MIKE HEDGES WELCOMES WELSH GOVERNMENT STATEMENT ON HIGH RISK BUILDING OVERSIGHT.
Speaking from his Senedd Office, local Swansea East MS Mike Hedges said… ‘ I really welcome this Government announcement and I am sure it will bring a degree of reassurance to my constituents who live in High Rise buildings. It seems quite bad that Developers can use private building inspectors, often on lucrative contracts to provide those services.
I hope that the Minister confirms that it will be Local Councils who provide these services in future’
I very much welcome the statement. I welcome that the Welsh Government will restrict the oversight of new high-risk buildings to local authority building control, and that it will introduce a new class system for registered building inspectors. This will make sure that only individuals who have the relevant skills, knowledge and experience are advising decision makers. We might wonder why people who didn't have the knowledge and experience were actually being allowed to do it in the past. I think that's something that certainly causes concern to me and I'm sure a number of my constituents. 383
I welcome the introduction of a new regulatory regime for building inspectors and building control bodies to support the changes needed. I have two questions. Why cannot we return to only council building inspectors providing building inspection services, rather than allowing private companies to provide these services? And the second one is: will we be having further reports, either written or verbal—and written would be quite acceptable—on those buildings that have problems with cladding, and the stage each one has reached?384
As you know, Minister, my interests are Altamar, South Quay and Copper Quarter, and I know that Mabon's is Victoria Dock, for example. So, we've all got our own local interests, so, if that would be possible, it would be very much welcome. 385
Thank you, Mike. On that last one, I will look to see whether we can include that in the regular updates that we put out. We can put a section at the bottom that tells you where each building is, I suspect. If there are issues that make that more confidential I'll make sure that Members can get a briefing on that as we go ahead. 386
In terms of the new building control systems, I'm glad you welcome it. I share your view, as you know, that building control should be in local authority control. We will be looking to restrict building inspection services to local authorities when we bring the full Act forward. That will give us the opportunity to do that. I do think there is a real issue around some of the controlled services that we have. So we have developers who basically have a contract with a single set of building control inspectors. I don't mean to impune the integrity of any individual inspector by saying that, but there's something not quite right about a retained set of people who only work for a single developer. I think that isn't a good regulatory system and so we'll make sure that we have a system that's better fit for purpose than that. 387
Where local authorities are themselves the developers we'll make sure that a local authority inspector from a different local authority does the inspection on behalf of that local authority, so that you've got a better cross-pollination in the system. And to do that we've got to grow the service itself, so putting the training programme in place and making sure that we have a succession plan in place has been absolutely pivotal to being able to do that. We wanted to get the system in place before we change the system to restrict it.
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