Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Phil Wilson Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Wilson, and to follow all the fine contributions to this debate. I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) on securing the debate and on reading into the record the names of those we lost. It is very important that he did so. I know so little about who those people were, but I hope that in due course we will all come to know much more about them. It was an honour to meet relatives of the deceased in Speaker’s House—I think we all felt that. I am sure that we will come to know them very well in this place.

I am the Member of Parliament for Wirral South, but from 2006 to 2010 I was the councillor in the London Borough of Southwark for the Brunswick Park ward, which contained the Sceaux Gardens estate, in the middle of which was Lakanal House. On 3 July 2009, Lakanal went up in flames. I can see that block in my mind’s eye as real as if it were that day. Six people, including a one-month-old baby, died in that disaster, and the inquest found that those were unnecessary and preventable deaths. We have heard people in this debate say that the Grenfell fire must never happen again. To me, those words are meaningless, because it has happened again—it is happening again. I saw Grenfell on the television, and to me it was alarmingly familiar. I have seen what the families have gone through since the day of the Grenfell Tower disaster. That, too, is alarmingly familiar, because unfortunately neither the disaster nor the secondary tragedy of the Government’s response to the disaster needed to happen.

Other hon. Members have talked persuasively about the recommendations following the Lakanal fire. It is a matter of great grief to all of us who were involved with Lakanal that the recommendations and the conclusions of the inquest were not progressed with more rigour. But there is something else. The Prime Minister, when she was Home Secretary, commissioned Bishop James Jones to report on the experience of the Hillsborough families. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) has talked about how all of this discussion and debate rings bells with us because it is all the same. Bishop James Jones’s report on the experience of the Hillsborough families was called “The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”. I would ask any person to listen to the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) and ask whether what she described does not amount to the patronising disposition of unaccountable power. Of course it does. Hillsborough was not about football and the Grenfell disaster was not about a tower block in isolation: it was about the relationship between citizens and the state that was supposed to protect and respect them. Of course a diverse panel for the inquiry, for all the reasons that hon. Members have gone through, was vital, but we need more, and I will spend just a couple of minutes saying what more the Government can do.

First, the Government should answer Bishop James Jones’s call for a charter for families bereaved through public tragedy. In his report, he gives all the details of what that should contain. The report came out in November, but the Government have not responded. All this could have been avoided if they had.

Secondly, the Government should bring forward their own Bill on a public advocate at inquests. That proposal was brought forward by Michael Wills, a peer, and the Government are committed to implementing it. Just bring forward the Bill. Let us reform inquests now; let us not wait another second.

The third issue is the Hillsborough law proposals, which were first put to this House by my friend, Mayor Andy Burnham. Those proposals include reform of legal aid so that we get the parity of arms to which the Scottish National party spokesperson, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), alluded. The importance of that is absolutely clear. I worry greatly that we will again get into a situation in which families are worrying about legal costs and whether their legal advice will be sustained, while the state has all before it—whatever expensive QC it needs. Let us prevent that from happening now before the problem arises.

Fourthly, and most important to me, is a duty of candour. This is not party political. The Government have already implemented a duty of candour for NHS staff, but I want to change the situation in every council and every Government Department up and down the country, where people are told, “Don’t admit you were wrong. Don’t accept responsibility. Don’t give the information out. Don’t make it publicly available. Because you will be liable.” I want the lawyers to say to them, “You know what? You’ll be liable if you don’t tell the truth. You’ll be liable if you don’t give the information out.” Trust the public.

The Government, as I have said, accept the policy for the NHS. Let us just make it real for every other representative of the state in our country, because in the end the central question that we have to ask ourselves is this: what kind of country do we want to live in? Who are we really as British people? Are we the kind of people who see grieving families and want to worry about whether we might be responsible, or are we, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) said, the kind of people who want to reach out and help? I thought that our country had changed radically since 1989. I worry that I was wrong.

[Phil Wilson (in the Chair)]

Before we hear from the Front Benchers, I say to them that I would like to leave two or three minutes for Paul Scully to sum up the debate.