Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Judith Cummins Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order. As the House will have realised, many Members wish to speak in the debate, so in order for us to help each other, I am afraid that I will have to impose a four-minute limit on speeches. I call Ben Coleman.

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[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

I, too, start by joining the Deputy Prime Minister in expressing my sincere condolences to the families tragically impacted by this avoidable disaster. I welcome her statement and the positive steps and actions she has outlined to address the findings of the inquiry.

I welcome the plans to introduce heavy penalties for those who fail to meet repair deadlines, but I share the concerns of campaigners that the timescales for making properties safe are way too long. The Deputy Prime Minister may say that the Government are taking “decisive action”, but the building safety fund was first opened for registration in 2020. The 2029 target must not be for the first building to be remediated—it must be guaranteed to be when the last one will be.

For over seven years, residents and leaseholders have continued to live with the mental anguish that the properties they and their families go to sleep in every night are unsafe, aware that what happened to the residents of Grenfell could well happen to them. As we have heard, residents also face extortionate home insurance bills and rising costs for repairs that should be the sole responsibility of the developers, while leaseholders face ruin, financially trapped in properties that they bought in good faith but were built in bad faith.

To widen the argument and the issue at hand, the picture of property developers cutting corners to make a profit and disregarding human life in the process is one that, before Grenfell, we wanted to believe belonged to a bygone era. Unfortunately, it is very much the reality of 21st-century Britain; a culture has become embedded where corporate bosses think they can get away with cutting corners in the pursuit of profit. We have seen the ugly imprint of that culture again and again, whether it is Government lobbyists scamming the public purse during the covid crisis, water companies polluting our rivers, the blatant disregard for truth and basic decency in the Post Office Horizon scandal, or people being burned alive in buildings that are not fit for purpose.

The only way to root out that culture is regulation to protect the public from those who seek to exploit them, and I am concerned that the Deputy Prime Minister does not go nearly far enough in that regard. We know that the property industry in general is rife with profiteering, and I am concerned that we will see more of the same as property agents hike up fees, earning hundreds of millions of pounds in the process by charging administration fees on works to make buildings safe. In opposition, the Labour party committed to preventing this by calling for the nationalisation of the process of fixing high-rise flats to eliminate administration fees, and I encourage the Government to pursue that policy.

I would like the Deputy Prime Minister to consider applying the risk assessment to buildings of under 11 metres as well. Campaigners are right to say not only that a comprehensive risk assessment must apply to buildings of all heights, but that building safety crises go far beyond external cladding and a holistic approach must give equal consideration to non-cladding defects—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order.

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[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I am here to talk about the people, their treatment and their rights, and I am sorry I do not have more time to do the topic justice. I had been a London Assembly member for one year in 2017 when the Grenfell disaster happened, and it had such a huge impact on my work and on me personally. I will never, ever forget the many things that I saw and heard. I will never forget the smells, the burned debris on garden hedges, the community’s shock and heartbreak, and its spirit as it called me and many other elected representatives down there to try to deal with the issues that they themselves were dealing with and identifying. The people around Grenfell, the victims, the 72 people killed that day—they are constantly in my heart when I work on any related issue. I was also a councillor in Camden, and a few days later five of our blocks had to be evacuated due to related issues, so I have a perspective of dealing with a non-fatal but nevertheless disruptive evacuation and incident.

Let me rattle quickly through a few of the recommendations relating to people, and to these issues. I am desperate on behalf of the residents I represented then, and those I represent now in Brighton Pavilion, where we have a huge number of medium and high-rise blocks that need work. For no good reason I still see many of these issues emerging in relation to the treatment of residents in blocks, the information they can get out of their landlords, the slowness of the action, and the fact that substandard work is still being done on many people’s blocks—I should not still be doing this so long afterwards.

Let me start with the recommendations related to management. The way that the TMO treated its residents was abysmal. We have seen much evidence for that, but the report gets to the heart of it when it states that however “irritating and inconvenient” it may have been to deal with those residents,

“for the TMO to have allowed the relationship to deteriorate to such an extent reflects a serious failure on its part to observe its basic responsibilities.”

The housing ombudsman echoed that, speaking of gross imbalances of power. Residents who ask questions, or who start to organise their neighbours to have some kind of collective voice that might get things done, are still talked about as troublemakers, as militants, or as a nuisance. I am still encouraged not to listen to those residents when there are issues, which is not correct.

I also want to focus on transparency of information—these things are the basic building blocks on which resident trust can possibly be built. In 2017 I was having trouble getting fire risk assessments from Camden council. I went to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which responded in a fantastic way. She was clear that councils needed to publish those assessments proactively, yet here I am representing residents in Brighton, and it has taken 18 months. My predecessor, Caroline Lucas, first asked the council to publish its fire risk assessments when she realised that it was not complying with the ICO’s recommendations. I wrote to the council about the issue back in September when I realised that was the case, and finally last week I was told that some assessments would be published imminently. That is just not good enough from councils. I do not even know where to start when trying to get information about non-council landlords. It has been ridiculous on behalf of so many residents. Finally, I want to talk about the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and its recommendations, which are tremendous. The humanitarian response on the ground was nowhere near good enough—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order.

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[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order. I call the final contribution from the Back Benches.

[John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)]

I strongly welcome the Deputy Prime Minister’s statement, which shows that she cares and is resolute in seeking redress. The essence of how our country is run with regard to public safety is at stake, so I hope my right hon. Friend and other hon. Members will agree that, for public confidence and for the deterrent effect to grow, not only must we ensure that justice is not denied by being delayed; it is also for us to ensure that justice—in the form of individuals, organisations and companies being properly held to account—happens at all. That is important because, as other hon. Members have alluded to, in previous cases of egregious state and business failure, there has been insufficient justice of this kind. We owe this to the Grenfell victims, to the survivors and indeed to wider society.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.