Grenfell Tower Fire

Sandy Martin Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Emma Dent Coad (Kensington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the response to the Grenfell Tower fire.

I wish to thank the Backbench Business Committee, the Minister, the Government Members who agreed to support the debate, my colleagues here today and those who have given me strength and help over the past two years, but who are, I hope, on the battlefield of the Peterborough by-election today. I also thank those in the Public Gallery who are watching the debate. I want to reassure them that this debate is just one step and that we will return to this subject over and again until all our demands are met.

I asked for briefings on all aspects of the response to the Grenfell Tower fire from organisations and groups that I have met. I was inundated. I received enough information for a two-hour lecture with slides, but I have just 15 minutes in which to speak today. To preserve this invaluable response, all the briefings will be available online very soon in the Grenfell archive that I am compiling—it will be factual information. In the short time available, I will speak on areas close to my heart and leave comments on the detailed issues to my hon. Friends and other Members.

Just four days after my election two years ago, a horrific and an entirely avoidable atrocity took place in my neighbourhood. Shock and disbelief resonated around the world. Pledges, commitments and guarantees were made in this House in the aftermath. Many of these commitments have been broken, and my community has been failed horribly. A year ago, a debate was held in Westminster Hall about the response to the disaster. The briefing from members of Grenfell United and the inquest was clear: they wanted the Government to demand that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council rehouse those people made homeless by the fire within a certain timeframe and that if the council continued to fail, the Government would send in commissioners to take it over. They also demanded that the Government appoint two independent panel members from diverse backgrounds to advise the public inquiry. It took a further year to appoint the panel members, and their very late arrival after phase 1 had ended will surely reduce their effectiveness.

I commend the work of Grenfell United in its tireless campaign to hold the council and the Government to account, often in very difficult circumstances. I also commend the work of the countless campaign and community groups fighting against the odds for Grenfell-affected people, including Humanity for Grenfell, the Grenfell Trust, Justice4 Grenfell, the Latimer arts project, Kids on the Green, Hope for Grenfell, Grenfell Speaks, Cornwall Hugs Grenfell and all those other groups that I may have forgotten. I thank the community centres, religious centres and the vast number of outside campaigns and individuals whose breadth of expertise and support is evidence of the depth and breadth of the failure of the statutory services that we have paid for to care for the people to whom they have a duty of care.

Let us look for a moment at rehousing. I must declare an interest as a current member of the council—I will remain a member of that council until every single person has been housed and cared for in the way that they deserve. The Government have failed to make the demands of the council that were made a year ago, and the council has failed to rehouse many people who were made homeless. The official figure is 19 tenants, but a tenant can comprise a household of many people with disparate needs. Only those made homeless from the tower and the facing Grenfell Walk are counted in those official statistics. In the walkways attached to the tower, there are a further 109 homeless households as of last month, making a total of 128 homeless households. Some remain in their homes, which re-traumatises them every day. The council has removed those households from the wider Grenfell rehousing scheme, and they will now languish on the council waiting list, some for many, many years.

While desperate families struggle to keep going, there is frustration and impatience within the council. Although there are good and empathic officers, this impatience is demonstrated by outbursts from some people because they are overstretched, and from certain senior councillors who should know better, while they persuade, cajole and sometimes, I am sorry to say, bully people into homes that are not suitable. While these 128 homeless households—around 250 people, in my estimation—are still awaiting rehousing, the rank incompetence of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation to have an up-to-date list of tenants at the time of the fire means that fraudsters have sneaked into the system and pillaged funds meant for the genuinely homeless and desperate.

During my tenure on the TMO board from 2008 to 2012, along with the now leader of the council, the TMO was so dysfunctional that I had to call in an independent adjudicator. There followed a change of director, but clearly not of culture or of staff Meanwhile, the attitude of some people at the council is questionable, and I have noted that for years some people have found it almost feudal.

In the early days after the fire, my predecessor as MP wrote to the council to air her concern about the numbers of people roaming around the streets “like gangs”. A senior council officer was told to go down to the site but refused, saying, “It’s like little Africa down there.” Another said that the area was full of people “from the tropics”. A senior officer regularly, in front of others, referred to my neighbours as “muzzies”. A recent visitor to the walkways was congratulated by a senior councillor for entering the “lion’s den”. I say “vulnerable”; they say “volatile”. This attitude is hardly surprising. About two years ago during a debate on refugee children, a senior councillor said:

“if we let these people in, we will have an Islamic Caliphate in Kensington and Chelsea.”

Racism or snobbery—take your pick.

What I see is people who have been utterly failed by the system subsequently being punished for it. Is it right to off-roll a child from school because they cannot cope with the pressure of trauma and schoolwork, and send them to a pupil referral unit or alternative provision located in a council-owned building, which is then closed because it is in such a poor state of repair that it is judged to be dangerous? According to parents who confide in me, these children have been left to roam the streets. Who is responsible for safeguarding these fragile children? Is it another case of accountability pass the parcel?

Is it right to punish a bereaved man beside himself with grief and anger—someone who has been a good friend to many people—who in a moment of blind fury on behalf of others used threatening words? Is it right to punish this moment of fury with imprisonment? Should we imprison someone who has been so dramatically failed? I say, “Free Mr Latimer,” so he can at least join the memorial event on Friday week for those he lost on 14 June 2017. Why are my neighbours being punished, excluded from school and imprisoned when the perpetrators of their misery, who continue to view us with disdain, walk the streets of Chelsea free?

I am reliably informed that a senior councillor recently complained, “I don’t know why they are wasting so much time on mental health. They all seem fine to me.” I declare an interest as a recipient of mental health services, although they have not helped me. We have 11,000 people affected to various degrees by the Grenfell atrocity in our neighbourhood. Some have been helped; many have not. The type of trauma we have does not go away. There have been several suicides. While it is always difficult to ascertain causes, the five people I know of who lost their lives in the past seven months were affected by what happened to various degrees. This heavy toll includes young teenagers.

I am still meeting people who are not getting any help and some who are refusing help because of the perceived shame of mental illness. I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder myself, but I am able to function. However, I know so many who cannot. On their behalf, I will wear the scars of my own mental ill health with pride. The shame is not for those whose mental health has been damaged. The shame lies with those who neglected our homes—those whose first reaction to the fire was that of damage limitation and passing the buck of blame, rather than accepting failure.

Local people and specialists have also been discredited over the controversial soil testing exercises. Members of the community concerned about toxicity of soil in the area around the tower contacted a university professor of fire chemistry and toxicity, who took samples and was so alarmed that she reported it to the council, Public Health England and the NHS. For some reason, they sat on these interim findings, and then six months later, the council leader denied in public that she had seen them, even though we have seen the minutes of the meeting at which she was informed of them.

After a long and failed campaign by the council and from other quarters to discredit the professor, they are now finally—after two long years—starting to test the soil for carcinogens and other toxic materials that can seriously affect people’s health. We are calling for full health screening, including blood and DNA testing; they are offering lung capacity tests. It is another fight that has sapped the energy of so many unnecessarily.

I turn briefly to the wealth of information we have had from the fire services, building regulators, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Association of British Insurers, which all have an interest, from various perspectives, in the safety of buildings and those who live and work within them. All this will be available in the Grenfell archive. I have worked closely with the fire brigade and the Fire Brigades Union for many years. The cuts to services have been devastating, and I pay tribute to the fire services for their extraordinary dedication. They often work long hours and double shifts to keep the service functioning. I well remember the previous Mayor of London, when challenged at a public Greater London Assembly meeting, uttering a foul expletive that I shall not repeat. The Minister may have witnessed it.

The independent review of building regulations and fire safety, the Hackitt review, includes many recommendations that fire services have put forward, including improving skills in the sector, defining who is responsible for what under fire safety legislation and increasing the role of the fire service in the safety of buildings, which, owing to deregulation, is currently open to all comers. The demand for the inclusion of sprinklers to all new buildings and for the retrofitting of residential buildings is consistent from many quarters. It costs money but not a lot, and not having them can have a terrible human cost that I have no wish to see imposed on anyone. Today, my hon. Friends will speak in more detail about improved regulation for fire doors, about responsibility for fire safety within the trained professional setting of fire services themselves and about regulating for safer electrical goods.

As many here will know, I spent most of my career writing about design and architecture. I know how buildings are constructed and what went wrong at Grenfell during the refurbishment. During my time on the TMO, work was done on digital cabling to Trellick Tower, which has the same concrete frame construction. During this work, firebreaks had not been reinstated. Fortunately, I was alerted to this by tenants, and after a row, these defects were corrected. Since that time, there have been several fires in Trellick Tower, all of which have been contained within a single flat.

The RIBA has specific demands that are more extensive than the recommendations in the Hackitt report. Its demands for non-combustible cladding, the use of sprinklers and alternative means of escape in new buildings would add just a few percentage points to the cost of buildings and keep people safe.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, however good building regulations might be, if developers can get away with not having them signed off, they are of no use? In St Francis Tower in Ipswich, in my constituency, a developer completely refurbished a tower block with flammable cladding without ever getting the building regulations signed off, because it did not have to do so through the local council.

[Emma Dent Coad]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend.

I will move now to the question of insurance, which might have been relevant in this case. The ABI has been working closely with the Fire Protection Association to reform building regulations, including on its review of Approved Document B. This relates not only to saving life; saving property is also paramount. If someone escapes a catastrophic fire in their home, they will have lost all their possessions and documents, and this can set them back years. They may never recover. A catastrophic fire in an office or warehouse not only destroys the contents and building; it can destroy a business, the jobs of all those who work there and the future of their work and family life, as well as all the organisations that depend on the business.

The ABI is demanding that sprinklers be fitted to homes, student accommodation, schools, care homes and warehouses. It is also concerned—as am I, with my background in architecture—with the implications of modern methods of construction, many of which have not been fire tested to destruction and do not perform well under more stringent tests. The results of tests I have seen argue against the wholesale embrace in the architectural profession of cross-laminated timber, particularly in the production of the next generation of social housing, which we so desperately need. I know that colleagues will discuss that later. The Shelter report on social housing has been a welcome piece of research whose recommendations I hope, in time, will be adopted. We need more homes for social rent, but they must be the right homes in the right places.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Betts]

I thank my hon. Friend for taking away from me my final, winding-up comments. She is absolutely right, and that is at the heart of Dame Judith’s report. This is about making sure that materials are right and are properly tested. In the end, it is not even about the building regulations in relation to fire; it is about the building industry as a whole and how it operates. There is a race to the bottom, and the industry is taking the cheapest on board all the time as the way forward. This is about making sure not merely that the materials are right, but that the materials specified are actually used, that the buildings are properly signed off and that they are properly maintained and managed. This is a whole-system issue.

[Sandy Martin]

Does my hon. Friend agree with me that the correct way of doing that is for local authorities, not private companies, to police the building regulations system?

[Mr Betts]

That is a really important point. In our report in July 2018, one of the things we highlighted was the conflict of interests in the building industry, which go right the way through. Fire authorities can actually be testing their own work and recommendations, which is wrong. This is also about the whole testing regime for products. We had evidence of producers going around different testing organisations until they found the one that actually approved their material, and there was no record of the failures from other organisations. Fundamentally, this is about building inspectors being appointed by developers and then signing off the work of the people that have appointed them. That cannot be right. This is not necessarily about local authority or private sector building inspectors, but about who appoints them to a particular job and whom they are accountable to, which is absolutely key. Dame Judith’s recommendations on that need to be followed through, because they are really an important part of the changes we need.

On other issues, when the Minister came to the Select Committee in January, we asked him about other forms of material. Rockwool had drawn to the Committee’s attention about 1,600 properties on which the material was not ACM, but could be as dangerous. The Minister was very open and direct about it, and he did say that all those properties would now be tested—I think there has been a delay in the testing, which is unfortunate, but it has started—but that if those tests showed that the material on those properties was as dangerous or as risky as ACM, the same rules would apply about taking it off and about having a requirement to take it off. That is what he said. There is, of course, disagreement about the testing arrangements, which have been a matter of contention right the way through our work. We must come to a conclusion whereby the industry in general is satisfied that the tests are fit for purpose, but nevertheless that testing is happening, and if any material is as dangerous as ACM, it must be removed. Will the Government pay for that as well as for taking ACM off homes in both the social and private sectors? That is a fundamental question. There is no point in banning the stuff if we then return to the same problems that we had with ACM.

The Government introduced a ban on materials that are not of limited combustibility immediately after Dame Judith’s report—on reflection she probably feels that she might have recommended that herself, and she is certainly comfortable with that recommendation, which was right. But there is a problem—the elephant in the room—how can we possibly say that it is too risky to put materials that are not of limited combustibility on new buildings, if we are happy for such materials to remain on existing buildings? How can we say to people, “You are safe in your homes, but we wouldn’t put that material on a new home because we don’t think it’s safe”? That is a fundamental problem.

I am sure that sums are going round in the heads of people in the Treasury, who will be counting the cost of taking material that is not of limited combustibility off all existing buildings. That cost will be considerable and probably far larger than the budget for dealing with ACM to which the Government had to commit, but is the Minister really comfortable with saying to people, “You’re going to live in a home that has material on it that we would not consider safe to put on a new building”?

I know that if building regulations are changed, we cannot always go back and retrospectively apply them to all existing buildings, but we are talking about a fundamental issue of safety and fire prevention that the Government must consider. Importantly, we must also think about non-residential buildings. Many hospitals, schools, student accommodations and residential homes are not covered by the current ban, although they are high-risk buildings. In 2018 the Committee said that this is about not just high-rise but high-risk buildings, and that provision must be applied.

Some progress has been made on many issues, but we have a lot more to do. Dame Judith recommended a whole review of building regulations, which is key, and we must get proper tests agreed. There is the conflict of interest to resolve, and the issue of existing buildings. Fundamentally, however, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) prompted me to say, this is about the whole construction industry not being fit for purpose. We need a fundamental review of how it operates, considering not just specifications, but including the management of projects and ensuring that people have homes and other buildings that are safe to live in.