Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 1 Report

David Lammy Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), and I hope that I can work with her on issues in relation to Grenfell, as I was able to work with her predecessor. Her contribution was a very good start.

On the morning of 14 June 2017, I woke up at around 5.30 am, and when I checked my phone, I saw dozens of message notifications. My wife’s phone, just next to it, would not stop buzzing. I shook her awake and we began to scroll through our messages. We were in complete shock as tears flooded down our faces. The first images and videos we were confronted with were of a burned-out shell of a building that we had known for much of our lives. Grenfell Tower had turned black, and its windows were fluorescent with orange light. My wife and I were just two of the many hundreds of people who woke up that morning to find out that a friend or relative had been burned alive.

In the wake of the fire, I assumed that this man-made disaster would be a defining moment in how we thought about housing in this country. In my view, it exposed a tale of two cities. In the wealthiest borough of one of the richest cities in the world, 72 people were forced to live in a tower wrapped in flammable cladding, and their complaints about safety in the blocks were ignored by the authorities in the months and years before. Back in the summer of 2017, I would never have imagined that the response, including that of the Government, would be so appallingly slow. I cannot believe that I am standing here in the next decade and that the Government still cannot say that all the necessary action has been taken to prevent another fire like Grenfell from happening again. In a sense, that is a summary of what the Secretary of State has said.

Members will have heard some of the statistics already today, but they are worth repeating so that the message gets through. We know that 91 out of 159 social sector buildings found to have Grenfell-style ACM cladding have still not had it removed, and that 174 out of 197 private sector buildings—those are the ones we know about—are in the same situation. On any analysis, this must be defined as cruel and unusual punishment for the families living in those buildings. I ask all of us in the House this afternoon, particularly those of us who are parents, to imagine the stress and strain of being in a building that could go up in the way we saw Grenfell Tower go up. This means that for more than two and a half years, thousands of concerned families have had to go to bed at night afraid that what happened in June 2017 might happen to them.

I am afraid that much of the blame for this inaction lies with the Government. It took them one entire year to provide the funding for councils and housing associations to remove the cladding, and it took them two years to announce a fund to help privately owned blocks. Ministers set a deadline of the end of 2019 to make social blocks safe and a deadline of June 2020 for private blocks. What is the explanation for why the first target has been missed and the second looks likely to be missed?

The inaction on cladding is matched only by the treatment of the survivors of the fire. Families have expressed frustration and anger at the chaos and lack of organisation over the past three and a half years. Much of this, of course, lies at the door of the borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Inquest is a charity that supports many of the families, including 55 of the 72 families who lost a relative. Its report contained serious criticism of the Government’s response at both local and national levels. Families have been made to feel like bystanders rather than participants in the inquiry proceedings. They have not been given adequate notice of hearings or fast disclosure of legal papers, and many have been locked out by technical jargon and inadequate language support. Most shockingly, 31 months later, nine Grenfell households are still living in temporary accommodation. When are these families going to be allowed to get on with their lives?

At the start of the last election period, we were shown the truth of how some in the Government really think about the night of the Grenfell Tower fire. The right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) blamed Grenfell residents for lacking “common sense” by obeying the orders of the fire service to stay put. Defending him, the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) explained that it was because he is more “clever” than the Grenfell victims. I have got to tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I was appalled by these statements. In a different era, what would have followed making statements like that was the honourable thing, which is a resignation.

I am obviously glad that the Government have accepted all of the recommendations made by phase 1 of the inquiry. I of course congratulate Sir Martin Moore-Bick on a very thorough first phase report that is some 1,000 pages long, but there are things that we need to take away from that. While I, too, would not want to do anything but add my own tribute to those firemen who rushed towards so many people, as I said in the last debate, I am hugely disturbed that my friend Khadija Saye heard fire officers on her floor in the early hours of the morning, but those officers did not come to her door and, as it were, drag her and her mother out of that building. Had she left earlier, I am absolutely convinced that she would be alive today and would not have lost her life on the ninth floor.

I am concerned that we now need to create a new independent body—a national oversight mechanism—to make sure not just that the Government accept the recommendations, but that the recommendations are implemented. Because of all we have heard about previous fires, previous reviews, previous inquests, previous recommendations and then inaction, it is really important that we have some kind of body that sees, this time, that implementation flows as result of what everyone has been through.

We also need to reintroduce the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill to create a duty of candour from state and private bodies. It is of course important that we do not allow the sequencing of this inquiry to scapegoat the brave firefighters who risked their lives that night. The bulk of the responsibility lies with decision makers in successive Governments and private companies that cut corners on fire safety. By doing this, individuals in positions of power, in my view, committed gross negligence manslaughter.

While this House makes much of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s inquiry, let us not forget that there is a police investigation into the decisions that have been made— I hope that at some point the House is updated on how that police investigation is proceeding—because for many, justice will be served when survivors see arrests and prosecutions and see those responsible for this crime given the justice that many of us believe they deserve.