Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. It is a particular pleasure, and perhaps a daunting prospect, to follow my friend, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). As Brummies, I feel “friend” is the appropriate word. It is appropriate that I should follow her, because I want to open my remarks by talking about the idea of sentiment and feeling.

My understanding is that some people postulate that there are five stages of grief that people move through, beginning with denial, then anger, and ending eventually in acceptance, although as the hon. Lady said, I understand that that period of acceptance may never come. The feeling may diminish over time, but originally, I was approaching this situation from a much more technical position.

I am a civil engineer by degree and a member of the Chartered Institute of Building, so I was giving some thought to the complexity of the panels, how they may be configured and where else they might be deployed. Of course I would do that because, as well as being a member of the Chartered Institute of Building, I chair the board of the housing association in Walsall. We have 20,000 houses. Following the Grenfell disaster, we had to review our buildings in order to determine whether we had any aluminium composite materials—ACMs—in buildings that we were building or cladding at the time. We determined that, in one case, we had exactly those elements present in one of our buildings. Although it was relatively low rise, we fully appreciated that the people living in that building would be concerned. It was not a question that would be answered by referring them to a technical building regulations document that would allay their fears. They needed reassurance on the basis that a tragedy had happened and they wanted to ensure, beyond reasonable doubt, that they would not be involved in a similar tragedy.

One of the things that helped to move me along massively was the opportunity to meet Grenfell survivors last week. I spoke to Hisam, who had lost six family members. The level of grief is incomprehensible to me. I lost my father 18 months ago. That feels like a dreadful tragedy, but he was an 83-year-old man who had a stroke and we had the opportunity to spend time with him before he passed away. It is not a comparable situation at all. I cannot begin to understand the level of grief experienced by those affected.

While speaking to Hisam, I thought, “Are you reassured with regard to the way the Government are handling this situation?” He explained to me that they wanted to bring family members over from another country to offer support to those who were grieving in this country. The barriers that they faced were incredibly intractable. When finally they were given the opportunity to bring family members over, my understanding is that it was for a two-week period. Sometimes we have processes that people follow by virtue of some sort of diagram or detailed specification, and we lose sight, as an hon. Member said earlier, of the fact that we are talking about people, not processes.

Similarly, Hisam had a child who had been affected and who had missed some time from school. He hoped that some one-to-one education might be provided to help that child catch up with the education he had lost. Originally, that was refused by his school. He needed to move to another school before, eventually, the original school said, “Actually, we could have provided some support after all.”

This is not a technical question about composite materials and ACMs; this is about how we treat people. I see at first hand just how complicated that can be. I used to be the assistant chief executive of the YMCA in Birmingham. We had 300 accommodation units for formerly homeless young people. We had a building that we refurbished that used to be a social care building in Birmingham, so we had an architect design a scheme for us and we refurbished it to create 33 flats. That was two years before Grenfell.

In the light of Grenfell, we went back to the fire safety experts—in fact, we brought in new experts—to review the layout of the building and ensure that we would be able to manage a safe and secure building for the vulnerable and frequently chaotic young people that we serviced. Dreadfully, we found that some items in the layout of the building needed to be addressed in order for us to regain that confidence. That building had been designed and refurbished only two years previously, yet there was an opportunity to reinterpret and be more secure in the judgment that was applied.

I sincerely hope, although I fully appreciate that it is unlikely, that we will be able to help people to move through all those stages of grief and to reach a point where they feel a level of acceptance. As a Government of MPs, not just the governing party, it is beholden on all of us to ensure that we provide that support from a people point of view rather than a process one.