Flood Risk: London

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Felicity Buchan

Wednesday 20th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered flood risk in London.

In July last year, my constituency of Kensington suffered devastating flooding. It was not only Kensington: the adjoining boroughs of Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham, which are represented by the hon. Members for Westminster North (Ms Buck) and for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), were also badly affected.

I want to give a sense of the magnitude of the flooding. On that Monday evening, London Fire Brigade received almost 1,800 flooding calls. If related calls are included, that figure reaches 3,000, which is the highest number that the London Fire Brigade control room has ever taken. I did a survey of the most affected wards in my constituency, and although people in almost 500 homes replied to say that they had been flooded, the reality is likely to be multiples of that number.

Flooding has truly devastating consequences for those who suffer it, and I will give a few examples. I heard from one lady who had just bought her first home. The floodwater in the basement was almost up to the ceiling with only a few inches spare. Many constituents—not just one or two, but multiple constituents—are still out of their homes nine months later. A lot of the basement properties in my constituency are actually owned by housing associations, and residents in those basement properties have lost absolutely everything they own—from clothing and photos to important documents, everything has gone.

Constituents of mine were flooded not just in July, but three or four times over the past 10 to 20 years. That is an important point, because although July was a truly devastating flood, it was not a one-off. The flood that I am referring to happened on 12 July, but London saw another devastating flood only two weeks later on 25 July. There was another in 2007, and I should declare a personal interest in that one, as my own house was flooded on that occasion. Those were three devastating floods, but we also had floods in 2004, 2005, 2016 and 2018.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. She is pursuing this issue on behalf of her constituents, as I am on behalf of mine, and she has hit the nail on the head by saying that we have had previous floods and we were told that the problem had been solved, but it has not. Does she agree there is a danger that, again, we have a partial, patchwork solution—flooding local improvement projects here, one or two schemes there—when what we need is a comprehensive solution so that our constituents do not live at constant risk, particularly in the summer months, of their homes being devastated in this way?

[Felicity Buchan]

This is one of the rare occasions on which the hon. Gentleman and I completely agree. We need a comprehensive solution, which I will go on to talk about: we need a short-term solution, because my constituents are very anxious about this summer since most of this flash flooding has occurred in July, August and September, and we also need a long-term strategy. My constituents, like the hon. Gentleman’s, simply cannot live with this risk hanging over them.

Fire Safety Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Felicity Buchan

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)]

This Bill is very important to me and my constituents, and I want to pay tribute to the Grenfell community—the bereaved and the survivors. I want the Bill to be implemented as quickly and as robustly as possible so that it is not subject to any future uncertainty or challenge.

We need to get on with this. We need to stop all the ping-ponging between this place and the other place. It is very clear that there is a systematic scheme here. There is this Bill, which is very simple. We have had the consultation on the fire safety orders and the regulation. We need to get on with that. We need to implement that work and then get on with it. We then need the Building Safety Bill. That needs to come to this House and, again, we need to get on with it. We owe that to my constituents.

The first phase of the Grenfell inquiry report came out in October 2019, 16 months ago. We, collectively—both in this place and the other place—need to get this legislation implemented and make sure that these dangerous buildings are remediated. The more we talk, the more we argue, nothing gets done—and there are dangerous buildings out there.

We have a simple piece of legislation that we can get enacted. We have a big pot of money. The totality of the pot could be as high as £10 billion. Let us implement this legislation, let us start assessing and prioritising the buildings, and let us start spending this Government money. We have time to review the details of the financing scheme. I just want to make the point that, yes, the Government are taking responsibility for buildings over 18 metres, but there is a reason for that: buildings over 18 metres, according to all the independent risk assessors, are way more dangerous. They are four times more likely to have fatalities.

I empathise hugely with leaseholders, but there is still a subsidy in there for leaseholders of buildings between 11 metres and 18 metres. So let us just get on with this today. After that, we can review the details of the financing package and amend the Building Safety Bill, but this Bill is the first step and we need to get on with it.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab) [V]]

It is shameful that this modest Bill is the Government’s legislative response thus far to Grenfell, almost four years after that tragedy took place. We might expect, therefore, that it would at least address the most significant and urgent wrongs that the Grenfell fire brought to the Government’s attention. The purpose of the Bill is to update the fire safety order and better manage and reduce the risk of fire. What better and more straightforward way of achieving that than to implement the recommendations of part 1 of the Grenfell inquiry, which deals with issues such as the inspection and maintenance of lifts and doors, and having proper systems of evacuation in place and communicated to residents? It is impossible to imagine those steps, backed by the moral and legal authority of the inquiry, not becoming law. That is the purpose of Lords amendment 2.

Although safety is the paramount concern, the treatment of leaseholders and tenants living in unsafe blocks is a wholly new scandal that this Bill will fail to address unless Lords amendment 4 is agreed today. Those tenants should not bear the cost of remedial work to their flats where they did not and could not have known the risks posed by their construction. The Government do not seek to deny that, but instead make a series of partial concessions. That is the wrong approach. We should start, as amendment 4 does, with the presumption that remedial costs attributable to the Bill should not be borne by leaseholders. They should not be borne by tenants or social landlords either, or by the rents of the least well off or the limited funds set aside for the provision and repairing of social homes.

The cynical disregard for the lives of our fellow citizens that Grenfell exposed will take years, billions of pounds and the concentrated efforts of the Government and industry to address. Building design, materials, construction, maintenance and inspection are all in the dock. Height is a factor, but so is who the occupants and users are and how they are taught to behave, especially in an emergency.

For the Government constantly to adopt a reductive approach to the crisis is irresponsible. This is not just about one or two types of cladding, buildings over 18 metres or residential buildings. Today is an opportunity not to address all those issues, important as they are, but to show a serious intent to act now on the most obvious faults and injustices. The Government should take it by accepting all the amendments before the House.