Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Friday 22nd November 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. The great advantage of being a fair way down the list is that it enables me to strike out some of the things that I would have said in more detail. I too pay tribute to Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report, as I do to the forbearance of the families of the 72 people who died in the Grenfell tragedy.

The phase 2 report is weighty, forensic and sobering in its implications. As a chartered surveyor, a patron of the Chartered Association of Building Engineers and a member of the fire safety APPG, I find the implications very profound and far reaching.

I cannot not thank your Lordships’ Library, which provided a very helpful and useful briefing note, and all those who have written to me. I must also thank my eldest son, who is my researcher and has been doing some work for me on this, and fellow professionals who have been happy to share some very candid views.

I turn to a point that was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere: we were warned. There were earlier fires, here and abroad, coroners’ reports, reports in particular that followed the Lakanal House fire, and Select Committee and other public body reports. They were noted and filed, with responses made—but, sadly, lessons were largely unlearned. That has to change.

The phase 2 report, in its technical and forensic detail, speaks for itself. I fundamentally agree with all its findings and recommendations, but I need to look at the wider context.

Professor Shane Ewen notes in his book Before Grenfell—I recommend it to any noble Lord—that what he describes as the “neoliberal agenda” of burning red tape and moving to individual responsibility also failed to maintain consistency of oversight, enforce regulation or impose sanctions. The moral hazard that sits behind that arrangement does not need any further explanation from me, but there is a risk of doing this again. The principles of a proportionate approach to fire safety, a tolerable risk, and—it has become a further undefined term—“life-critical” fire safety are all untested. Arguably, they may make things less safe than the building regulations requirements that constructors were supposed to follow and adhere to prior to Grenfell.

This matters in particular to remediation and the requirements of what I can describe only as the rather equivocal PAS 9980. I think that needs a review to make its wording clearer. It is also particularly important to the building regulations’ assumption of “stay put”. Noble Lords will be familiar with fire-resistance criteria of half an hour, one hour or one and a half hours. They have been in regulations since 1965; they were the regulations I grew up with, as it were, when I studied for my profession. They assume that a building has sufficient fire resistance and compartmentation to enable firefighters to access and put out the fire. That is their fundamental purpose.

Adding to the fuel load by incorporating lightweight components—doubtless with the best intention to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—has altered that fundamental understanding entirely, and it has done so while nobody seemed to be taking any notice of what was happening or what the consequences might be. It has all sorts of implications for establishing adequate fire safety in existing buildings. One hopes that new regulations will deal with the ones that will be constructed in the future.

The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Porter of Spalding, on the complexity of buildings is apposite. I have always said that lower height does not necessarily equate to lower risk. I was glad to see the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, nodding, because she and I have argued that, up hill and down dale, in this House, particularly during the passage of the Building Safety Bill.

My point is that safe buildings—in other words, those that resist fire and its spread if it occurs—also protect people: that has to be the fundamental. So I cannot see that a risk-to-life approach that does not start with robust buildings makes logical sense. I invite the Minister to comment on that or perhaps write to me.

The people who had full agency here were those constructing the buildings. It was their choice as to whether they had a clerk of works, what specification they used, which architect and supplier they used, which product they substituted during the process, their relationships with their subcontractors and all the other things—many of which are highlighted by the Farmer report, Modernise or Die, and other reports about the construction sector.

These people need to be held to account, and I yield to no one on this point. It is not good enough to say that if you make a voluntary contribution of however many billions, we will let you off the hook. That must not happen. This has to be dealt with in a way that enables the funding mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, to be provided for somebody who may be made legally responsible for carrying out work but has no means to do so. That has to be dealt with as well.

We have inadequate information on residential block types and their construction risks, despite the seven years we have had to collect that data in detail. We do not account properly. The NAO report earlier this month does not take any account of non-cladding defects, which the House of Commons committee has heard are likely to be equal in scale and cost to the cladding defects. If you are talking about the budget for fixing cladding, you may need to double that figure for the rest of what needs doing.

We are doing nothing about buildings below 11 metres. We do not even know how many there are, how they are constructed or what the risks are, which goes back to my earlier point.

The report does not deal with the residual value attrition of life safety measures on the value of the building. It is all very well saying that something should be life critical. That deals with the human side of things but not the writedown of the property asset itself. It is the property asset that insurers are insuring. When they do not want to insure something, that is what they look at. They do not want the asset reduced to a pile of sticks. This goes back to my earlier point that we need robust buildings to protect people.

We do know some statistics. We have an estimate from the MHCLG of £16.6 billion as a low median figure to remedy cladding defects. According to my calculations, that represents around £50,000 per affected flat—or roughly a fifth of the average value of a flat in England, which is £254,000. To further contextualise, 1,300 buildings in London are under simultaneous evacuation orders as at September 2024. That is a departure from the building regulations “stay put” principle I referred to earlier. But in single staircase buildings, which most of them are, that has implications for people getting out in the event of a fire, and the fire services trying to get in, with fire doors being opened and closed, compromising the rescue process. That is where the second staircase argument comes in. How we will deal with that is an unresolved matter.

Some 11,000 people in England have been decanted from their homes because they are deemed too risky to live in—and the number continues to rise. To put this in a further economic context, house prices across the residential sector in general have risen by 34% since the Grenfell disaster, beating consumer price inflation which is 30%. Leasehold flat prices have risen by just 12% in the same period. If you take inflation into account, it is a negative return. That has significant implications for the inventory value. More to the point, it affects individual households’ spending power, their sense of well-being and their ability to build equity. It affects banks and lenders’ ability to generate money and has a significant effect on the overall economy. I have not tried to work that out, but it ought to be dealt with.

We are not out of the woods yet. The Grenfell report suggests bringing building control under a public body not driven by conflicts of interest. I agree with that but, needless to say, the industry out there is starting to shift as we speak. There is some evidence that those who have been involved in building regulation inspections are migrating to other roles. Why would they not? It is becoming a bit of a toxic area to be involved with. It is probably quite difficult to get professional indemnity insurance and so on. There is attrition going on in their numbers, and the training cannot keep up. If we are not careful, we will run into a situation where projects that might legitimately be expected to go ahead will be stalled because there is not the personnel to keep ahead of that.

There are other areas of specialist expertise—cladding, smoke extraction, staircase design and wider fire safety assessment. We are in deficit of people able to deal with them. Who is to do that and how is it to be funded? I am told that in the year ending September just gone, some 4,000 construction firms became insolvent. That is a very difficult thing to deal with.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, touched on the last point that I wish to make. Ultimately, we are talking about people in their homes—a place that should have been their secure residence from which they conducted their lives, operated their work/life balance, maybe brought up children, established friendships, put down roots and became part of society. The problems that we are faced with of unmortgageable property, sky-high insurance costs and very high fees for general maintenance and management—many of these things were imposed under the Fire Safety Act—are becoming a corrosive factor in what should be these people’s secure place. The mental stress and strain, the repossessions and sell-offs that are still going on, and the fact that people are not being allowed to extend their mortgages—putting them at a real financial disadvantage—must be the most terrifying things that affect home owners in this category. That really has to be addressed because I fear that a very large cohort—it may be 300,000, 400,000 or half a million homes—are affected by this. This has to be looked at most carefully, and I hope the Minister is taking good note of that.