Building Safety and Resilience

Joe Powell Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Joe Powell (Kensington and Bayswater) (Lab)]

I would like to put on the record the thanks of my constituents in Kensington and Bayswater, which includes the wider Grenfell community, for the cross-party support last week when the phase 2 report of the Grenfell inquiry was published. We thank the Minister and the Government for making time today and for committing to future time, and we thank the Prime Minister for his statement and heartfelt apology on behalf of the British state for what happened. He spoke for us all, including the Leader of the Opposition.

The Grenfell legacy obviously has lots of dimensions, but one of them is building safety. I urge Members to remember the 72 victims of the fire, whose legacy has to be fixing this crisis. After the report was released, there were three immediate actions that the community wanted me to advocate in this place. The first was about criminal prosecutions, which is not a matter for discussion today. However, as the Justice Secretary mentioned in questions yesterday, it is important that we ensure that the court system is prepared for any potential decisions that come through the Metropolitan police and CPS process, and that court backlogs and the complexity of any potential trials do not result in even further delays to justice.

Secondly, the accountability of the companies is not just about criminal investigations; it is about their role in public procurement and paying for remedial work. We need to continue to push on that. Finally, we are discussing policy changes today to ensure that this never happens again, but the pace of change has been far too slow. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) said, that is partly due to the culture of how tenants—social housing tenants, in particular—are treated and about their agency and power and respect. There are tens of thousands of people up and down the country who are still going to bed in buildings that are unsafe.

In my constituency—quite incredibly, given the history of Grenfell—we have one of those buildings that is not yet on the Department’s list. It underwent a fire inspection just a few months ago and flammable rendering was found. This is a good example of what many Members have mentioned. It is a building with approximately 50% social tenants and 50% shared ownership leaseholders, who have scraped together the money to get on the housing ladder and have now been hit with a £400 a month increase in their service charge, primarily driven by the dramatic increase in insurance after the fire inspection took place.

I agree with the shadow Minister’s call to look at the insurance market, because in that case there was not a competitive bid for insuring the building. I know there has been a discussion with the Association of British Insurers to see how we can bring down the costs, but I urge the Government to look at this, because in the short term, while we wait for the remedial work to take place, the situation is simply unaffordable for those leaseholders. I certainly think we need to look at the insurance industry. In addition, that building is another example of the merry-go-round of buck passing that we talked about last week between local government, national Government, developers, freeholders and housing associations.

We need clear timelines to speed this up, and I really welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment on that. We need incentives in the system—carrots and sticks—to ensure that we do not have these never-ending situations where leaseholders and tenants are unclear about when the work will be done. As the Minister said, the money is there, so this is about knocking heads together and making sure that, at an individual building level, we get the speeding up that we need. I will write to her about the specific building that I have mentioned.

Speeding up this work is obviously part of the answer, but the recommendations from phase 1 and phase 2 of the Grenfell inquiry are also relevant. They go beyond cladding, as the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) mentioned. I really welcome the Government’s announcement last week that residential personalised emergency evacuation plans for disabled people will be taken forward. It is a big frustration for many of my constituents that that did not happen under the previous Government. We look forward to more detail on what those PEEPs will look like. I urge the Government in the comprehensive spending review to look at funding, for multiple years, for social landlords to implement that and at a scheme to ensure that developers and freeholders cover the costs for private buildings.

We are all still digesting the full phase 2 report, and there will be time to go into it in more detail, but one recommendation that I urge the Government to think about straightaway is the streamlining of accountability in terms of ministerial responsibility and the regulator, so that we do not have a dispersed system between multiple Departments that makes it easy for things to fall through the cracks, as Sir Martin Moore-Bick made clear in his report. I hope we will have time to discuss that in detail.

Finally, on the question of who should pay, I welcome the Prime Minister’s statement that he will be writing to the companies and looking at exclusions in the public procurement process to ensure that companies referenced in the Grenfell report will not be able to access public tenders. I also put on the record my thanks to the golfer Shane Lowry, who yesterday—belatedly, but he got there in the end—removed the sponsorship of one of the companies mentioned. I will not mention it by name, just out of caution. More broadly, these developers clearly need to need to pay for the remedial work.

The campaigners have done an incredible job, as the Minister said in her opening remarks. Their ask has always been for truth, which we now have from the inquiry; for justice, which we hope will come from the criminal prosecution system; and for change, which it is on all of us in this House to deliver.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call Peter Fortune to make his maiden speech.