Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, and that is a really important point. Regardless of where someone lives or which Government they live under, the right to safe and secure housing is important. The Deputy Prime Minister has already met the First Minister of Scotland, and we will take every opportunity to work jointly on this issue.

[Clive Efford (Eltham and Chislehurst) (Lab)]

How many times must we come here and hear another example of how the state, which should be on the side of ordinary people, becomes the enemy of working-class people? We have had Hillsborough, the Horizon Post Office scandal, the contaminated blood scandal, Windrush, and the treatment of former armed forces personnel who are members of the LGBT community. In each of those, the state has become the enemy of the people and delayed paying compensation to them.

Can the Grenfell inquiry be a watershed when we end the process by which the state becomes the enemy of working-class people, we treat them with the dignity they deserve, and we ensure that their compensation is paid rapidly and not delayed, as it has been in all those other cases? In the case of freeholders who are still holding out and not paying for the remedial work to their properties, it is about time they paid fines for delaying that work.

[The Prime Minister]

That is a really important point, because there have been I don’t know how many examples of injustice where people have not been listened to and have been disregarded. Different Prime Ministers over the years have stood at this Dispatch Box and quite genuinely made commitments on the back of reports. I do not doubt that for a minute. I think every Prime Minister who has stood here in relation to any of those injustices meant every word that he or she said in response, and yet it goes on. So there is something more fundamental that we have to make time to consider, because I do not want to be back at this Dispatch Box—or any future Prime Minister to be at this Dispatch Box—having a version of the same discussion about injustice, about people being disregarded, not listened to and not taken seriously after the event for too long, and about justice coming too late for people who desperately need it. That is what I mean by turning a corner.