Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Friday 22nd November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my register of interests. For the avoidance of any doubt, I was the chairman of the Local Government Association on the morning of the fire, when I was with the Secretary of State. I attended all the COBRA meetings and all the recovery group meetings put on by the Government—which just filtered away until we stopped doing them, even though the problem had not been fixed. I think I am right in saying that I am the only elected politician who was there at the start of that process and was at the end of the line when the Government stopped doing it.

I have not finished reading the report yet, and I do not intend to speak for very long today, but I thought that it was important to make a point of coming to speak, out of respect for the survivors and victims of the fire. To ignore the chance to be part of a debate about the fire would have been disrespectful. I am not sure that I have anything that I can add appropriately at the moment.

The victims will not see justice until people are in a criminal court facing manslaughter charges. Only then will the victims get the justice they deserve. It has taken far too long to get to this stage. I honestly believe that, part-way through the inquiry period, the criminal case should have been running in a parallel process, because the people who suffered need to get justice, and the only way that that justice will be delivered is when somebody has their liberty taken away from them.

I heard the Minister say that he was hopeful that we would never have another case like this, but I did not see whether he had his fingers crossed—because that is the only way we would have no chance of another one. Pure luck is stopping another Grenfell happening tomorrow, today or at any point. There are so many unsafe buildings in this country that will not get remediated at any time in my lifetime. There will still be buildings that are dangerous places for people to live in when I am in my wooden box. There will still be people who will live and sleep every night in a building that could end up killing them. We will not get through the remediation process. Every time somebody brings a new piece of work to the table, we find more properties that need fixing. The Government insist that high-rise buildings over 11 metres are the only places to look—but they are not. This is about all buildings that are complicated in terms of who lives in them and how they are constructed.

A big care home was torched and levelled, and we were lucky that nobody died. The only reason nobody died was because it happened during the day and the staff were able to get everybody out. If that had happened at night, when the staff complement had been reduced and the people living in the care home were asleep and harder to move, people would have been victims. I appreciate that everybody is concerned and that everything the Government do takes time, but there does not seem to be the sense of urgency that will be necessary to get this problem dealt with any time soon.

I will probably be seen as “Mr Unpopular” for saying this, but the report is far too long. There are far too many words—across 1,700 pages—and it has errors and omissions. I will describe one omission. A number of the organisations that were found to be culpable were part of the Government’s immediate response afterwards. The Government set up a panel of experts immediately after the fire, and some of the people on that panel were responsible for some of the organisations that have now been criticised in the report. But the report does not criticise the fact that they were the people who the Government went to for expert advice. If we have the wrong people expertly advising the Government on a problem that they have partially created, how will we get to a place where everybody can say that we are content that we have done as much as we can? That is an omission; as far as I am concerned, it should have been in the report.

An error in the report is that the building safety guidance—the stay-put policy—is attributed to the LGA. It was not an LGA policy; it was a government policy. The Government commissioned the work and approved the experts who put the work together and its scope. The LGA was paid to bring those people together and then to host that information on its website. It was commissioned two chairmen before me, so I have no skin in the game with the commissioning. When we realised that the stay-put policy did not work because the compartmentalisation of buildings does not work—it does not exist; the stay-put policy was premised on the idea that you could be safe in a property, but nobody in a high-rise building is safe—we told the Government that we were taking the information down from our website. We took it down. The Government insisted that we put it back up again —and the staff did so. When I found out, I went ballistic at the staff, and we took it back down again. The Government now host that information on a Government-held website. The report should not have criticised the LGA because of that piece of work—that was another failing of another government department.

I will stop, because I might start going into the criminality bit, and I will end up probably doing something wrong by saying the names of some people who certainly should be locked up. The work we did from Smith Square all the way through provided plenty of evidence.

I have worked on a building site for most of my working life. I did a proper job: I was a brickie by trade. If we worked on a building site in the winter and the sand was frozen, which happens in English winters, we would chuck pallets into the sand heap and light them, to help to pour the sand out. We used offcuts of insulation as firestarters—it is solid petrol, so it burns really well. That was not a secret—everybody knew that—yet we were still allowing people to put it on buildings. I will stop before I drop myself in trouble—apologies.