Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for making that point. The Government are committed to ensure lasting transparency and accountability by creating a publicly accessible record of all public inquiry recommendations. We need to learn from past mistakes to stop them being repeated and ensure that a clear process is there on reforms. As I said in my previous answer, we will report back to Parliament annually, ensure we have quarterly updates on GOV.UK and continue to meet families and victims.

I was with victims yesterday with the Deputy Prime Minister, listening to the concerns and, naturally, frustrations. Lasting transparency is important; we also want to commit to enforcing a legal duty of candour through a new Hillsborough law. Your Lordships may recall that this is something we have talked about. We need to compel public authorities to disclose the truth, ensuring transparency in major incidents, such as the one mentioned by the noble Lord. We want to hold those responsible for failings to account, and we are committed to that.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety and Rescue. I thank the Minister for the information on PEEPs. When is “later in 2025”? It would be useful to know, and I look forward to seeing the detail. I remain concerned that the detail is not quite as clear as some of us with disabilities would like.

Following on from the other points noble Lords have made about the recommendations in principle, with recommendations 43 and 48 it seems that the Government are not quite doing it in full because it sounds like, first, it is onerous and, secondly, it might cost money. Yet one is dealing with voluntary organisations as first responders, and the second, and in my view much more important one, is about codifying the training required for local authorities and other category 1 responders. Why are they only in principle and not accepted in full, with the resources needed?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, on the question on PEEPs, the Government have committed funding this year, 2025-26, to begin this important work by supporting social housing providers to deliver residential PEEPs for their renters. Future years funding will be considered at the upcoming spending review. I will come back to the noble Baroness on which part of the year in particular.

The noble Baroness asked why we are not accepting those recommendations in full. I want to be clear: we accept all the inquiry’s findings and will address all the recommendations. However, we have to look at how we work through the recommendations. The commitment is clear—we accept them in principle. But there are different ways of dealing with this. As I said to her on the previous issue about the single regulator, there are some conflicts and we want to make sure that we do this, which is long-lasting, sustainable, makes a difference to people’s lives, and makes people feel comfortable and confident in the system as something they believe in.