Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are continuing to see what measures we can take, and I have taken nothing off the table. I am working with my officials to make sure that those who are responsible are the ones who pay, not taxpayers.

Important progress has been made since 2017. Fire and rescue services are better trained and better prepared for large-scale emergencies, improvements have been made to local authority building enforcement, and a poor culture among tenant housing associations is being tackled through regulation. However, we must go further. If you speak to those who live in unsafe buildings, it does not feel like there has been progress—it does not feel like progress to them. They still feel trapped, powerless in the face of a system that is not designed for them, so this Government are acting.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

As my right hon. Friend has just said, many of my constituents feel very trapped, so I welcome the acceleration of action. However, does she have any timeframe—or will her Department be working up a timeframe—for when that action will have an impact on constituents? Some of mine will be facing bankruptcy because of the challenges they have been facing. I should declare for the record that I am a leaseholder.

[Angela Rayner]

The absolute deadline we have put forward as part of our remediation acceleration plan is 2029, but we want to go much further. The Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North and Kimberley (Alex Norris), and I have met with developers and others, and we continue to push really hard on this issue—it has been one of our No. 1 focuses.

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[Kevin Hollinrake]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, as I did during much of our work on the Select Committee. One of Martin Moore-Bick’s recommendations was exactly that: that all test results should be published, not just the ones that support the safety of the product. That would go a long way towards ensuring that the true safety of the products is established.

The BRE findings highlight a shocking betrayal of trust, and a callous disregard for public safety, driven by financial gain. The report also identified severe leadership and management failings within the London Fire Brigade. It described a chronic lack of effective management, an undue focus on processes, and a complacency among senior officers regarding the brigade’s operational efficiency. Those weaknesses hindered the brigade’s ability to respond effectively to the crisis, and underscored the need for systemic reform and improved leadership in fire services.

To address those failings, the phase 2 report made far-reaching recommendations, including the establishment of a single construction regulator; centralising fire safety responsibilities under one Secretary of State, to end fragmentation across Departments; regular updates to approved document B, to keep fire safety regulations current; and the creation of a chief construction adviser and a college of fire and rescue to ensure high standards in fire safety training and practices. We fully support those recommendations and urge the Government to implement them swiftly and effectively. We will scrutinise their progress to ensure that the necessary reforms are delivered without delay.

Some have questioned the pace of the remediation efforts. I think the Secretary of State was right to do so. I emphasise that the remediation efforts prioritised the highest-risk buildings, and by July 2024, 98% of high-rise buildings with the most dangerous, Grenfell-style ACM cladding had either completed or started work. On the remaining buildings, enforcement action is being taken against non-compliant owners. The complexity of the buildings and legal disputes over responsibility have caused delays. Nevertheless, all building owners must step up, take responsibility, and act swiftly to address the issues, or face the consequences of their inaction. It is important to note that the building regulations regime was established under the Building Act 1984, and fire safety reforms were introduced by other Governments in previous decades, as the Secretary of State acknowledged.

From 2010, the coalition Government sought to remove unnecessary bureaucracy, but fire safety and building safety were explicitly excluded from those reviews. The inquiry acknowledged that key safety regulations, including the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 were excluded from deregulation initiatives. Under our leadership, safety was never treated as red tape. Nevertheless, as the report confirms, mistakes were made by Ministers and officials on our watch. The frequency of changes under Governments of different political stripes, and the frequency of changes in housing Ministers and Secretaries of State, would not have helped. I hope that Parliament may learn that lesson for the future. Since 2017, the Conservatives in Government led comprehensive reforms of building compliance and fire safety. Measures introduced include the Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Act 2022, which created the Building Safety Regulator to oversee stricter compliance with standards.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

One issue that arose at an early stage, about a year after the tragedy at Grenfell, was the need for fire safety surveyors. These people are experts and take about three years to train. In retrospect, does the hon. Gentleman not think that a lesson for future Governments of any colour is to look at such issues at an early stage, because we still have a shortage of those people now in 2024?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I agree. Mistakes were made—there is no doubt about it. As the phase 2 report recommends, there should be greater oversight and regulation of people who proclaim themselves to be experts in these fields. I agree with the hon. Lady’s points.

Accountability must remain a cornerstone of our response. Those who knowingly cut corners on safety to maximise profits must face justice. We call on the Metropolitan police and the Crown Prosecution Service to pursue criminal charges against those responsible, be it through a deliberate act, a willingness to look the other way, or gross incompetence. Companies implicated in such wrongdoing should not receive future public contracts. Let us be clear: this was not the responsibility of any single Government, Minister or official. As the report sets out in its opening paragraphs, failures occurred over decades, involving Administrations of all political colours. We must approach these difficult questions with the honesty and determination that they deserve, ensuring that we learn the lessons of the past to protect lives in the future.

While we have made significant progress, the journey is far from over. As we look to the future, we must acknowledge the hard questions raised by the report about past governance. Those failures occurred over decades, involving Administrations led by Labour, the coalition Government, and Conservative Governments. This was a systemic failure, which requires an open and honest response. Our party’s record demonstrates our commitment to making things right. We took swift action after the tragedy to establish the public inquiry, launch the independent review of building regulations and fire safety, and allocate significant resources to remove unsafe cladding from high-risk buildings. The Fire Safety Act 2021 implemented recommendations from phase 1 of the Grenfell inquiry, and the Building Safety Act 2022 overhauled existing regulations, setting up the Building Safety Regulator to oversee stringent compliance measures.

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[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am very happy to agree with the hon. Gentleman and to welcome the Secretary of State’s announcements today about accelerating all of this and ensuring that action is taken much more quickly. I hope that that will result in much quicker action for his constituents.

I was addressing the first major recommendation in our submission to the inquiry, which is that there should be established an independent building safety investigation branch of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, reporting directly to the Secretary of State. That removes any possible conflict that investigations have with any other part of the system. The idea that the Health and Safety Executive or the new Building Safety Regulator should be conducting investigations is absolutely fine, but we can never guarantee that they will not come across a failing of their own and be conflicted in that investigation. The public will not have confidence in any investigation that they conduct unless there is an independent investigation that looks at all the elements of the system. The Hackitt review rather overlooked this issue. It failed to underline how future fire incidents would be investigated. This is a gap that is still to be addressed.

The current system of resort to public inquiries, as the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green confirmed, takes far too long. I feel for those who were caught up in the tragedy directly. They have waited far too long. An air accident investigation rarely takes more than a few months because the capability exists. In the Grenfell case, the Housing Ombudsman still felt that

“residents’ complaints were dismissed and devalued.”

I think the inquiry was overwhelmed with so much material and so many different elements. In a way, its terms of reference were too wide to be able to capably come up with a comprehensive set of safety system recommendations.

It is also notable that although there was an inquiry into the Lakanal House fire, we had another inquiry into Grenfell. Public inquiries do not seem to resolve problems. A building safety investigation branch would transform that. It would operate independently, modelled on similar bodies for air, marine and rail. These bodies have proven their worth in both the rail and aviation. No public inquiry has taken place into an aviation accident since 1972 and there has not been a public inquiry into a rail accident since the Ladbroke Grove inquiry, because people have confidence in the new independent arrangements. They conduct rapid investigations. They focus not on blame, but on understanding failures and issuing binding recommendations for the future.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

The hon. Gentleman has spent a lot of time in this House thinking about how systems work. Does he not think that there is now an argument for the Government to have a proper review process of all coroners’ recommendations and all public and other inquiry recommendations, so they do not just get responded to in the moment and then not followed up in the months and years that follow?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am sure that may be a very good suggestion, but the point I am making is that we need an apex to our safety system. Whatever else the Government do to remediate the safety system as it exists at the moment, they need an independent safety investigator as the apex of the system, which is like a guardian angel over the whole system. The hon. Member for Kensington and Bayswater said there should be—I think I quote him correctly—an independent oversight body. Well, this is the body he seeks. It would be constantly looking for risks in the system, not just investigating accidents, and following up directly with the Secretary of State to say, “This has not been done.”

Crucially, the independence of the bodies is what commands public confidence. They also provide a very significant capability that no other regulator can do—a safety investigation body is not a regulator, of course. They provide a legal safe space where anybody can go and say anything without fear or favour. Witnesses have protection and, if necessary, anonymity, so they can openly speak without fear of retribution of being sued or the words they give in evidence being used against them in court. This creates a culture of openness that accelerates the learning process while maintaining accountability.

The introduction of a BSIB would not trespass on any other part of the safety system, such as the HSE or the Building Safety Regulator. It is an essential additional capability which needs to exist, otherwise we do not have that ultimate check over the whole system. Regulators, if necessary, can still run their investigations, as I was saying before. The safe space in the safety investigator does not protect anyone from legal culpability, as we saw when the air accidents investigation branch investigated the Shoreham air crash. It passed a file to the police, because it believed there had been negligence. The pilot was prosecuted. The safe space does not protect someone from wrongdoing.

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[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I associate myself with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), and others, and I very much welcome the Deputy Prime Minister’s written statement today, and her speech highlighting why the Government are acting and what they are doing.

We know that this was a systemic failure over many generations and across many parts of Government. In fact, in 2018 the late James Brokenshire issued a ministerial direction to civil servants to ensure that the original money was spent to remove the most dangerous cladding. I spoke to the senior civil servant who had had to go back and speak to predecessors about what had gone wrong, but no one had seen this coming. So I say to the Deputy Prime Minister that if there is a bigger lesson in this, it is about how the Government manage risk and watch for the unintended consequences of actions. Even with all the problems nobody intended that such things would happen, but that is what can happen if we do not keep our eye on the ball, and I hope my right hon. Friend will take that back to the heart of Government.

The impact in my constituency has been immense. Hackney as a borough has the second largest number of unsafe buildings in London, with the London Fire Brigade showing that 93% buildings in Hackney are at high risk—a larger figure than all other London boroughs except Tower Hamlets, as we heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) and for Stratford and Bow (Uma Kumaran). We have 72 buildings that are over 18 metres tall. Together, Hackney and Tower Hamlets in the heart of east London account for almost a quarter of the buildings in London with fire safety failures. I invite the Minister to meet us in any of our constituencies, or indeed in this place, to talk about what can be done across east London, because the impact is terrible. Insurance premiums have gone up massively. Many of my constituents who are leaseholders face bankruptcy. The mission to achieve change by 2029 will be too late for some. There is also disruption to their lives. They are unable to move on, and are putting off having a family. Their lives are on hold while they wait for the matter to be resolved.

I concur with the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) about housing associations, but in the interests of time I will not repeat them. Some of these properties are owned offshore or have opaque ownership. That is one of the reasons that James Brokenshire issued a ministerial direction. He realised that one of the buildings with the worst cladding had had 89 owners since it was built. If there is one thing that the Government can do, they can stop our homes becoming vehicles for offshore finance. That is why 2029 is a challenge.

The National Audit Office report that has been cited says that we will not see changes until 2035. With the construction industry in its present state, and all the other pressures that the Government will face when trying to invest in infrastructure, I would love to hear from the Minister how we will ensure that we have the right construction skills in this country and, if it is what is required, that the Government will allow migration in order to ensure that we have the right skilled people in place.

Finally, I will highlight a wider issue about how we support families affected by fire. On 5 June this year, during the election campaign, a fire gutted a building on Dalston Lane in the Pembury Estate, with 36 households escaping with just the clothes on their back. Of those households, 10 are still in temporary accommodation—the Peabody housing trust did a good job in the early days of getting them housed—and many are still living in hotel rooms. Someone who is in her 90s is trying to be offered a place by an estate agent. Today, I launch a campaign, which other Members are welcome to join, to require landlords to have a wider set of plans to help tenants in the aftermath of a fire or other crisis. Yes, there is the immediate challenge—happily, there were no fatalities on Dalston Lane—but the ongoing impact on residents is immense, with mental health challenges, disruption to their lives and trauma. We need a holistic approach to supporting tenants and residents in those situations, and every landlord should be required to have that model.

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[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

This evening’s debate has been appropriately serious and wide-ranging, and I will open by thanking the many who have enabled it to be just that: the excellent journalism of the BBC, which has ensured that not just the initial fire, but the inquiry and the lessons learned from it have remained at the forefront of public debate; and the survivors, the supporters of Grenfell United, some of whom are here tonight, and the many others who contributed to the inquiry process and to ensuring simply that Grenfell remained at the forefront of the public mind. I also thank Sir Martin Moore-Bick, who chaired the inquiry. I know it was the subject of some criticism when he was first appointed, but when we read the phase 2 report and consider everything that led up to it, we can see that it is a serious piece of work that puts us in a position to make good decisions about what needs to change.

It is our parliamentary duty to consider these most serious of matters. We need to ensure that we get it right for the sake of the survivors and the families of victims, but also for all the other people who have been spoken about in the Chamber this evening: those who live with anxiety about their own personal safety and circumstances, and those with a stake in the system, who need to ensure that the legislation that has flowed since the tragedy, and the actions that the new Government will need to continue, are fit for purpose. To that end, I confirm that the Opposition will support the Government to implement the proportionate and necessary measures that are required to keep the public safe.

Many Members across the Chamber have said that those who have intentionally cut corners on building safety need to be held to account, and the Opposition agree. While it has taken a long time, the inquiry process has gathered really good evidence, which will provide the Metropolitan police and others that may be involved, including the Crown Prosecution Service, with the beginnings of the evidence base needed to hold specific individuals to account through criminal charges and to pursue action against those developers and contractors who we now know clearly and fraudulently cut corners on building safety for their own financial gain. It has been said very clearly that we also need to ensure that the bigger businesses—the big corporates—that may have condoned that action need to be excluded from profiting from future public sector procurement activity.

There will be further lessons to learn from the inquiry. I pay tribute to a number of Members who made very serious and considered speeches. The hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) talked about the rise of the tenant management organisation. That is example of where there will be difficult questions for all parties and Government Departments to consider. The purpose of the previous Labour Government in introducing arms-length management organisations was to create a mechanism by which additional funding could be put forward to enable a higher standard to be achieved in the social housing sector.

However, I also know—the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation is a good example of this—that that created an additional barrier of governance between the local authorities, which in most cases were the freeholders of the properties in question, and the tenants, who in theory gained additional control through the creation of boards to oversee what happened in their buildings. However, as the phase 2 report spelt out very clearly, effective governance often failed to materialise. Instead, there was often mutual finger pointing, with each thinking that somebody else was responsible for the critical fire safety issues. Those lessons about governance, however difficult they may be for both sides of the Chamber, must not be glossed over.

It is clear, as has been set out, that the Government intend to take robust action. It is the Opposition’s contention that they have solid foundations to build on. As the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) set out, James Brokenshire—the then Minister, since sadly deceased—set out swiftly after the fire, once some initial information about its causes was available, that £400 million funding was to be made available to social housing providers and local authorities in 2018 to ensure the swift remediation of social housing settings with the most high-risk cladding on the exterior.

That was followed with legislation: the Fire Safety Act 2021, the Building Safety Act 2022 and the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023. Each was designed, as the process of inquiry was progressing and as other evidence came to light, to ensure that we were addressing, as far as we could, those things that we were legally able to do at each of those stages, first on the basics of fire safety, and then on to the broader lessons emerging about building safety and ensuring that social housing regulation—in what is a diverse sector—was fit for purpose.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; I want to repeat the point I made earlier, to see if I can get a response this time. We knew at various stages that there needed to be skilled people, from surveyors to contracting, to carry out the remediation work. Looking back, does he regret that perhaps some of that effort was not put into developing those skills earlier, so that constituents of ours who are still waiting for remediation could perhaps have had it done more quickly?