Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry

John Healey Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

It is four weeks to the day since the truly dreadful Grenfell Tower fire—the worst fire and greatest loss of life in this country since at least the London blitz. One hundred and fifty-eight families have lost their homes, and many others have lost loved ones. All are struggling with the horror and trauma of losing family members, of their own escape, and of being left with absolutely nothing. This is the time when they should feel that they can look to their council and their Government for help, as well as to the overwhelming solidarity and support of their local community. But so many do not, and so many feel that they simply cannot trust those in authority to listen to them and do what they promise. This is a very strong message to Ministers, Kensington and Chelsea Council and the chair of the Prime Minister’s public inquiry.

Today is one week on from the Prime Minister’s deadline for everyone affected to have been found a home nearby, yet just four of the 158 families from Grenfell Tower have moved into a fresh home—and those are only temporary. Today is 24 days on from the start of the Government’s testing programme; the Prime Minister said that we could test more than 100 buildings a day, yet only 224 tests have been done, almost all on one type of filler in one type of cladding. Today is four years and four months since two official coroners’ reports following other fatal tower-block fires, yet the Government have still failed to act on their recommendations. And today is almost three weeks since the Prime Minister said that

“we simply have not given enough attention to social housing”—[Official Report, 22 June 2017; Vol. 626, c. 169.]

Yet, in her speech yesterday crying out for ideas—any ideas for a domestic policy programme—there was no mention of housing and no mention of the words “social housing”.

This is the measure of the Government’s response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy: too slow to act; too slow to grasp the gravity and complexity of the problems; and one step off the pace at every stage. Let me spell out to the First Secretary and his colleagues the pledge that the Labour party makes, as the official Opposition, to, above all, the survivors and the relatives of the families from Grenfell Tower: we will not rest until all those who need help and a new home have it; until all those culpable have been brought fully to account; and until all measures needed to make sure that this can never, ever happen again are fully in place.

We welcome the Prime Minister’s public inquiry and what the First Secretary said about this debate helping to inform the terms of reference and the way the inquiry will be conducted. We will make a submission to the Prime Minister on the terms of reference and recommend an approach like that of the Macpherson inquiry, with the appointment of panel members with deep experience in community relations to help to overcome the serious gulf in trust that many in the north Kensington community feel.

Let me turn to housing and the help for the survivors. The pledges that the Government have made to the families and the survivors—no-strings financial assistance, open access to trauma counselling, guaranteed school places, no legal action on immigration status or sub-letting, and rehousing—are all welcome and important. But there is still a big gap between what Ministers are saying to us in the House and what the residents and the community in north Kensington are saying is happening to them.

On housing, how is it, one week after the Prime Minister’s deadline, that only four families have moved into a fresh home and 13 others have been offered somewhere they feel they can say yes to? Who is finding, checking and offering this temporary accommodation? Who is providing the reassurance needed for the families? Who is in charge?

[Rebecca Pow]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a good point, and of course these people, their homes and rehousing them is of the utmost importance, but to politicise the figures and to argue—[Interruption.] I do not know where he is getting his figures from. I was led to believe that 139 people had received offers of accommodation and many families have agreed not yet to engage, because they are not quite ready—we cannot force them to either. I am not sure where the statistics are coming from or whether all the scaremongering about statistics is helping to solve the actual problem, which this Government are getting on with doing.

[John Healey]

The First Secretary’s speech to this House was fact and figure free. If I am wrong about the fact that only four of these families, after nearly one month, have moved into a fresh home—a temporary home—and the rest are still in hotels, he can get up and correct me, but he is not doing so. The hon. Lady talks about scaremongering and political point scoring, but it is precisely the decisions and policies of those in power that the Grenfell Tower residents want challenged. And it is precisely the questions of policy, ideology and responsibility in government that lie at the heart of the deep changes needed to fix the housing crisis in this country, and her own Prime Minister has recognised that.

[Damian Green]

Just to clear up any confusion in the right hon. Gentleman’s mind, 159 families have been offered accommodation, as my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) rightly said. Some of those have said—I heard the leader of Kensington’s council say this this morning—that they do not wish yet to make the move into the housing they have been offered. Of course everyone across the House will recognise that we need to meet those wishes. These people have to decide how they can try to cope with this, but I can assure the right hon. Gentleman and the House that 159 of the families identified have been offered accommodation—some of them have been offered more than one type of accommodation. That commitment has been met.

[John Healey]

I think the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government may want to set the record entirely straight when he winds up this debate. I take the First Secretary at his word for now, but last week we were told that 158 families lost their homes in Grenfell Tower, and 139 had been offered accommodation by the Prime Minister’s deadline. Last week, only three had moved out. This week—today—four weeks on, four had moved out and only a further 13 have actually been given offers that they feel they can accept. There is a huge gap between what Ministers are saying here and what residents are saying there. That is the problem, and the question to the First Secretary and the Secretary of State is: who is sorting this out? Who is in charge? Who is responsible for this continuing failure to provide the homes and the start again that people need? I am sure the First Secretary would accept that a hotel room is no home and that temporary accommodation is no place in which to try to rebuild a shattered life. So the top and the urgent priority must be for Ministers to find the permanent homes that are needed.

We welcome the 68 homes in Kensington Row that now will be available, as social housing, for the residents of Grenfell Tower. The rest could be done straightforwardly by doing a deal with local housing associations to make new homes available; by leasing or buying vacant private properties in the area; and by funding the council to build or acquire the new homes needed. The Government might even force Kensington and Chelsea Council to use some its reported £274 million in reserves to take this urgent priority action.

[Andy Slaughter]

Most of the residents who have been decanted are in budget hotels—I know that as I have visited a number who were unceremoniously dumped in my borough by Kensington and Chelsea Council, without money, a change of clothes or anything of that kind—and have been there for four weeks. None of those people are there because they want to be there; they are there because they have not been made appropriate offers. Does my right hon. Friend therefore agree that the Government should stop this sophistry and get on with offering decent, permanent homes to people who have suffered extraordinary trauma?

[John Healey]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about that. He speaks with a special authority, as a neighbouring MP who has spent a great deal of the past four weeks in the North Kensington community, working alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) to try to support and give voice to the concerns of survivors.

Let me move on to the issue of safety testing. It is totally unacceptable, four weeks on from the Grenfell Tower fire, that Ministers still do not know and cannot say how many of the country’s other tower blocks are unsafe. The Government’s testing programme is too slow, too narrow and too confused. This is a testing programme in chaos. Only 224 tests have been done, yet an estimated 530 tower blocks have the same cladding and we have a total of 4,000 tower blocks across the country. That means that 24 days after the start of this testing programme, which we were told could test 100 buildings a day, we find that tests have been done on only half the highest-risk blocks and on fewer than one in 20 of the total number of tower blocks around the country.

[Ms Buck]

Last week, the Secretary of State said that there was “no backlog” in testing and that tests would be processed within a matter of “hours”. Given the continuing shortfall in the number of high-rise buildings that have been subject to testing, does my right hon. Friend share my bafflement that the Government do not appear to know where any of this material actually is?

[John Healey]

Yes, I share my hon. Friend’s bafflement entirely. I also hear of councils and housing associations that want to test their buildings, which may not have the same type of cladding, but simply cannot get the tests. I note, again, that the First Secretary’s speech was entirely free of any facts or figures that can update the House on the chaos of this testing programme.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend will be aware that Camden Council has done the testing in my constituency and, as a result, has evacuated more than 3,000 people from the Chalcots estate. The council is spending its own money to try to ensure that the buildings are fit for purpose before the residents are placed in them again. Does he agree that the Government should be giving financial support to councils such as Camden after cutting their budgets for years on end?

[John Healey]

The short answer is yes; the longer answer is that I pay tribute to Camden Council for taking the tough decision that it had to make in those circumstances. My fear is that other housing associations, councils and landlords of high-rise blocks around the country will hold back or perhaps cut corners because they know they cannot afford to do the works required—either to remove and replace cladding, or to make the inside safe and fully fire-safety compliant—and that they will do so only because they cannot get a straight answer from this Government on a clear commitment to up-front funding where it is needed to make sure that this essential work is done. The situation leaves hundreds of thousands of residents in tower blocks around the country still uncertain as to whether their block is safe.

I hope that Ministers will stay to hear the debate because a number of colleagues from around the country will set out concerns about the testing system, including the problem that landlords and residents are confused. The testing system does not meet the needs of those residents or landlords. We know from the Lakanal House fire that cladding is not the whole problem—nor, I suspect, was it in Grenfell—yet only one component of one type of cladding had been tested until very recently. We are therefore talking about no tests on cladding systems, on insulation materials, on the interaction between cladding and insulation, on installation, and on the fire breaks between floors. I can tell the First Secretary of State and the Secretary of State that housing associations across the country, such as Bradford-based Incommunities, cannot get their type of cladding tested, so they cannot reassure their residents that their tower blocks are safe. Councils such as Salford have stopped stripping off cladding from their high-rise flats because they have no guidance from Government on what to replace it with.

[Seema Malhotra]

I wish to comment on that point in relation to Hounslow Council. I commend it for the speed with which it was able to de-clad a block in my constituency, but it has hit some of these concerns about what to replace that cladding with. Given the amount of re-cladding that might take place across the country, I am worried that the producers of that cladding could jack up the prices, thus making the replacement even more expensive.

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right. Her council, like Oxford, is in the dark on this—it simply does not know what the Government’s guidance and advice will be. If it takes off the cladding, what does it replace that with, because the council must be certain that it is safe?

The First Secretary of State rightly made great play of the panel of independent experts in his speech. The panel is there to advise Ministers on the urgent lessons that need to be learned and the action that needs to be taken, and that is very welcome. I hope that the panel can help the Government to get back on track and deal with some of the following concerns, which Ministers will hear about from colleagues right across the country. What advice will the Government give to landlords—and what reassurance will they give to residents—if cladding systems pass the new second round of tests despite the fact that they failed the narrow first test? If cladding fails the Government’s tests, must it be taken off tower blocks in all circumstances, and will the Government cover the costs of taking it down and replacing it? When will councils and housing associations be able to get other cladding or insulation tested? How will the Government make sure that all internal fire safety works that are now being carried out inside tower blocks meet the highest safety standards? Will the Government launch an immediate review into the approved inspectors responsible for building control checks, as well as who hires them, who pays them and who approves their qualifications, starting with all those responsible for signing off the systems that are being failed by the Government’s tests?

Four weeks on, Ministers must widen their testing programme and reassure all high-rise tenants that their buildings are safe, or commit to fund the urgent work necessary to make them safe. The clearest warnings that the system of fire safety checks and building controls was failing came more than four years ago following the inquest into fatal tower block fires at Lakanal House and Shirley Towers. Both coroners wrote formal rule 43 letters to Ministers with recommendations to improve fire safety in high-rise buildings. Such letters are written by coroners only when the Government can prevent further loss of life—that is their importance. Some of the recommendations were simply rejected, such as making internal cable supports fire resistant and providing onsite information about a tower block to firefighters arriving to fight a blaze.

Ministers said that they would act on other recommendations, but they have not. The Government passed all responsibility for retrofitting sprinkler systems on to landlords. In 2014, one Minister even said:

“We believe that it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government.”

On overhauling building regulations, the Government promised a review but it did not happen. The Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), has just told me that

“this work will now need to be informed by any recommendations that the independent inquiry into Grenfell Tower fire makes.”

Rather than waiting months or years to start this work, Ministers must put this right now. They must start installing sprinkler systems in the highest-risk high-rise blocks and start the overhaul of building regulations, into which any findings from the fire investigations or the public inquiry can be incorporated.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Has my right hon. Friend picked up on the rumour about the review of building regulations in the Department for Communities and Local Government? I have heard that the review was paused because the civil servants who were leading on it were put on to other work related to Brexit. If that is true, how many other pieces of essential, urgent and safety-related work are on pause in government right now?

[John Healey]

I had not heard that rumour—I prefer to deal with the facts in front of us—but my hon. Friend is dead right that there is a serious question of capacity in DCLG. There is an even greater question over leadership, which I shall come on to in a moment.

Finally, I want to turn to the “fundamental issues”, as the Prime Minister described them, that were raised by the Grenfell Tower fire. When a country as decent and well-off as ours fails to provide something as basic as a safe home for its citizens, things must change. Let me mention two areas, the first of which is regulation. Surely Members in all parts of the House would agree that all markets, organisations and consumers require regulation to guarantee quality and safety, to ensure fair practice and to stop abuse, yet that is not the current Government’s mindset. Never again can we have a Government Minister who, when challenged on fire safety measures after the fire in Camberwell, said that they were not the Government’s responsibility, justifying that with the “one in, two out” approach to regulation. If the Prime Minister and First Secretary of State are serious about change, they should start by confirming that that approach came to an end with the Cameron-Osborne era of Conservative government.

[Sir Edward Davey]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. He and the House might like to know that when I was a junior Business Minister, people from No. 10 and the Cabinet Office asked me whether we should get rid of fire safety regulations for girls’ and ladies’ nightdresses and furniture. I said no. We did not get rid of them, nor should we have done. He is absolutely right that we have to change the culture.

[John Healey]

I am grateful for that unexpected support from the Liberal Democrat Benches. The right hon. Gentleman’s very important and specific point supports my general argument.

The second area is social housing. For decades after the second world war, there was a national cross-party consensus about the value of social housing to help to meet the housing needs and aspirations of many ordinary families. There is a recognition that there has been only one year since the second world war in which this country has built more than 200,000 new homes without the public sector doing at least a third of them. This is the first Government since the second world war to provide no funding to help to build new social-rented housing, and they have also ended all funding through the Homes and Communities Agency programme for decent homes, which is investment to bring social housing up to scratch. If the First Secretary of State and the Prime Minister were serious about social housing, they would lift the cap on councils borrowing to build and maintain their homes, restore central Government investment to help to build new social housing, guarantee “first dibs” on new homes for local people, and strengthen the hand of councils to get better deals from big developers for their residents.

Finally, we hear that the Prime Minister wants us to “contribute” rather than just “criticise”. I have to ask this: has she asked her Cabinet to contribute? What does the Secretary of State have to contribute to solving the country’s housing crisis; to doing more on social housing; to reversing the plunging rate of home ownership, especially for young people; to giving 11 million private renters basic consumer rights; and to preventing the rapidly rising numbers of homeless people sleeping on our streets? Where is the plan? Where is the hope? Where is the leadership? If the Prime Minister wants a domestic policy programme, and if she wants to find common cause and to make fundamental changes to Government policy, we stand ready to contribute—we offer our Labour housing manifesto, published last month, as a starter.

If the Government want our support for a plan to tackle the country’s housing crisis, they must raise their sights. If Ministers want our support for their recovery programme post-Grenfell, they must raise their game.