Grenfell Tower Memorial (Expenditure) Bill

Lord Garnier Excerpts

2nd reading & Report stage & 3rd reading & Committee negatived
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, only someone who was there on the night of the Grenfell Tower fire or who experienced the loss of a loved one in that disaster can truly understand what it must have been like to suffer the physical and emotional losses that it caused. Death, injury, mental trauma, the sudden removal from a home, and the incalculable and continuing difficulties and questions for the emergency services and their personnel are just some of the consequences that come to mind, but there will be others. The noble Lord, Lord Roe, powerfully spoke about this, as others have pointed out, and I commend him for what he did with his colleagues on the night of 14 June 2017 and for what he said to us today.

It is right that there should be a memorial to the people whose lives were lost or damaged by this fire. Its design is not a matter for this debate, but I hope that it—in its entirety—will be a thing of beauty and utility that will last as a solace and as a continuing reminder not just of the lives lost but of the need for public authorities and the corporate world to behave with responsibility for and to others. In short, I ask that we do not just look back but that we look forward to the creation of a better regime for government and corporate conduct.

In the compressed procedure that governs the narrow compass of the Bill, there will not be time—indeed, it may not be appropriate—to introduce an amendment to describe the idea that I wish to advance, but it is one I would like the Government seriously to bear in mind. I interrupt myself by making it clear that, although some members of my barristers’ chambers have been involved in the Grenfell Tower inquiry and its related litigation, I am not a construction law practitioner and have played no part in the inquiry, nor in any related cases.

Although a memorial of the type envisaged by this Bill is a fitting way to commemorate what happened on 14 June 2017, that is not all that we should do. What connects the 72 deaths in Grenfell Tower and other cases of corporate decision-making resulting in loss of life are the bereaved families waiting for justice. The 72 Grenfell Tower deaths and others elsewhere caused by corporate failure make it clear that we need to strengthen corporate criminal law.

We may think that corporate crime is only financial: bribery, tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, cash in brown envelopes, false accounting and clever schemes that cheat the Revenue. Britain has, to its credit, taken a leading role in tackling those offences. However, where corporate misconduct kills rather than steals, our legal system is failing.

It does not have to be like this. The Bribery Act 2010 introduced a powerful weapon: a company commits a criminal offence if it fails to prevent bribery by those who work for it or on its behalf. Companies can no longer shelter behind ignorance or delegation. If a company benefits from wrongdoing and has not put reasonable procedures in place to stop it, the company itself can be prosecuted. We later extended that model to the failure to prevent tax evasion and fraud offences through, respectively, the Criminal Finances Act 2017 and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. The effect of those laws on corporate culture has been profound. Rather than turning a blind eye, companies now invest in procedures to prevent financial crimes.

Without new UK legislation, the same cannot be said about the prevention of death, assault, forced labour and other non-financial crimes from which companies benefit. It is now nearly nine years since the Grenfell Tower fire. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry, so ably and sensitively led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, concluded that the 72 deaths in the 2017 fire were, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, pointed out, “wholly avoidable” and resulted from “decades of failure” by government, industry and regulatory bodies.

The final phase 2 report, published on 4 September 2024, identified a “merry-go-round of buck-passing”, where every party involved in the building’s refurbishment failed to take responsibility for fire safety. Sir Martin revealed that persistent and deliberate prioritisation of commercial interests over human safety played a direct part in causing this tragedy. A cladding company that knew about the safety issues was

“determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes”

in the United Kingdom.

By 2023, the financial cost of the Grenfell Tower disaster had reached nearly £1.2 billion; that is 4,000 times the amount that was saved by replacing fire-retardant cladding with a cheaper combustible alternative during the disastrous refurbishment. The bulk of the cost is being met from the public purse, dwarfing the compensation to the bereaved and the survivors paid by companies involved in wrapping the tower block in combustible materials before the fire in June 2017. Although the biggest fire in a residential block, Grenfell was not the first, and there have been others since. So far, no one has been held criminally accountable.

I could cite other examples where corporate decision-making, or the lack of it, both here and overseas, has caused or been alleged to have caused hundreds of people to lose their lives, homes or livelihoods. I will not say more, as at least one of the cases that I have in mind is currently the subject of High Court proceedings here in London. What I can say is that the law of the United Kingdom makes it difficult for cases like these to result in effective accountability, let alone access to justice for those who have suffered.

Jurisdictional arguments aside, holding corporations accountable for criminal activity is complicated, whether it is based on the identification principle or on attribution to a senior manager—an improvement now proposed in the Crime and Policing Bill, which is shortly to receive Royal Assent. Crucially, existing laws do not impose a proactive duty on companies to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm arising from their commercial activities.

The introduction of effective corporate accountability laws here in the United Kingdom is long overdue. I first wrote about the need to plug the gaps in our legal system more than eight years ago, in the Times newspaper. Since then, other countries have moved ahead. Norway, Germany, France and the EU as a whole have all introduced a legal requirement for companies to prevent human rights and environmental abuses in their operations and supply chains.

Now is the time for us to act. The failure to prevent model is an effective British legal innovation. It is pragmatic and it is fair. It does not criminalise accidents. It does not promote meaningless box-ticking. It simply asks whether a company that has benefited from serious wrongdoing took reasonable steps to stop it. If the company can prove to the civil standard that it did, it has a defence. If it did not, it should answer in the criminal courts and compensate its victims.

Calls are growing to extend this model beyond financial crime to discourage harm to human rights, workers’ rights and the environment. They come from campaigners, parliamentary committees, trade unions, investors, businesses themselves and the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. The argument is no longer seen as radical. It is not, as others have already said, party political; it is humane and it is orthodox. The Government’s trade strategy proclaims that responsible business conduct is a priority, and a review of the UK’s approach is under way. If Ministers are serious about this and they wish to be taken seriously about this, they should build on what works. A new law cannot bring back the dead of Grenfell, but the failure to prevent model has changed corporate behaviour before and it can do so again. Would not such a reform of our laws be a practical and above all a fitting memorial to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire?

Chinese Embassy

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am sorry, but this is the case with planning. Anyone who has any experience with planning, as I am sure the noble Lord does, will know that that is the case. Planning has to be considered according to the material considerations of a planning application. There were a number of material considerations in the original application considered by Tower Hamlets, and there was a public inquiry in February on this, where the planning inspector took a number of other considerations into account. Since that time, information has been requested of the applicant, and that information and the answers to it will be released at the time of the planning decision. I do not think it is helpful to comment any further on that. We know that the first duty of government is to ensure our safety and security, so I am sure that when we hear about the decision, we can consider whether we think that has been done adequately in this case.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, it was my experience when serving as a law officer that the Director of Public Prosecutions—in my time, Keir Starmer—would come and see the law officers every three or four weeks to discuss criminal cases of particular sensitivity and significance. It was also highly likely—and it was certainly my experience—that the Planning Minister would come and discuss matters of political and planning significance. Common sense and experience tell me that that will have happened between the DPP and the Attorney, and between the Planning Minister and the law officers’ departments in the recent past. Could the Government please get off the hook of using expressions such as “We do not recognise”, and other weaselly forms of excuse, cut to the quick and start telling the truth about what is going on?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I think there are quite a lot of weaselly words going around in here today anyway. Whether the Attorney-General has been advising the Planning Minister or not is a matter for internal consideration. We do not normally release information relating to internal advice that has been provided to Ministers, as the noble and learned Lord will be perfectly well aware. That has happened under all Governments, so I am sure he knows that. The documents relating to this case will be released with the planning decision in December.

Building a Co-operative Union (Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee Report)

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, was characteristically generous to the staff of the Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee—and rightly so—as well as to the members of the committee. But, if the truth be known, she has led us in an utterly unpartisan manner, melding the opinions of noble Lords from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, as well as those of the noble and learned Lords from the Cross Benches, into a cohesive, collective view. Her introduction to the debate was both comprehensive and clear, and was one with which we can all, I am sure, agree.

We have the advantage that we all seem to enjoy each other’s company—albeit remotely, as we have had to participate on screen rather than, as here, in person. It is also a pleasure to welcome my noble friend the Minister to his new role, and to see my noble friend Lord Dunlop in his place. Through his eponymous report and its recommendations, he has played a central part in the study of the union, the United Kingdom and all its constituent nations, and of course he also gave us some extremely valuable evidence—albeit, as he said, after the completion of this report. However, I have no doubt that others will follow.

I believe that in our committee we all share a desire to see the union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland flourish under the current dispensation. If any of us wants, for example, to see a closer political and economic tie between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, or greater self-determination for England, Scotland or Wales, we want those things achieved in a spirit of democratic and mutual respect, and not antagonism, still less enmity. We represent—in so far as this House can do that—each of the four countries of the union by birth and residence, and, if I may say so, we all bring a particular expertise and experience to the committee.

However, whether our focus is on Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland or England, as well as on the United Kingdom as a whole, we all understand the delicacy of the current devolution settlement and the difficulties that the United Kingdom Government have in representing the interests of both the entire union and of England. Our committee is not a body of revolutionaries; we want to see the post-Brexit transfer of powers from the EU to the four UK Administrations achieved with efficiency, with competence and with consent.

The report we are debating, although the result of a good deal of hard work, is necessarily disappointing—not because of anything we have done but because of the external constraints under which we have been placed. One of them, lack of time, has been lifted, and we are to continue until next summer. Some may say that what we have been scrutinising is no more than the tedious process of moving regulations from one political institution, in Europe, to others here. I caution against that glib opinion: the name of our committee, and the work that we have done, may not excite Fleet Street’s finest, or even Brexit’s praetorian guard within Parliament, but, as with a number of institutions in this country, those with the fanciest titles often have the smallest influence. Go behind the name of this committee and read the report to see what others we observe, with grander names, have—or, more worryingly, have not—been doing.

Having listened to Ministers and officials giving evidence to us, it is my experience that, in the United Kingdom Government at the political level, there is a lack of real interest in the process and in the work required to ensure that the process works well. This must be got right if we are successfully and consensually to move powers from the EU’s institutions to our own.

This committee was established in September 2020, over a year ago, yet we have been supplied with a very small number of common frameworks. The rate of progress in bringing them forward to us has been, frankly, lamentable, and the process of their development has been opaque. The surprise expressed by Ministers that we were, and remain, dissatisfied with departmental progress has been extraordinary. The detailed consequences of Brexit, if not spoken about by government before the event—here I give them the benefit of the doubt—must at least have been known and thought about beforehand. Yet there we were in March, when our report was published, and here we are seven months later, with a woefully small number of these frameworks available for scrutiny.

Defra is the department with most to deal with, which is why I mention it, but when my right honourable friend the Secretary of State was giving evidence to us recently he could not tell us when the process would be completed. My impression, and this may not have been shared by other noble Lords on the committee, is that he really had no idea what the timetable for his department looked like. To be fair to him, he was not the only government Minister to give me that impression but, across government, I see a lack of political drive and leadership in this policy area. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, in the direct questions that she posed to the Minister this afternoon and with the concerns expressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas.

My other concern is that there is a lack of respect and understanding among the United Kingdom Government’s political leadership for the policies and desires of the elected devolved Administrations. I fundamentally disagree with the aims of the SNP and I find the attitude and posturing of its leadership tiresome, but that is the party whose Ministers happen to be in government in Scotland. I am not a supporter of the Labour Government in Wales either but, like it or not—I do not—it is the duly elected Government of Wales. I am certainly no fan of Sinn Féin and have my reservations about aspects of the DUP’s politics but, again, they are the parties in government within Northern Ireland.

My understanding is, from evidence that we had from witnesses from the DAs and other non-political interested parties from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that, whereas officials in Whitehall maintain good business relationships with their counterparts in the DAs, there is no such equivalence at a political level. I dare say that this is caused to an extent by mutual political dislike or distrust, but the Westminster Government are the Government of the entire country whose Parliament legislated for the current dispensation and, although imperfect and replete with annoyances, it is the one we presently have. I, therefore, through the Minister, urge the Government to work harder to forge better relations with the DAs for the sake of the future of our United Kingdom.

Covid-19 Secure Marshals

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, the enforcement approach to be adopted by the police involves engagement, explanation and encouragement first—before moving to enforcement. As noble Lords will know, this Government are committed to increasing the number of police officers with enforcement powers on our streets, but we recognise the important contributions that police community support officers make.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I was most grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his telephone call this morning, but can he tell us what legal authority there is for the appointment and payment of these Covid marshals?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

The appointment and payment of the Covid marshals will be organised through the relevant local authority, which will then determine how best to deploy them; it is a local, not a national, matter.