Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report

Lord Booth-Smith Excerpts

Friday 22nd November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Booth-Smith (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by saying how much I share the sentiments of my noble friend Lady Sanderson, who spoke with great power at the start. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Porter, who proved that you do not need to speak for very long to make a powerful and important point.

Given the scale of the inquiry report—both the time span it covers and the breadth of its recommendations and subject matter—it is incredibly difficult to know where to start. Noble Lords in the Chamber have covered much of that ground and I do not want to be repetitive. In such circumstances, the best advice I ever received was to begin with the truest of the true, then the rest will take care of itself.

The truest thing I can think of is where I was on the night of the fire. I was living and working in Victoria at the time, and I remember coming home and opening the curtains of my apartment. The sky over west London was lit up. It was not the still-cold light that you sometimes see coming from stadiums or festivals; it was something very different. It moved. I turned on the television and the horror of what was happening unfolded in front of me. I remember, the next day, walking along Buckingham Palace Road near my office, in the late afternoon/early evening. There was ash falling from the sky that hit my coat and covered my shoes.

I share these things not because there is any profound policy insight to be drawn from them; clearly there is not. But any part of an enduring legacy requires the act of remembering—not in a corporate sense, where you check the date on a calendar, but as something personal and deep. If we can remember, we should, and each time we do, however innocuous or tangential it may feel—much as my memories are—the greater memory lives that much longer.

On the policy, like my noble friend Lord Porter, I have not been able to get through the 1,700 pages of the report, but I read through as much of it as I could on the morning of its publication and I have revisited it since. There are two points on it that I want to raise with the Minister, which are important for him to take away.

The first is this question of the pace of remediation. I know that the recent NAO report laid bare the sheer scale of what is left to be done, which the Minister noted at the Dispatch Box. In 2018, I worked on this issue at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and I know at first hand how incredibly complex it is. One of the challenges is that there are multiple different schemes, for want of a better word, for different types of buildings to access different sorts of support, funding and information. If we could go back in time and know everything then that we know now, we probably would not have designed it in that way. A critical part of helping to speed up the pace of remediation is a relentless focus on trying to simplify the process as much as humanly possible, so I encourage the Minister to take that away and try his best, working with the department, to make things simpler.

The second point is on transparency. Information breeds confidence, and one of the things that is important for people, particularly those affected who live in buildings that require remediation, is the feeling not just of frustration that where they are living is not safe but that they have been forgotten. Every time the Government produce an update, make a Statement in the House or generally do anything to show that they are still alive to people’s concerns, it genuinely breeds confidence in the people who are still affected by this. As my noble friend Lord Porter pointed out, the projections for remediation go quite far out—2035 is one I saw in the NAO report and it could go on for much longer, as new challenges emerge. I will leave it there.