropriate Fire Authority) to eliminate or mitigate fire risk and to tailor their risk management to the fire risks that exists in their property.  As with the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) (introduced in the Housing Act 2004), the regulatory regime does not enable responsible persons to simply ‘tick box’ but requires that they develop tailored action plans to remove or mitigate risks as they exist. In addition the Housing Health and Safety Rating System allows local authority officials to require works to be carried out in ANY domestic property to mitigate the fire risk, but those works must be appropriate to the level of risk in a property.  

The rationale of this regulatory regime is that those in charge should think carefully about what fire risks exist within their premises and what possible steps they can take to deal with that risk.  Fundamentally this focus should continue to be that people responsible for buildings should be encouraged not to treat fire safety as a ‘tick box exercise’.  

That should be the basis for fire safety efforts in domestic properties. The narrow focus of the Order runs contrary to this effort and has the potential of producing an inflexible, ‘one-size-fits–all’ regime for new residential premises that requires no real consideration of what fire risks actually exist.  The Order (as it currently stands) has the potential to be seen as a panacea for achieving fire safety to the exclusion of other, more tailored solutions, that might be more effective for particular circumstances.

We believe that any measure that does not require people to actively think about fire risk can be seen as a step backwards.  The Assembly should consider how it can best encourage vigilance and active risk management.

Sprinkler systems should certainly be seen as one of many potential options for residential property owners and landlords dealing with high-risk properties, such as student halls of residence, high density HMOs, care homes, and sheltered housing.  In these specific situations there is a clear necessity for extra time which a sprinkler system could provide to ensure vulnerable people able to get out of the building in case of a fire.  

In terms of possible implementation, the draft explanatory memorandum accompanying the Order lack detail in certain important areas.  An accurate estimate of potential implementation costs is one such area.  The draft memorandum outlines that the cost of domestic fire sprinklers for new build homes is estimated to be “about 1% to 2% of the total cost of construction…maintenance costs between £75 and £150 per annum” (para. 32).  There is no consideration in the draft memorandum of the potential costs for installing domestic sprinkler systems in already existing buildings.  It is likely that costs in these circumstances will be larger than for new build (especially since there is no indication of the number of buildings, not entirely new build but conversions covered by the Order might be affected – mainly due to problems in the definition of ‘new residential premises’ as noted below).

Furthermore the Committee should consider that, if legislation was introduced based on the Order as currently drafted, then some conversions, due to the building’s age or construction, would face a disproportionate burden in complying with the Order,. In some cases it may not in fact be physically possible.  Whilst it is a straightforward and practical option to install measures such as hard wired fire alarms in buildings, a requirement to install a sprinkler system might require significant construction work and therefore be prohibitively costly.  This is especially true where specific maintenance and protection against water damage from the pipework to the sprinklers would be required incurring large ongoing maintenance costs.

The Committee should consider that the cost of implementation is likely to affect different categories of owners disproportionately, since large housing developers will have the ability to easily absorb or pass on the costs on to new buyers, whilst smaller landlords will not.  As mentioned before, the basis of the fire safety regulatory regime elsewhere is that any method of reducing fire risk is acceptable if it meets with Fire Authority and Local Authority approval.  Owners in this situation have access to range of cost effective methods to eliminate and mitigate fire risk in their property.  The Order would remove that freedom for residential properties.

The Committee should look to ensure that any new legal requirement sufficiently balances the possible cost of implementation and maintenance and the benefit in terms of removing fire risk.

Is it necessary to set out the meaning of ‘new residential premises’ and ‘sprinkler system’ in the proposed Order? If so, are the interpretation provisions appropriate, or should there be any changes to the way they are drafted? If so, how and why?

We believe that the meaning of ‘new residential premises’ as set in the body of the proposed Order, and in the accompanying draft explanatory memorandum, does not sufficiently spell out what properties will fall within the remit of the Order.  As Committee members highlighted, ‘Granny flats’ or (for instance) large garages converted for residential use by an older family member would seem to be covered by the Order.  Whether these types of conversions would come under the Order and require the installation of a sprinkler system throughout the whole domestic home is a critical question that would widen the scope of the Order considerably.  The draft explanatory memorandum provides no detail as to where the Order is expected to apply or where it can be expected that it would not.

We believe if the Order is passed as drafted, any subsequent Welsh Assembly Government legislative measure to implement this Order would require significant work to address the issues regarding the scope of its application and how it could conceivably be implemented given that scope.  We would expect extensive stakeholder consultation and a full regulatory impact assessment to accompany such a measure.

The NLA welcomes measures that place rights and responsibilities for fire safety fairly and appropriately to ensure that lives are saved.  However we are left unconvinced that this Order achieves this appropriately.  We look forward to reading the Committee’s report.

Yours sincerely,

Vincenzo Rampulla

Public Affairs Officer

National Landlords Association