Oral Answers to Questions

Laura Pidcock Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) (Lab)]

9. What assessment he has made of the correlation between changes in the number of firefighters and fire service response times.

[The Minister for Policing and the Fire Service (Mr Nick Hurd)]

Response times to fire have increased gradually over the last 20 years. At the same time, as the hon. Lady knows, the number of fires and deaths from fire has, thankfully, fallen. There is no clear link between response times and firefighter numbers.

[Laura Pidcock]

I thank the Minister for his response, but last month a report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services found that fragmentation was resulting in a postcode lottery of 999 response times and standards, which simply is not fair on the public or on firefighters. What steps is the Minister taking to introduce a consistent national framework of standards across fire and rescue services, to provide a proper benchmark against which inspections can take place?

[Mr Hurd]

The independent inspection of the effectiveness of our fire service found that 10 of the 14 fire services inspected were rated good for effectiveness, including their response to emergencies. We are driving up standards and finding out what “good” looks like through independent inspection, the creation of the standards board and robust local accountability, including the chance for local police and crime commissioners to take over governance. That framework will drive up standards across the fire service, which is what everyone wants.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Laura Pidcock Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I thank all the people who signed the petition, which has given us the chance to put our demands to the Government on behalf of the bereaved people of Grenfell Tower and the wider community in Kensington. It is always people outside this place rather than Members themselves that push it to progress.

To be honest, like many others Members have said, it should not be this difficult to secure a debate to convey to the Government the demands of survivors. It should not have taken a petition or the precious energies of campaign groups for those to be heard. Everything I have seen about this horrific incident shows that that is part of a pattern. The people in Grenfell Tower were not, and are still not, listened to. They were not listened to before their homes were destroyed and they were not listened to in the immediate aftermath, nor in the months that followed.

It is clear that the lives of Grenfell Tower residents were placed at risk, not only because of the refurbishment—residents warned that it was shoddy and that corners were being cut—but because of the ongoing management of the block. I cannot seem to get over the fact that residents repeatedly warned that the building was unsafe. They produced a long list of issues that needed to be addressed, yet nobody listened. I was told outside that there was a group that blogged about their concerns for five years before the fire. Imagine the worry of someone going to bed each night knowing that, although they had done everything within their power to keep their family safe, their home was not safe and that nobody would listen.

Why is it only when death occurs on a huge scale that these people’s calls become significant or newsworthy? What is it about our society and the system we live in that judges working class people’s voices as so meaningless that they are only given weight and validity or heard on their death? Even that has been a fight. I would like for us to consider for one second how these people would have been treated if they were the wealthiest residents of Kensington and Chelsea. In fact, would this have happened at all if they were the wealthiest residents?

Why is it that the Government and Kensington and Chelsea council do not just give these people every single thing that they want without a fight? Why is it taking a battle to get a process that residents have confidence in, and that they believe will deliver justice and truth? When confidence is so low—understandably, after everything we have heard today—how can Ministers not see that what they think is appropriate in this situation is actually irrelevant? The only thing that is relevant, and the only experts, as has been said, are the residents of Grenfell Tower and the surrounding communities.

I do not believe that any Member here has ever experienced their home being burned to the ground or their gravest concerns being ignored by the state, or has ever had to rely completely on the state to get them and their family out of a hotel room and into a home. Why do these people, who know so much about their own situation, have to go through such a battle, on top of their grief and having to rebuild their lives? That is against the backdrop of deregulation, cost cutting, gentrification and the demolition of democratically controlled local housing, and of complex, distant and unaccountable tenant management organisations and cuts to fire safety inspectors. My own area of North West Durham is a long way from Grenfell Tower, but we have lost 50% of our fire safety inspectors since 2010. We do not have great tower blocks like Grenfell Tower, but we have huge concerns over that.

On top of that, the demands of generations of people have not been listened to. Those demands are modest, to say the least. What they ask for must be granted by the Government and the council. If not, the Government and the council will let those people down and, I believe, will re-traumatise them. That would only confirm what working-class people up and down the country have come to believe: the state and the Government actively work against their interests, even when they are in the most difficult of circumstances.

All they ask for is an independent expert panel, akin to the one afforded to the Macpherson inquiry, and that that panel is representative. The two members announced on Friday is a start, but it is not enough, and it should not have taken all this time to do such a simple thing. They also want a guarantee that all residents will have a permanent home by the one-year anniversary. If that does not happen, action should be taken against Kensington and Chelsea Council—action that is proportionate to the failings of the people responsible for Grenfell Tower.

As has been said by many Members, the deadline to re-house survivors has been moved time and again, as if it does not matter at all to the council or the Government. People are still living in hotel rooms, their lives on hold. I believe that, if there was enough care, they would have permanent homes, and this bureaucracy would not be preventing them from moving on. The hundreds of times we have returned to our homes since the Grenfell Tower fire is a luxury not afforded to those people who, through no fault of their own, lost everything on that night. A year to rectify that is simply not good enough.

The bereaved people’s legal representatives should be able to see all the evidence—from the start of the inquiry, and should have access to all the documents relating to the inquiry. They should be given whatever they need to properly represent their clients. Finally, we want a commitment from the Government that they will implement in full all the inquiry’s recommendations, and not pick and choose those that are most convenient.

I fully support the demands of the people of Grenfell Tower and Kensington. I hope the Government will do the right thing and announce today that they will grant all those people’s wishes. What a terrible disaster in the history of our nation. Living in one of the richest countries in the world means absolutely nothing if those riches are diverted from communities. As somebody—I wish I knew his name; I will find it out—so eloquently said at the protest outside, “The Government need to defend, represent and listen to the people and not the market—for once.”

Windrush

Laura Pidcock Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I want to start by mentioning the patronising way in which the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry)—who is no longer in her place—spoke to me earlier about countering the far right in her youth. Countering the far right should not be something that people can consign to their youth; they should make a lifelong commitment to challenging and countering those deplorable racist views. It is quite a privilege for someone to be able to leave it behind in their youth.

There have been many brilliant and moving speeches today about the Windrush generation. I want to address the question of the “hostile environment” more broadly. It is clear to anyone who has had any engagement with the Home Office that our immigration system is broken. It is a shambles and, in its present form, it has been constructed on a premise that is solely negative and suspicious of our fellow human beings. There has been a culture on the right and the far right and in the printed press that places immigrants and immigration at the heart of society’s ills. That is both futile and inaccurate. I represent a constituency that has one of the lowest levels of immigration in the country yet, you know what, we still have hospitals that are underfunded, schools that are under immense pressure and a woefully inadequate transport system. None of those ills was caused by migration.

Returning to the question of our broken immigration system, I want briefly to outline some of the things that I think are wrong. People engaging with the immigration system have to wait far too long for a response. Deadlines for processing applications are not being met. The fees are extortionate, and there is little or no help or immigration advice. It is a complicated process. Passports, birth certificates and other important documents are lost. None of this has been created in a vacuum. The asylum process is degrading, frustrating and punishing, and many vulnerable, brave people are treated without respect.

The system is built on a presumption that everyone who wants to come to this country is a cheat and a liar who must be found out, and that their intention must be to defraud the system and to steal. Charges, borders, barriers, searches, detention centres, medical inspections, dawn raids, go-home vans, charter flight removals and hostile environments therefore seem necessary, but that is a flawed assumption based on a superiority complex. We might think, from the way some people talk in the press, that we have open borders, and we hear the perpetuation of the unfounded myth that migrants receive preferential treatment. Everything that has been said in this debate shows that that is absolutely untrue. Was I surprised to hear about the treatment of the Windrush generation? Absolutely not. It is not a shock at all. British citizens are regularly treated with contempt by this Government; it is nothing new. But now the mask has fallen, and we need some truth and honesty, starting with the publication of every single document relating to this fiasco, so that people can see and understand the scale of the problem.

We should not be shoved down the path of the good migrant versus bad migrant narrative. That language is wholly unnecessary, and it leads to two difficult endpoints, in which only the richest and most privileged people have freedom of movement, and the others who come here are often those who come in servitude to those people. What kind of society have we created, when those are the only two options? Where is the humanity in our immigration system? We must find it, develop it, nurture it and place it at the centre of whatever is built next. Pathologising human movement as though it were an affliction is not a route to a healthy society or a peaceful world. We can do so much better than this.