Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Debate between Siân Berry and Judith Cummins

Monday 2nd December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I am here to talk about the people, their treatment and their rights, and I am sorry I do not have more time to do the topic justice. I had been a London Assembly member for one year in 2017 when the Grenfell disaster happened, and it had such a huge impact on my work and on me personally. I will never, ever forget the many things that I saw and heard. I will never forget the smells, the burned debris on garden hedges, the community’s shock and heartbreak, and its spirit as it called me and many other elected representatives down there to try to deal with the issues that they themselves were dealing with and identifying. The people around Grenfell, the victims, the 72 people killed that day—they are constantly in my heart when I work on any related issue. I was also a councillor in Camden, and a few days later five of our blocks had to be evacuated due to related issues, so I have a perspective of dealing with a non-fatal but nevertheless disruptive evacuation and incident.

Let me rattle quickly through a few of the recommendations relating to people, and to these issues. I am desperate on behalf of the residents I represented then, and those I represent now in Brighton Pavilion, where we have a huge number of medium and high-rise blocks that need work. For no good reason I still see many of these issues emerging in relation to the treatment of residents in blocks, the information they can get out of their landlords, the slowness of the action, and the fact that substandard work is still being done on many people’s blocks—I should not still be doing this so long afterwards.

Let me start with the recommendations related to management. The way that the TMO treated its residents was abysmal. We have seen much evidence for that, but the report gets to the heart of it when it states that however “irritating and inconvenient” it may have been to deal with those residents,

“for the TMO to have allowed the relationship to deteriorate to such an extent reflects a serious failure on its part to observe its basic responsibilities.”

The housing ombudsman echoed that, speaking of gross imbalances of power. Residents who ask questions, or who start to organise their neighbours to have some kind of collective voice that might get things done, are still talked about as troublemakers, as militants, or as a nuisance. I am still encouraged not to listen to those residents when there are issues, which is not correct.

I also want to focus on transparency of information—these things are the basic building blocks on which resident trust can possibly be built. In 2017 I was having trouble getting fire risk assessments from Camden council. I went to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which responded in a fantastic way. She was clear that councils needed to publish those assessments proactively, yet here I am representing residents in Brighton, and it has taken 18 months. My predecessor, Caroline Lucas, first asked the council to publish its fire risk assessments when she realised that it was not complying with the ICO’s recommendations. I wrote to the council about the issue back in September when I realised that was the case, and finally last week I was told that some assessments would be published imminently. That is just not good enough from councils. I do not even know where to start when trying to get information about non-council landlords. It has been ridiculous on behalf of so many residents. Finally, I want to talk about the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and its recommendations, which are tremendous. The humanitarian response on the ground was nowhere near good enough—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Siân Berry and Judith Cummins

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

The Greens are not agnostic on privatisation. We very much support the principle of the Bill and look forward to its progress. I want to make a short speech on amendments 2 to 5, which I tabled. They are very simple and common sense; their goal is to leave open the opportunity for elected devolved bodies to set up companies that they own, in order to bid to run railway services under the overall guidance and wing of Great British Railways. The Bill, which restricts the definition of a public sector company to those owned by Ministers, either here or in Wales or Scotland, does not allow for that. That seems to clash with the direction of travel towards more public sector devolution, with which my party and I agree.

It would improve and future-proof the Bill if we amended proposed new section 30C of the Railways Act 1993 so that Ministers could in future choose a company set up or owned by combined authorities, or by groups of unitary, county, district or borough councils who decided to co-operate, ahead of further devolution, on improving their railways. Any decisions on the award of franchises, on the suitability of a body to run and own local railways, and on where investment should go would remain fully with Ministers. I tabled the amendments in a constructive spirit, and I hope that they will start a constructive conversation that will continue here and in the other place as the Bill progresses.

[The First Deputy Chairman]

I call Abtisam Mohamed to make her maiden speech.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Siân Berry and Judith Cummins

2nd reading
Monday 29th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I thank all the Members who have given their maiden speeches. It was moving to hear all of them, particularly the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean). I am making a note of everybody who mentions youth services, and he did some very good advocacy: he is on my list.

It is great to be speaking on my first Bill in the House, and that it is a Bill that brings passenger railway services back into public hands. The fact that this measure made it through the dramatic sift of Labour policy that took place before the election, and is among the first and most urgent pieces of new legislation we are looking at, is I believe in no small way due to the Secretary of State’s own commitments to this policy and her dedicated internal advocacy for it. I wish that more of her colleagues had been so willing and determined to push for similar Bills to bring other privatised services such as water and the big six energy companies into public hands, but that does not diminish my delight this evening. I recently mentioned to her how much I was looking forward to scrutinising and where necessary helping to improve other upcoming Bills under her remit, including the buses Bill and the more detailed railways Bill. This is all great work.

As far as this Bill’s key principle is concerned, the Secretary of State will have noticed that public ownership is popular with me and is popular with the people. In 2024, that principle is supported for the railways by 76% of the public. That support has risen steadily for the past decade; it was even backed before the election by 60% of those intending to vote Conservative.

Bringing the railways back into public hands has been in my party’s programme for as long as I can remember. It is also close to the hearts of my constituents in Brighton Pavilion, for whom the legacy of the failed policy of privatisation is one of poor services, inefficiencies and very high costs for passengers. An annual season ticket between Brighton and London currently costs my constituents the best part of £6,000. That cost has risen by approximately 40% in the past 10 years—far more than wages in Brighton have risen. In the face of service cuts and failure to invest, passengers have had to form local pressure groups such as the Preston Park Train Campaign to save services. In so many stations, understaffing and disabled access remain dreadful, creating appalling discrimination against passengers—and don’t get me started on toilet provision.

I am not just here to praise the Bill or celebrate its principle. I do have some questions and comments—all to be constructively taken, I hope. The Bill is very short and very simple, and I wonder whether it could benefit from some additional detail and a wider scope. I will keep my comments brief at this stage, but on each point I would welcome more detail from the Secretary of State on her thinking. I also request a meeting with her to discuss the issues before Committee of the whole House.

First, I want to talk about the exceptions from the Bill. From the information I have, it appears that the Bill will not bring into public ownership the regional services currently let by concession contracts, including the Elizabeth line, Mersey Rail and the London Overground, or any of the services on open-access routes, including Eurostar, Grand Central, Heathrow Express, Hull Trains and Lumo. For passengers, hearing the Government promise to bring private operators into public hands, but then hearing that a service they use will be excluded, will be a disappointment. I hope we will hear more soon about how those gaps will be filled.

Also out of scope, as the Bill’s title indicates, are rail freight services. The public might have expected those private operators to be among the first for action, especially as getting freight off the roads and on to rail has so many benefits in addressing road danger, congestion and climate emissions.

Another exception from this Bill to bring passenger railways back into public hands is the rolling stock companies. Quite honestly, most members of the public do not have much awareness of it, but the rolling stock in which we travel is another public asset that is worthy of public investment and should not be held merely for private rent and profit by companies that add no real value to the service. At the very least, the Bill could have included a prohibition on new arrangements of that kind.

Finally, I feel that there is a potential gap in the Government’s plans around rail devolution. The Bill’s definition of “public sector company” will allow franchises to pass only to companies wholly owned by the Secretary of State or her counterparts in Wales and Scotland, not to those owned by other elected bodies whose remit includes, or might in future include, managing transport in an integrated way within an area of the country. I am very interested in further exploring the Secretary of State’s thinking on that, because a Green principle close to my heart is subsidiarity: making sure that ownership and power are devolved to the lowest and most practical level.

In the case of integrated, multimodal transport planning and investment, particularly for day-to-day travel, the best level is often a regional or sub-regional travel-to-work area. At that level of planning, sustainable travel across different modes can be linked up in a responsive network with convenient interchanges, rational timetables and shared ticketing across modes. Profitable commuter routes on a railway might also directly help to cut car dependency in isolated villages by subsidising essential connectivity by bus, for example.

This kind of transport planning is best done alongside and in tandem with planning for new homes and businesses, for which the right scale is also a regional or sub-regional area, working with the involvement of local authorities, people and workplaces. Like many people, I am slightly concerned about the centralising tendency that we can detect in a range of recent actions from the leadership of our new Government; I hope that it will not dominate transport and planning policies in this House. If the Secretary of State agrees to meet me as requested, I will be very interested to hear more about how she expects the upcoming devolution Bill to interact with this Bill and with the future railways Bill in respect of her plans for how centralised the future planning, management and ownership of transport as a whole will be.

Admittedly, the places in England where this kind of devolution applies, and where rail franchises might sensibly pass to companies owned by cities and regions in the near future, are currently very few. However, when we have franchises serving nearby metro mayor areas, such as TransPennine Express and Northern, which are already under the wing of the Department for Transport; when the Mayor of London already has his sights firmly set on taking over specific services; and when there might, as I hope, be greater devolution of powers to combined authorities and areas in the south-east region and Sussex, where I now represent many people dependent on rail services, it does seem strange to introduce a Bill that appears to need amendment to rule in such an exciting prospect. When the Government are about to give more powers to local authorities to run buses, it also seems strange not to help them to work together to run suitable railways. Will the Secretary of State explain what plans there are to better link up railways and bus services? Will she discuss them with me before Committee?

Those are all my comments and questions. I am very much looking forward to the future, and I am looking to help build the best future we can from this new and refreshing approach of public ownership. I reiterate how pleased I am to be making such a speech, rather than one bitterly complaining about a Government who have completely the wrong idea; I hope that my questions and cautions will be taken in that spirit.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Jon Pearce to make his maiden speech.