Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 1 Report

Matt Rodda Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake). I welcome his willingness to look at a wider range of policy responses to try to deal with this terrible problem.

I would like to start by paying tribute to the Grenfell families. It is almost impossible for us to imagine what they have been through. Their steadfastness and determination are a wonder to us all, and I pay tribute, from the bottom of my heart, to them, the whole Grenfell community and the firefighters who so bravely served local people on that dreadful day. I thank the Secretary of State for his work and the tone in which he spoke earlier. I concur with the views of many hon. Members on both sides of the House.

I want to focus on two areas that have been discussed but that I believe need to be developed further. The first is the scale of the problem. The fire was truly dreadful. We have heard moving accounts of how people heard about loved ones who were caught up in this disaster. The aftermath affects the whole country and we need to consider the full scale of the issue, by which I mean many of the aspects that we have started to discuss tonight, including the much wider range of cladding that is believed to be dangerous, such as wooden cladding and other forms of composites, and the lack of fire safety, such as potentially substandard fire doors. There is a whole range of other issues that we are just starting to touch on.

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his thoughts on the height of buildings, and I urge him to work with me and other Members who have a large number of lower-rise flats in our constituencies. It is a huge potential problem. Many have a whole series of potential fire hazards buried within them. In Reading, for example, we have four high-rise buildings that were identified as having ACM cladding on them after the terrible disaster. It took some time for Berkshire fire and rescue to investigate a number of tall buildings across the county. They did a very thorough job. However, there then comes the issue of buildings that are not quite as tall but may contain very serious fire safety risks to residents. Substantial numbers of people in medium-sized towns and cities around the country are living in flats that are four, five, six, seven, eight or nine storeys high that are not covered by some of the issues we have discussed today.

There are other issues with potentially dangerous houses in multiple occupation where terraced houses are divided up into maybe two or three flats. I have seen for myself, as a former local councillor, two or three families living in one terraced house, crammed in, often in very squalid conditions, subject to poor quality housing. There are real issues about the provision of fire safety in those buildings.

We also need to address the very real problems that some Members have discussed, or hinted at, regarding other types of buildings, whether they be academic buildings, workplaces, hospitals or schools. A whole range of buildings could contain dangerous cladding in one form or another. We need to address those issues very thoroughly. In the wake of the original disaster, we have had terrible fires in a number of parts of the country, such as the Bolton incident, Barking and several others. These fires could take place across a number of parts of Great Britain, and they deserve to be addressed properly through a suitable scale of response.

I am grateful for the attention that has been paid so far to the scale of response needed from central and local government. However—I urge the Government to consider this fully—I find it deeply disturbing that in the fifth wealthiest country in the world, two and a half years after this disaster, we are still waiting for people to be rehoused and still waiting for a series of actions to be taken. Those actions just deal with the initial problem of the ACM cladding, not the subsequent issues that I have discussed. I note that the Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service is in his place and attentive, and I believe he is very sincere in his desire to improve matters. I urge Ministers to ensure that we look thoroughly, afresh, at the need for human resources in DCLG—skilled people who understand the issues and who are trained in building safety—and the need for fire inspection by fire services. In my case, in a typical English county, it took months for the local fire and rescue service to inspect all the buildings. They worked very hard with the limited resources they had.

We need to look carefully at the resources for dealing with emergencies but also for inspecting and understanding risk, and we need to take urgent and determined action to tackle that risk. That covers a number of fronts, both at official level in central and local government and on the ground, with firefighters and building control officers making sure that the new inspectorate has real teeth and has suitable resources to take the action that is needed. I am sure the Minister would agree that this is a vital point. I urge him to ask his friends in the Treasury to look afresh at this issue and to commit substantial and significant sums of money on a timescale that is appropriate to the urgency of this very serious issue. I hope that he will take account of that plea.

My town of Reading and the neighbouring small town of Woodley, which also falls largely within the Reading East constituency, are just one small example of many towns and cities across the country where this serious problem exists. Luckily, we have not yet had a disastrous fire, but it could happen at any time. We need urgent and determined action, with central Government in the lead, to tackle this dreadful problem. I urge the Minister to take action on the scale that is needed.