Government considered scrapping building control entirely as part of red tape review

Mr Ledsome was grilled throughout the day about the review of Approved Document B, which provides guidance on building regulations covering fire safety, that was supposed to be carried out following the Lakanal House fire in 2009 when six people died. 

After an inquest concluded in March 2013, the coroner made a series of recommendations, which were later not implemented by the government. One of the proposals was to make the approved document easier to digest as it was “a most difficult document to use”.

Then-communities secretary Eric Pickles agreed to review Approved Document B in response to the recommendations. 

He said: “I can assure you that my department is committed to a programme of simplification.

“However, the design of fire protection in buildings is a complex subject and should remain to some extent in the realm of professionals.”

Mr Pickles also said a new version of Approved Document B would be published by 2016-17.

Mr Ledsome agreed that the letter sent by Mr Pickles in response was “ambiguous as to whether the recommendation was accepted in full”. 

“Looking at it now, yes,” he said. 

It also emerged that a year after Mr Pickles’ letter, Brian Martin, the civil servant responsible for official guidance on fire safety at the time, said there was “not an absolute commitment” to a review of the approved document. 

Referring to the commitment to publish a new version of Approved Document B, he wrote in an email in 2014: “We’ve repeated this line a couple of times since. It is not an absolute commitment.” 

Lead counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett QC asked: “What did you understand Brian Martin to mean when he said it’s not an absolute commitment?”

Mr Ledsome said he “did not know why” Mr Martin would have said that because “there was a commitment” from the communities secretary.

“Were you not concerned to discover that Mr Martin did not regard the commitment that had been made to the coroner in his letter by Eric Pickles as absolute?” asked Mr Millett. 

“I can’t comment on why Mr Martin used that term. All I can say is that in all of the discussions that we were having at that time and subsequently we were very, very conscious of the timeframe which had been set out in the secretary of state’s response,” said Mr Ledsome.   

The inquiry saw Mr Martin said in his witness statement that as an election was due in 2015, “another government would be in power and would not be bound by the commitments of a previous administration”.

Mr Ledsome said he could understand the reasoning, but added: “It would have been unlikely that a new government would have said, ‘oh, we’re going to completely ignore this recommendation and do something completely different’.”

Asked about the timescale of finishing the review of Approved Document B, which was aimed for 2016-17, Mr Millett asked if Mr Ledsome had “lost sight of the fact that what the coroner wanted was a response which went to life safety”. 

He said: “You allowed yourself to be overwhelmed and distracted by the complexity and the size of the task and lost sight of the fact that, in fact, what the coroner wanted was a response which went to life safety.”

Mr Ledsome said: “I do not accept that we lost sight of life safety. I do accept that we should have thought is there an option to do something sooner? 

“Yes, I accept that and I regret that perhaps we should have given it more attention and we didn’t.”

Mr Ledsome was also asked about the government’s regulatory ‘one in, one out’ policy that was implemented in 2011, was extended to ‘one in, two out’ in 2013 and then ‘one in, three out’ in 2016.

The policy meant a cost analysis had to be undertaken of any new regulations, with the equivalent cost removed from existing regulations before it was implemented. There was no exemption from building regulations from these rules. 

Asked if the response to the Lakanal coroner’s inquest would have been caught by this rule, Mr Ledsome said: “If we had come forward with a new version of Approved Document B, then in my view we would have had to have gone through that one in one out challenging process.” 

Mr Millett asked: “I think you’re saying that notwithstanding that the review of Approved Document B was pursuant to a coroner’s recommendation accepted by the secretary of state, it would still have been subject to the one in, two and three out principles?”

“I believe so, yes,” Mr Ledsome said. 

He also told the inquiry that his division would not have applied for an exemption to building regulations over a concern that it “was a fight worth having”. 

Mr Millett asked: “Did you or anybody else in your department ever consider even trying to apply for an exemption for the building regulations? Or the approved documents? 

“No, frankly I don’t think we would have got one. Frankly, there is a judgement to be made as to whether it’s a fight worth having,” Mr Ledsome responded.

“Was your pessimism that you described earlier in not even applying [for an exemption] grounded in the assumption that the cost-benefit principle would always trump any consideration of life safety?” asked Mr Millett. 

“Well, it certainly would have made the case for change more difficult to achieve,” replied Mr Ledsome. 

The inquiry continues with further evidence from Mr Ledsome on Thursday.