Fire Safety Bill

Sarah Jones Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 29th April 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

The House is sitting in unique times, in a unique way. Every Zoom picture we have seen today has told a story of hon. Members safe at home with their loved ones. That is what home should be: a place of safety. During this lockdown, for all its stresses, we have come to understand even more urgently that sense of a place of safety.

Yesterday, we heard harrowing tales of people whose homes are not safe because of abuse. Today, we are talking about another group of people for whom home is not safe—people who are not as lucky as us; people who live every day with the fear that what happened at Grenfell may happen to them. They suffer this amid the economic shock of covid-19, which has further reduced their incomes and their choices, and stopped the remediation work that they have long needed. They are forced to stay in a place of unsafety; a place of fear. They cannot forget what happened on 14 June 2017, and neither should we.

I pay tribute to the Minister, officials and House staff who have worked hard to get us here today, and I thank the fire Ministers—the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire) and Lord Greenhalgh —for their detailed briefing over the phone to me on Monday. We all agreed that our fire and rescue services deserve huge credit for going above and beyond the call of duty against covid-19. They deserve our full support.

I am also grateful to all the hon. Members who spoke with such passion and expertise today. As ever on this topic, there is agreement on both sides of the House. Members and former members of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee have done so much to highlight these issues. We heard from the ever-wise Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts); the hon. Members for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake); and my hon. Friends the Members for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare), for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), who have sat or sit on the Committee.

Members of the all-party parliamentary group on fire safety and rescue, who were warning Ministers to act many years before the Grenfell Tower tragedy, also brought us their expertise. Its chair, the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess), has been dogged in his campaigning for fire safety, and the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith, the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning)—he brings his own unique experience—and the hon. Members for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), for Thirsk and Malton and for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) all brought great experience to the debate.

We welcome the Bill, but it goes nowhere near far enough to prevent another Grenfell tragedy, nor to undo a decade of cuts to our fire and rescue service. The Grenfell community were failed by a system that did not listen to them. We must never forget that failure. I pay tribute, as others have, to Grenfell United, the families and the whole community for continuing to fight for justice, but why has it taken three years to get to this? The Bill is the first and only piece of primary legislation on fire safety introduced by the Government in those three years. It is just three clauses long, and it fails to implement any of the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower inquiry phase 1. At every stage, we have had to drag the Government into action. Coronavirus is an unprecedented crisis, but it cannot be an excuse for failure to act on fire safety. We need to be much stronger and go much further.

I shall mention four key problems with the Bill, which we will explore in Committee. The first is the competence of fire risk assessors, which the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead mentioned. It is frankly outrageous that it is perfectly legal for someone with no expertise and no qualifications to set up as a fire risk assessor and complete fire risk assessments for schools, hospitals or tower blocks. The Bill makes the issue of competence even more pressing, because it will make fire risk assessments more complex by including elements such as the nature of cladding materials.

How is it that 15 years after the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 was passed we still do not have a proper system to accredit those carrying out fire risk assessments? I am aware that a working group has been looking at this issue. Will the Government commit to legislating, through the Bill, for higher standards and greater public accountability in fire inspections?

The second problem is the slow pace of implementation. The powers in the Bill will not come into force until an undetermined date of the Secretary of State’s choosing. This is simply not good enough. We are calling for the implementation of those powers from day one. This call is supported by the London fire brigade, among others. The fire service has developed a model for a risk-based approach of inspection, modelled in my own town of Croydon, which could be reflected in the legislation. A vague commitment to bring the Bill into force over time, as the Minister wrote to MPs yesterday, is not good enough. As many Members have mentioned, the Government have also promised to make further changes to the fire safety order via secondary legislation to implement the Grenfell Tower inquiry recommendations, but again at an undetermined date in the future. Six months ago, the Housing Secretary promised to implement the findings of the inquiry in full and without delay. We have a Fire Safety Bill here in front of us, and we have a series of recommendations that could have been consulted on and placed into the Bill.

The third question relates to residents trapped in Grenfell-style buildings across the country. This issue was raised by many Members in the debate. It is the most immediate and pressing fire safety issue and it is being exacerbated by covid because of stalled work to remove flammable Grenfell-style cladding from buildings. Not only are these residents in danger; they are now facing ruinous costs for waking watch, building insurance and other interim safety measures at a time when many have lost income due to covid-19.

We have heard excellent speeches and experiences from my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), for Reading East (Matt Rodda) and the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, as well as from my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson), who has just told us about constituents who are losing their homes. I spoke to leaseholder residents yesterday who are paying £14,000 a year for waking watch. Who can afford that? There is one block whose residents have spent £700,000 on waking watch because they were told that they had to, but the building has now been tested and found to be safe. This whole area is a total mess—or total chaos, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood said. If we do not fix the problem now, people will go bankrupt at the height of this crisis. I know that the Housing Secretary has launched a pledge to keep cladding removal work going, but we need more than a pledge. We need action. And will the Government please make good on our waking watch system? It is simply not fit for purpose, and it is ruining people’s lives.

My final point is that, as the Fire Brigades Union and many Members including my hon. Friends the Members for Newport West (Ruth Jones) and for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) have said very powerfully today, the Bill could have significant resource implications for fire and rescue services, but the reality of the past decade has been devastating cuts to firefighter numbers and fire appliances, leading inevitably to slower response times. Fire inspectors—those we need to audit and enforce these new powers—have seen some of the largest cuts. Their numbers have fallen by almost a third since 2010. Will the Minister agree today to publish an impact assessment of the resource implications of the Bill and commit to funding it properly?

In July 2017, I made my maiden speech during the first full debate in this Chamber on the Grenfell tragedy. I did not think that, three years later, I would be facing a Government that have still yet to pass a single Act of Parliament to deliver on the clear promises made in the wake of that tragedy. We welcome this legislation, but it cannot be enough. This piecemeal response to Grenfell cannot be enough, and this delay and dither cannot be enough. The tragedy of Grenfell and the scandal it exposed of unsafe housing across the country have been too slowly addressed by the Government and too quickly overshadowed by other events—first Brexit, now covid. The Government have a chance to put this right, and we will work hand in hand with them to do that. Everyone needs a place of safety. We in this virtual House all have one. Three long years after the Grenfell Tower fire, we must move faster.