Grenfell Tower Fire

Steve Reed Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I add my congratulations to those given to my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) for her phenomenal leadership on this issue. She represents a constituency where many people feel disenfranchised and voiceless. In this place, she has become their voice and we thank her very much for that.

Days after Grenfell Tower went up in flames and 72 lives were lost, the Prime Minister promised to do everything in her power to keep people safe. That was two years ago and the Government’s record since then has been one of denial, dither and delay, as they failed to act on words that now ring very hollow indeed. Some years before Grenfell, in 2009, there was a fire at Lakanal House in south London that led to the death of six people, including a baby. The inquest reported in 2013 with very clear recommendations. The coroner said that the fire safety regulations and, specifically, part B of the building regulations that cover fire safety, were unclear. That was why unsafe and combustible cladding was being strapped on residential buildings inappropriately. The coroner warned, sadly prophetically, that if the confusion was not put right, more deaths would follow.

The Government were given that warning in 2013, but they did nothing, so three years later, flammable ACM cladding was strapped to the outside of Grenfell Tower. A year after that, it went up in flames and 72 people lost their lives. It could not be more horrific, and I am afraid that Ministers’ responsibility could not be clearer. We are now two years further on and yet the fire safety regulations remain unaltered. The Government could have acted on those regulations after Lakanal House 10 years ago, but they did not. They could have introduced a complete ban on flammable cladding after Grenfell, but they did not. They could have taken immediate action to strip Grenfell-style flammable cladding from every housing block where it existed, but they did not. Why not? Because if they had belatedly acted on the Lakanal House recommendations after the deaths at Grenfell Tower, they would have had to accept that their failure to act earlier had contributed directly to that disaster. Rather than do that, they chose to cover up their earlier inaction with more inaction. If the leaders of a private company had acted in the way that Ministers did, they would find themselves in the dock charged with corporate manslaughter. Ministers should reflect on that.

Last December the Government finally, and belatedly, announced a partial ban on flammable cladding, but a partial ban is not enough. They have proposed a ban on flammable cladding on new buildings over six storeys or 18 metres high, but have excluded hotels and office blocks. I simply cannot understand why. I have written to the Minister asking for the evidence that a hotel or an office block is safer than a block of flats, but he has not provided anything convincing, and I doubt whether he will be able to. Surely people in a hotel where they have never stayed before are less likely to know the fire safety escape routes than they would be at home, in a block of flats with which they are familiar; and if flammable cladding is not safe above six storeys, why would anyone on the fifth or the fourth floor want flammable cladding strapped outside their home?

The Government propose to continue to permit the use of flammable cladding on the majority of schools, care homes and hospitals, because most of them are under 18 metres high. How do the Government think parents will feel, knowing that flammable cladding is still allowed on the outside walls of the school that their child attends every day? No parent I know would tolerate that.

Right now, there are still 60,000 people living in 272 blocks with Grenfell-style cladding. The Government refused all demands to act for nearly two years. They finally performed a welcome U-turn last month and found £200 million to remove and replace flammable ACM cladding on residential blocks, but even that is not enough to pay for the work to be carried out fully. It includes nothing to deal with other types of flammable cladding which could be just as dangerous as ACM, nothing to deal with failing fire safety doors, and nothing to enable sprinklers to be installed in the blocks where they are required. Even after all this time—even after two years—Ministers continue to evade their responsibility to keep people safe.

The best way in which to meet the Lakanal House coroner’s demand for clarity on fire safety rules is to introduce a complete ban on flammable cladding on all buildings where people live or work, and that ban should not only cover new buildings. We must take down flammable cladding wherever it exists, because it is an unacceptable danger to people’s lives. Many European countries have already introduced a complete ban; Scotland is introducing one, and we need one here in England as well.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is completely insane for the Government not to introduce a complete ban? If they are not going to do so, Ministers should guarantee today that there will be no further fatalities. Otherwise they should call for a complete ban, through legislation if necessary.

[Mr Reed]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. It strikes me as incredibly and frighteningly contradictory to say that flammable cladding cannot be allowed on new buildings, but is fine on buildings where it already exists. If I lived in a block like that, I would be living in fear, and I know that thousands of people are living in those circumstances.

There is still an average of one fire a month in buildings with flammable cladding, and it is only a matter of time before one of those fires is not put out. Let us mark the anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster next week, and honour the memory of those who died by making sure that what happened at Grenfell can never happen anywhere ever again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter]

I am grateful to the Minister for intervening, but I would like to feel absolutely certain on that. I would be grateful if he could to write to me to guarantee that any additional costs for the police will be covered from central funds and not from their own budget.

The key point I want to make on the inquiry relates to its longevity. The fact that it will take time means that it is being used as an excuse. We are not short of good advice from people at the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Fire Brigades Union and the London fire brigade about what needs to be done now, but actually things are not being done now. An example is the fact that a consultation has just been published in the middle of this debate. In fact, I was tipped off by the fire brigade about five minutes before the debate started that there was a 200-page document to be read. Why could that document not have been published yesterday, or even the day before, to inform the debate? The terrible suspicion is that this has been done in order to capture a headline, so that, rather than the Government’s inaction on this subject being highlighted, they appear to be doing something.

I had a chance to read the written statement and the Government’s press release, which contained the welcome comment that

“too many in the building industry were taking short cuts that could endanger residents in the very place they were supposed to feel safest—their own home.”

I could not agree more, but who is responsible for this? Within the last five years, Ministers have said in relation to the important issue of sprinklers:

“We believe that it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government, to market fire sprinkler systems effectively and to encourage their wider installation.”—[Official Report, 6 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 188WH.]

The right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) has stated:

“The industry itself has an opportunity to make a case. I am not convinced at the moment it is for the Government to make a case for private industry”.

That is typical of the Government. The right hon. Gentleman said that when he was the Housing and Planning Minister, but I am sure I could have quoted many others. We have to get rid of this ideology, and the Government have to face up to their responsibility on this matter.

In the short time I have, I will cover a number of topics, although necessarily very briefly. Individual Grenfell survivors are not being well served. I am not going to name her for reasons of privacy, but I have a constituent who escaped with her daughter from a high floor in Grenfell Tower on the night. She then spent a year in hotel accommodation and a year in temporary accommodation in my constituency. She appears to be no nearer to getting rehoused. I may pass that case to the Minister, because he may want to intervene himself, because this clearly is not working. It is not working generally for survivors. I would like to see an open book approach to how the rehousing has been dealt with. It happens that Kensington and Chelsea was the richest council in the country; I wonder what would have happened in Northamptonshire or somewhere of that kind. To some extent, the Government have been let off the hook there. We still hear reports that people are not in permanent or suitable housing, or that housing has been purchased but is in such a state that it still needs to be got ready. People have gone into permanent housing because they felt pressurised to do so and have then had to come out of it because it turned out to be unsuitable. That is entirely unfair.

Issues of causation have not been addressed, such as that of the fridge-freezer—the plastic back is still legal, despite the fact that it is prone to fire—the fridge-freezer, manufactured by the Whirlpool company, who have a terrible reputation for white goods of this kind. We will not find out until the end of this year exactly what the cause of the fire was. Everyone suspects that the cladding was the major form of spread, but we are no further forward in knowing the exact sequence of events in relation to that. On all the other fire safety issues around regulation, means of escape, fire doors, and building security—fire alarms and matters of that kind—we are really as in the dark now as we were two years ago.

There were issues around what happened on the night, and the fact that clearly—not just Kensington and Chelsea, although they were utterly, utterly abysmal, to the extent that they could not even accept offers of help from other authorities, but generally speaking—we were not in a state to deal with a major emergency of this kind. If it happened again tomorrow, would we be any better off? I would like to know the answer.

I am grateful that the Chair of the Select Committee and others have dealt with some of the complex issues of fire safety; I do not have time to do so. I am glad to hear from the chair of the all-party group that they are pursuing this matter as well. To have dealt with ACM cladding only, and not with high-pressure laminate cladding—which can be twice as combustible as ACM cladding—over the last two years is negligent. Not to have heeded the advice of the fire brigade and others in relation to sprinkler systems is negligent. Not to have looked at the testing processes, and the combination of materials—not just cladding but insulation, and how they work in situ, not just in test circumstances—is equally negligent. I am afraid there is still a terrible stench of complacency from the Government, even after two years.

[Mr Reed]

My hon. Friend is making some important points about the inadequacy of what the Government are proposing, but in the written ministerial statement that they have issued—during the debate rather than before it—they are proposing not to consult on whether 18 metres or six storeys is the appropriate height, and therefore they are not even going to consider whether a ban on flammable cladding below that height should be looked at. Does he think that is acceptable?

[Andy Slaughter]

It is absolutely not acceptable, and my hon. Friend has made some points in his excellent speech about the lacunae—all the missed opportunities to deal with existing buildings, including other types of high-risk and high buildings, which are not even within the Government’s purview here, despite many experts’ having pointed out the necessity of that.

Let me say a few words about housing. In the decades following the second world war, we were building an average of about 125,000 social homes a year. In the past year, we built 6,000. I would like to know what will happen on the site of Grenfell. The sooner the building goes, the better. Yes, we can have a consultation on what should be on the spot. It is a sensitive matter. Why are we not specifically replacing the hundreds—it is not just the tower itself—of social homes that have been wrecked by the fire?

The year before the Grenfell fire there was a serious fire in Shepherd’s Court, a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush, in my constituency, and the fire spread; so I am only too aware just how traumatic fire can be for residents. Thankfully, there were no injuries. But incidents like that should have been warning signals; they were not heeded. Grenfell is a nightmare. I can think of no worse way to die—waiting for rescue, hoping for hours that it was going to come, and then the slow realisation that it was not going to, and that you were going to have the most horrific death. If that is not a wake-up call to this Government, I do not know what is. I would like to see much, much more action to ensure that this never happens again.

Local Government Funding

Steve Reed Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Thelma Walker) on securing this very important and timely debate. Since the Conservative party came to power in 2010, my local authority, Croydon Council, has lost more than 70% of its central Government funding. At the same time, the population is growing. We have higher numbers of older people who need care services, more families have been made homeless because of welfare reform, and more working families are in poverty because of the freezing of working-age benefits and a real-terms reduction in people’s wages. Funding cuts and an increase in demand for statutory services such as care and housing means that there is drastically less funding for everything else. That includes services that help tackle the causes of violent youth crime. That is on top of severe cuts in policing. The result of all that is a national knife crime epidemic.

We largely know how to prevent violent youth crime and have successfully stopped it in the past. I was the leader of Lambeth Council in 2007—the last time there was a big increase in violent youth crime. We were the first council to set up what would now be called a public health approach, which means understanding and then treating the causes of violent youth crime, rather than focusing only on the symptoms. We commissioned the country’s biggest piece of academic research on violent youth crime, learned the lessons and then funded the services that stopped young people at risk of drifting into criminal behaviour doing so. Violent crime quickly dropped by 30% and continued falling. We know what works, but it requires investment in services, including early intervention with low-level young offenders before they progress on to higher-level offending; mentoring and support that helps offenders not to reoffend; help for families in which children are growing up without the support they need, for instance to develop language and cognitive skills or loving, emotional bonds with their family; treatment for mentally ill people, particularly when it arises from a child experiencing traumatic situations such as sexual or violent abuse; school exclusions, particularly of black boys; and youth activities and diversionary projects that help young people develop healthy relationships, skills and interests that will support them throughout the rest of their lives.

Since 2010, the Government have taken away the funding for those services in every community that needs them the most. They targeted the biggest cuts on the poorest communities, where violent youth crime is the highest. The 10 poorest communities in the country have suffered cuts more than 18 times bigger than the 10 wealthiest communities. By removing those communities’ ability to stop violent crime early, it spiralled out of control and spread, leading to what is now called county lines—the export of violent criminal behaviour linked to drug dealing from the areas where it started to everywhere else. That is why the number of deaths on our streets has escalated year after year across the entire country.

Instead of learning from their mistakes, the Government seem determined to keep repeating them. Their ironically named fair funding formula, which comes into force next year, removes deprivation levels from how funding for local services is calculated. The poorest communities will lose even more, and what capacity they have left to stop a further escalation of violent crime will be reduced, so violent crime will rise even faster.

When I asked the Home Office Minister about the need to do more to tackle violent crime, she emphasised the importance of the troubled families work, which is funded by the Minister’s Department. That is one of the few areas where the Government have done the right thing. They are funding professionals who bring together support that helps to reduce offending by families who are generating the highest levels of crime. What she did not say, perhaps because she did not know, is that all funding for that programme will come to an end in 12 months’ time—March next year. The services are working on their wind-up and closure plans. It is staggeringly short-sighted at a time when violent youth crime is soaring out of control to close down one of the few services that is actually helping. We need more of that kind of work, not less. What action is the Minister taking to ensure the troubled families programme continues after March? What guaranteed funding will the Government make available to ensure that it can continue?

We do not need to wonder how to tackle violent youth crime. We already know. The problem is that the Government have slashed the resources available to tackle it in the communities where it is growing the fastest. We need them to think again.

Fire Safety and Cladding

Steve Reed Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the issue of fire safety, which is of great concern to many people in my constituency and throughout the country, particularly since the Grenfell Tower fire 19 months ago. The debate is happening somewhat earlier than we envisaged. I hope that means that there will be more opportunities for other Members to participate, because I know that the issue affects many constituencies.

I want to cover two areas: first, the major fire that happened at the Shurgard self-storage centre in my constituency on new year’s eve; and secondly, fire safety and the use of flammable cladding in residential and other buildings throughout the country, about which there has been great disquiet since the Grenfell Tower fire.

The fire at the Shurgard self-storage centre was massive. More than 1,200 people had stored their goods and possessions in that facility, which was one of the largest in London. When I was first alerted to what had happened, my first thought was, “I hope everybody is safe,” and it was reassuring to hear that there had been no loss of life. However, a couple of weeks later I had the opportunity to meet a group of Shurgard customers who had lost everything they had put in storage at that facility. The scale of loss, devastation and harm that that caused cannot be overstated. The losses were enormous.

As with all self-storage centres, the Shurgard facility was marketed as a safe place to store goods. It was even advertised as a place for those who had suffered a bereavement to store the belongings of a loved one.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing this important debate to the House. Constituents of mine had their goods burnt in the Shurgard fire. I am sure that hon. Members will be interested to know that, having advertised as “safe and secure”, since the fire the Shurgard website has removed 35 mentions of that phrase. Its use is nothing short of mis-selling.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and neighbour for her intervention. It is telling that Shurgard saw fit to remove all the language about safety from its website after the fire. I hope that, during the debate, we will expose the fact that the facility was far from being as safe as it was marketed to its customers.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising this important issue in the Chamber. Like the constituents of my other neighbour, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), many of my constituents had possessions at the facility. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is essential that the London fire brigade carries out a full investigation to establish whether the operators of Shurgard had implemented all the relevant fire safety measures? It seems that the fire spread so quickly and so extensively that it requires a thorough investigation.

[Mr Reed]

I completely agree and am grateful for that intervention. Everybody who uses self-storage facilities needs to know that their possessions are safe when they put them in storage. We need to know that Shurgard and other providers of such services abide by the regulations, and that the regulations are sufficiently robust to provide the reassurances that customers deserve and need.

When I spoke to the group of customers, I found that the single biggest reason for storing possessions at the facility was being between homes. People were not just putting some spare goods into self-storage; they had left the place where they were living and had not yet moved into their new home, so everything they owned was stored at the facility. As a result, everything was lost; everything was destroyed in the fire. As one of them said to me, “It’s bad enough to lose a sofa, a bed or a sideboard, but at least you can replace those things. What about your keepsakes from loved ones who have passed away?” The company advertised its facility as a safe space to leave keepsakes for those who had suffered a bereavement. What about someone who has lost a lifetime of family photographs—all their memories of their family experiences and of the people they most love? A price cannot be put on that. It cannot be insured. If it is gone in a fire, it is gone forever and it is irreplaceable. The devastation, pain and stress of losing such things can be incalculable.

I met one family—a husband, his wife and their three children—who, because of benefit-system failings, had been evicted from the home that they rented just before Christmas. They had put everything they had into this Shurgard self-storage facility. They were penniless because of the problems with universal credit so they could not afford insurance. They have now lost absolutely everything that they owned. They have been left absolutely devastated, without any possessions at all, and they are living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. That family need help, and they need it urgently, because they are facing critical hardship as a result of what happened.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. He has picked up on a crucial point—that the storage centre claimed that it was safe, and so on. Does he agree that when the Minister responds he should refer to the specific case of those individuals, who have lost everything because of the social system and are now living in a bed and breakfast? These must be considered special cases, in which the Government need to step in and act.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention and completely agree with her. I hope that when the time comes the Minister is able to respond to that point. People who have been left in severe hardship as a result of what happened have had nowhere to go for the help that they deserve.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this issue to the House. It is important that evaluations are made of properties where the same thing might occur. Does he agree that there has been ample time to assess the number of buildings that are in danger? My local authority in Northern Ireland, Ards and North Down Borough Council, carried out evaluations and provided reports within six weeks of the disaster. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that additional funding must be put in place to help local councils to make evaluations and to help those people who need compensation, and that that needs to be done as a matter of urgency? Furthermore, on the changes to fire safety regulations, does he agree that the real, live testing of materials in the construction sector is urgently required?

[Mr Reed]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, with which I have great sympathy. I believe that in this particular case the investigation is also in the hands of the police, because we do not yet know whether arson lay behind the tragedy at the Shurgard facility on Purley Way in Croydon.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a strong point that—I am sure he will come on to this—applies as much to residential fires as to the case he is talking about. First, there is the issue of insurance, with people in these situations often underinsured or not insured. There is also the issue of who is liable. As he says, the case he is describing may be a criminal matter. At Shepherd’s Court in my constituency, there was an obvious cause—it was a tumble-drier fire—but the manufacturer denies liability and will not pay out. As a consequence of cases like that, people can lose everything and go for years and years without being able to replace their belongings.

[Mr Reed]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I am also interested in the insurance aspects of this case, including whether people were wrongly advised by the self-storage company about the level of insurance that they should have taken out and, indeed, whether there was mis-selling of insurance. I have contacted the relevant authorities—the Financial Conduct Authority and others—to seek their advice. I hope we can bring that issue back to the Chamber at the appropriate time, and I would be delighted to work with my hon. Friend on that, since he has an interest in it.

I return to my attempt to establish the extent of the harm that has been caused to people’s lives by the fire. I met another woman—a customer—who had stored in the facility her mother’s and her grandmother’s ashes. One simply cannot imagine what it would feel like for an individual to lose something of such enormous human value to them.

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend is giving way generously. On that terrible point, last weekend I met some people who were affected, and I have a constituent whose pictures of her deceased children were burned. These things are so irreplaceable and so sad. People really did believe that their things would be kept safe, and that everything would be okay. We cannot emphasise enough what a horror they have been going through.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful again to my hon. Friend for her intervention. One really cannot exaggerate the pain that has been caused. When anybody puts their most beloved and treasured possessions in a facility and are assured that it is safe, they deserve to know that it actually is safe. I met an artist who had lost a lifetime’s artworks, which she had created. I met a DJ who collects first-edition reggae albums on vinyl. All of that is gone in the fire, all of it irreplaceable. No money can replace that.

Of course, many businesses today keep their stock in facilities like these, and many businesspeople have lost their stock. Even if it was properly insured, the short-term loss of that stock means that they have lost a whole quarter’s trading, which is enough to put many small businesses under. I really do think that the Minister needs to consider what emergency support is available for the people facing real hardship and crisis as a result of the fire.

Many colleagues have raised concerns about the level of fire safety at the Shurgard facility, and I share those concerns. When I met a group of customers, that was one of the biggest areas giving them cause for concern that they raised with me. A customer putting their possessions in a self-storage facility would assume that there had been some effort, when designing it, to prevent the spread of fire, should a fire take hold. In fact, the walls in the individual units in this facility did not go right up to the ceiling—there was a gap between the top of the unit and the ceiling—so a fire that started in one unit could quickly and easily move into the next, and then the next and beyond. It seems to me shocking that these facilities are built without designing in measures to prevent the rapid spread of fire.

Customers using that facility reasonably assumed that a sprinkler system was installed in case of fire. In fact, there is no sprinkler system in that facility, and there is no requirement for self-storage units to have sprinkler systems. Another point is that Shurgard did not ask their customers to report or keep a record of what they were storing in that self-storage facility. Someone could put all their most treasured possessions in the unit they were renting, but the next-door unit could be filled up with barrels of oil or something equally flammable, and nobody would ever know.

If we put all that together, there were in effect no fire safety measures whatsoever in this facility. It was advertising a service as safe and secure for people to keep their goods in, but it simply was not. It was taking money from people, and then not providing the service that people expected. If things go wrong—and on new year’s eve in Croydon they went severely wrong—everything people owned would have gone: it would have been taken away, and they would have lost it.

Shurgard has been very clear with me—I have met it to discuss this—that it has complied with all UK fire safety regulations. I do not know whether that is true, but that is the point it has made to me. If what it says is true and it was fully compliant, those regulations need to be reviewed and tightened as a matter of urgency.

[Sarah Jones]

At the meeting with customers last weekend, they made two really interesting points. One was that Shurgard in other European countries would have to have sprinklers, because in other European countries there are regulations requiring a building of a certain size to have sprinklers, so the same company would have sprinklers in another country but not here. They also made the point—I do not know whether this is 100% accurate—that, about 40% of Europe’s storage is in this country. There is something about the nature of the cost of housing and the fact that people have to put so much stuff into storage, perhaps because of the value of land, that means our country has a particular problem in this area and needs to look at the regulations for the storage sector in particular.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

I am sure that many people who keep their possessions in such self-storage centres will be astonished to learn that the multinational companies, where they are multinational, operate safer and more secure facilities abroad than they operate in the United Kingdom. That seems to me entirely wrong. I hope the Minister, when he responds, will explain to the House what he intends to do about conducting a review of the levels of fire safety in these facilities, and whether he believes there is a case for tightening those regulations.

Many, many people use these facilities. They are very common all over London, and we all know about them and have them in our constituencies. The customers include people who are between homes—moving from one place to another—either as buyers or as renters. Many newly built flats are very small and are built without adequate storage, so people use self-storage centres instead. If people have suffered a bereavement and have lost a relative, they need somewhere to store their possessions; we do not all have the space in our home to store these things. All those people need to know that their possessions are safe, and if the regulations are not allowing that to happen right now, the regulations need to change.

My concern is that the fact that the regulations are inadequate has created a race to the bottom in fire safety standards, as self-storage companies compete with one another on price. The way in which they reduce price is to reduce staffing in the facility and reduce the level of security and fire safety measures. They do so to minimise their costs, so that they may offer as low a price as possible. The only thing that will maintain minimum standards—and people need know what they are—is to ensure that there are adequate fire safety regulations for self-storage facilities. I am afraid that we do not have those at the moment.

Finally on this particular issue, does the Minister see the case, or the need for, providing specific help to people facing severe financial hardship—whether it be from the relevant public authorities, the Government, or even perhaps the company itself, which must bear some responsibility towards their customers for what has happened to them?

I will turn now, if I may, from the subject of self-storage towards wider issues of fire safety in residential blocks. The issue of cladding in particular has become very significant and of great concern throughout the House ever since the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower 19 months ago.

In today’s Prime Minister’s questions, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) reminded us that, days after Grenfell went up, the Prime Minister promised to do everything in her power to keep people safe. Since that time—19 months have passed—the Government seem to have done precious little in concrete terms to reassure people that they are safer now than they were then.

[Marsha De Cordova]

I thank my hon. Friend, who is being generous with his time, for giving way once again. He rightly points out that, 19 months on, we still have many blocks covered in this cladding. Residents in my own constituency are living in an unsafe block, and they might have to pay tens of thousands of pounds for fire safety remedial work. Does he agree that it should not be the leaseholders who foot the bill, and that the Government need to intervene to ensure that freeholders or the Government themselves can implement it? They must take the pressure and the burden off leaseholders.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. I completely agree: the leaseholders seem to be the innocent party in all this. They certainly should not be forced to bear the cost, the stress or the worry of having flammable cladding on the place in which they live.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is very clear—the Government have made this clear—that leaseholders should not be left footing the bill. When the developer is also the freeholder, as was the case in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, and is prepared, because of the potential reputational damage, to step up to the mark, the problem is resolved. However, as he will know from experience, a difficulty arises when the freehold is sold on, often to a trust company or a financial institution. Unlike a firm of developers, such a body will not be trying to sell houses to the public and is not subject to any reputational pressures, and will use very common clauses in their leases to pass back to their leaseholders any cost that, say, the local authority or Government push on to them. Do we not need a legal mechanism to override that, which is difficult to do with leases, or, in such cases, to compensate leaseholders directly so that they do not lose out? It has to be one or the other.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I know that he is fighting very hard on behalf of his residents who are living in these circumstances, and he makes a point with which I agree. That is at the heart of our problem with the Government’s response. The Government can say what they like in support of leaseholders, but if they do not act, they are not actually helping them and, unfortunately, a moral obligation is not enforceable in court. We need a legal means of redress for people who have been damaged.

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful and moving speech. I am sure that his constituents are incredibly grateful to him for his tireless campaigning to support them. We are talking about residents, but I wish to draw the House’s attention to a different issue—schools. Hundreds of schools across the country are also covered in combustible material, and the Government have not included them in the building safety programme. [Interruption.] Well, that is the latest report. The Minister suggests that there are not hundreds, so I would be very happy to send him the report that I have read that gives that evidence. When he responds to the debate, will he also talk about how he can ensure that our children are safe when they attend school?

[Mr Reed]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. I, too, look forward to hearing a response from the Minister. I have tried to find out whether a newly rebuilt school in my own constituency has flammable cladding, but it seems impossible to do so. If I, as the local Member of Parliament with the access that I have to the relevant authorities, cannot find out, I pity those poor parents who are trying to find out whether their children will be safe after they have taken them to school each morning. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on that point.

I came to this subject because a block in my constituency, Citiscape, has the same sort of cladding—aluminium composite material cladding—that was on Grenfell Tower. The cost of removing and replacing the cladding was £2 million. The managing agents wrote to leaseholders in the block, who received estimates of up to £30,000 each for the work to be carried out. Of course the vast majority could not afford that—not many people have £30,000 lying around in the bank, particularly not those who have just bought their first flat and are stretched on their mortgage—but they were told that unless everybody paid up, the work would not happen. In effect, nothing would be done to keep the people in the block safe. We approached the freeholder, but the freeholder is not legally liable to carry out the work and there was no way to compel the freeholder to do it. The builders also are not legally liable to carry out the work. They can rely on the fact that there are concerns about lack of clarity in the building regulations and guidance, and they had been following the guidance that they believed meant that the cladding was safe. It turned out at Grenfell that ACM cladding is absolutely not safe.

When the case came to the housing tribunal, it ruled that the leaseholders were liable. We hear welcome words from Ministers at the Dispatch Box saying that leaseholders should not be made to pay, but in fact the housing tribunal—the legal body responsible for adjudicating on the matter—said the leaseholders were indeed responsible and would have to pay. In the case of Citiscape and others where not all the leaseholders can pay, the work will not be done. People are stuck living in blocks with Grenfell-style flammable cladding strapped on the outside; they are living with their families, their children and their parents in absolute terror.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his speech and the argument he is making. It has long been argued that there should be some reform of leasehold law. We have tinkered with it over the years, but it needs to be dealt with properly, and Governments have shied away from doing so. I thought that the Secretary of State had said that he would discuss leaseholds with the people involved, some of the companies and so on. About 12 months ago, I said to the previous Secretary of State that what the Government should have done after Grenfell was to take emergency powers. Had they done so, we would not have some of these problems now. They did not do it and the rest is history.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful for that helpful intervention and look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

I said that there were concerns about the state of the building regulations and the guidance, and it is worth exploring briefly how we got into a position where the regulations were so lax or could be interpreted in such a way. Back in 2009, there was a fire in Lakanal House in Camberwell, central London, that resulted in the death of six people, including a baby. An inquest conducted an inquiry, which took a number of years, and reported in 2013 in a very long document that contained some very clear recommendations. The inquiry said that the fire safety regulations—specifically, part B of the building regulations, which cover fire safety, and the associated guidance—were unclear, and that that was the reason why unsafe and combustible cladding was being strapped on buildings where people lived with their families. The coroner was absolutely clear that if that lack of clarity was not remedied, we would be running the risk of further fires and further deaths.

[Andy Slaughter]

I mentioned Lakanal House, where six people died 10 years ago, yesterday. There was combustible material involved, but it was not ACM cladding. Is it not extraordinary that the Government’s building safety programme is only tracking identification and remediation of residential buildings over 18 metres with ACM cladding? Should not the programme apply to all potentially combustible cladding?

[Mr Reed]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is absolutely extraordinary that we are not looking, right now, at a ban on all forms of flammable cladding. It is now 10 years later.

What we see now is still evidence of a go-slow and foot-dragging approach by the Government that is highly inappropriate—I would almost say negligent—given the risk to life that we know exists from the deaths that happened at Lakanal House and those that happened in even greater numbers at Grenfell Tower. [Interruption.] It is no good the Minister shrugging his shoulders and grunting from the Front Bench. Grenfell happened after Lakanal because Ministers refused to act on the guidance—the instruction—that they were given by the coroner. Eric Pickles, who was the Secretary of State at the time, refused to act on the advice given by the inquest into Lakanal House in 2013. In 2016, because it had not been banned, ACM cladding was strapped to the outside of Grenfell Tower. In 2017, it went up in flames and 72 people lie dead as a result. It could not be more serious.

We need properly to understand how this came to be, why the Government did not act, and why the Government still have not acted to ban that type of cladding from buildings. They are talking about banning it, but all flammable cladding has not been banned from all buildings—[Interruption.] The Minister will have an opportunity to respond later in the debate, and we look forward to hearing him. [Interruption.] If he wants to intervene, I will take his intervention.

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

I am quite happy to intervene, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. It should be clear that in December last year, we banned flammable cladding of all types on buildings over 18 metres. This is an absolute and complete ban, and nobody should be under any illusion about that, or represent it as being anything other than that.

[Mr Reed]

As I will come on to say during what remains of this debate, a partial ban is not a ban. This kind of cladding is still permitted on far too many buildings, and too many people are not safe. There has been no action to take flammable cladding off buildings where it already exists. Those are the issues that I want to come on to. In fact—

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

I will take an intervention in a moment, but I want to make this point, because it is linked to the issue that we are debating right now.

In fact, there are still thousands of terrified residents living in blocks with the same kind of cladding, or a very similar kind of cladding, as that which went up in flames at Grenfell Tower. There are still 56 private blocks of flats around the country—that is 56—that have no clear plan in place to remove and replace it. People are left living in fear. There is no point in the Minister standing up and telling me the Government banned it last December when right now, in 56 blocks around the country, people are living with flammable cladding strapped to the outside of their homes and no plan whatsoever to remove it.

[Kit Malthouse]

We went through this yesterday during the urgent question. I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman is seeking to make an issue of it. We have made it very clear that while he is correct that there are still a number of private sector residential buildings that do not have a clear plan for remediation, it is the case, as I said yesterday, that 100% of those buildings have temporary measures in place that have been agreed and certified by the local fire and rescue service as appropriate for the building. My primary concern, and the Department’s primary concern, has been to make sure that people are safe tonight. As I am sure he would acknowledge, it is not possible, by some feat of magic, to make this cladding disappear overnight. We must, however, make sure that everybody is safe overnight. That is where we have been focused.

The hon. Gentleman says that thousands of people are living in terror in blocks, but that should not be the case, on the basis that every local fire and rescue service has visited, inspected and agreed temporary measures with every residential building over 18 metres in height that has this cladding, and they are going back to check and monitor to make sure that they are in place. I really would urge him not to cause undue alarm among this residential population, because steps have been taken to keep them safe.

[Mr Reed]

I have to say, with all due respect to the Minister, that I find that comment rather complacent. It is all well and good to say that this cladding cannot be taken down overnight, but it is 19 months since Grenfell Tower went up in flames, it is 10 years since Lakanal House went up in flames, and it is eight years since the coroner told the Government that there needed to be a ban on this kind of cladding—that is not overnight. The Government have not acted with anything like the requisite speed, given the scale of threat to human life. It is completely unacceptable.

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. I apologise for missing the start of his speech, but I have been watching it from outside the Chamber. Notwithstanding the Minister’s defence of the position, he accepted yesterday during proceedings on the urgent question that there are 42 blocks whose freeholder is saying that leaseholders have to pay for remedial works, as my hon. Friend said. The dangers may be temporarily resolved—there are big question marks about that—but the financial distress that has been caused to leaseholders by the prospect of hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of pounds of debt has not been resolved.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

I absolutely agree. The level of stress that this is causing is making some people so ill that they cannot continue to work. We cannot allow this to go on.

[Sarah Jones]

I am sorry to keep intervening—my hon. Friend is being incredibly generous—but I just want to make a point about waking watch. Having talked to the fire services, I know that it is not an ideal situation. The fire services are worried that companies have come out of the woodwork and started doing waking watch, but people are not always well-trained and there are not always enough of them on site. Waking watch is very much a temporary measure. To have 19 months of waking watch is expensive, but also not ideal, and we cannot be 100% sure that these people are trained and doing what they are supposed to be doing.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. As the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) will know, residents in Northpoint Tower in Bromley face bills of up to £70,000 each. People simply cannot afford that, and the stress they suffer from receiving that bill and knowing that, unless they find a way to pay it, they will be left living in a block with potentially flammable cladding on, is simply unacceptable.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again and for mentioning the problem at Northpoint. There is a certain insecurity about the risk of human error at the very least with a waking watch, but the difficulty is compounded by the cash flow impact. Most of these leaseholder groups will have a sinking fund that has been set up over the years, but that is quickly dissipated by the cost of the waking watch. In the case of my constituents, there is an enforcement notice running out in April. They could have the waking watch until then, which will exhaust all the reserves and will mean further calls on funds from people who often have mortgages, because they are often first-time buyers, and who effectively cannot raise any more money because the flats are currently valueless. It is a Catch-22: the money is exhausted, and they have no means of raising any more.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention; he makes an important point well. The other course of action that would normally be open to a homeowner—selling their home—is not open, because their homes are unsellable. Nobody will buy a flat in a block that has flammable cladding strapped to the outside of it. Whatever the Minister tells us, if we speak to people living in these blocks, they say that they feel abandoned by a Government who told them in the aftermath of Grenfell that everything would be done to keep them safe. They do not feel that they have been kept safe, and they manifestly have not been.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; he is being very generous and making an excellent speech. Does he agree that part of the problem is the lack of trust? When I met residents in my local tower blocks, they said, “You’re telling me that this cladding on my block of flats is okay, but how can I trust?” That is compounded by the fact that the Lakanal House fire report, published in 2013, was not fully acted on by the previous Government but one.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention, and she is absolutely right. I have seen previous Secretaries of State stand at the Dispatch Box and say that those responsible need to take responsibility. It is the Government who are responsible because the Government failed to act on the instructions and advice of the coroner following the tragic and fatal Lakanal House fire in 2009. The Government are responsible for the situation that these people find themselves in, and the Government should take responsibility for giving those people a way out of this, without burdening them with unmanageable debt or pointing the finger at all sorts of other people who they say have a moral obligation to act, when that is unenforceable in any court.

The only way this can be dealt with is if the Government take direct action. As my hon. Friend said, the Government failed to clarify the regulations and guidance after the fire at Lakanal House. It is not about an individual Minister or Secretary of State—there has been a whole string of them ever since that time: Eric Pickles initially, but subsequently Greg Clark, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab—[Interruption.] I am sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker, I cannot remember their constituencies. A string of Secretaries of State have failed to take appropriate action in line with the guidance that they were given. A previous Housing Minister, who is now the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, failed to act in this circumstance. I am afraid that collectively the Government are culpable for what has happened, and failed to act when they were told that action was necessary to prevent a repeat of Lakanal House. Of course, it was repeated horrifically in the disaster at Grenfell Tower.

I thought long and hard about why the Government would not act on that advice, and I have come to the conclusion that what is going on in this sector is nothing short of a national scandal. There is a tangled web of conflicts of interest that have led to the framework for fire safety regulations being wholly inadequate. The Building Research Establishment is a privatised organisation that helps to write fire safety regulations and drafts fire safety guidance. Its chief executive sits on the Government’s expert panel on fire safety, and one of its trustees, Sir Ken Knight, was until recently the Government’s chief fire safety adviser.

The BRE has a direct financial interest in the sector. It makes money by allowing cladding manufacturers to run fire safety tests on rigs that it sets up. The manufacturers are allowed to rerun those tests multiple times, with various adjustments, until they get the result that they want. There is no requirement on them ever to disclose the outcome of the final successful fire safety test—it is considered commercially confidential—nor is there any requirement on them to report publicly how many times their product failed a fire safety test before finally passing it.

The BRE makes money every single time a different rig is put up and a product is tested for combustibility. It has a direct financial interest in permitting the use of flammable cladding, because testing it is how it makes its money, and it was people with a direct interest in the BRE who advised Ministers not to ban combustible cladding. It is an absolutely shocking and scandalous network of conflicts of interest that the Government should never have allowed to happen.

[Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is getting to the fundamentals of the issues. Let me give an example. I met a bunch of laggers, who handed me a document about the combustible compounds contained in phenolic foam insulation, which is used in multiple buildings. That document was 15 years old, and it detailed the combustible properties of that foam, which is still used and passes Government tests. The whole industry has to put up its hands on its historic culpability and the way it has dodged the inspection regime. These are life and death issues for our constituents.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the important point that he has made. He has emphasised that this is not just about ACM cladding—there is a problem with wider fire safety regulations in the entire building sector—which we cannot allow, not just on residential blocks but on many different kinds of buildings. We need to understand properly those conflicts of financial interest if we are to understand what led Ministers to reject advice that they should have followed all that time ago.

I hope the Minister will put me right on this point, but I fear that subsequent Secretaries of State and Housing Ministers did not correct the mistakes made in the decision to ignore the Lakanal House findings because, if they recognised it as political failure, they would have to take political responsibility for the 72 deaths at Grenfell Tower after it went up, which they did not want to do. That is an extraordinary thing to have to say, but I believe it is true because I can think of no other reason why Minister after Minister failed to correct regulations and guidance that were so manifestly unacceptable, and that posed such a threat to life. That is not just supposition—we saw that it was a threat to life in the scale of the tragedy and the deaths that happened at Grenfell Tower. I would go so far as to say that, if the Government were a private company and acted as they have, Ministers could be in the dock for corporate manslaughter.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

My hon. Friend makes incredibly powerful points that must be taken seriously. Does he agree that the Government need to trace it back to the source and say which local government Ministers did or did not take seriously the Lakanal House report recommendations?

[Mr Reed]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is critical that that happens so that we can understand what went wrong in the process. If we do not understand it, we cannot stop it from ever happening again.

The Minister mentioned the partial ban on flammable cladding that the Government have announced, which is welcome. Industry bodies have said on the record that they welcome it, but have also said that it is not enough and that we need to go further. The Government have proposed a ban on ACM cladding on new buildings that are over 18 metres high—that is roughly six storeys—but have excluded hotels and office blocks. I simply do not understand why. What evidence is there that a hotel or an office block is any safer than a block of flats? Surely if someone is in a hotel where they have never stayed, they are less likely to know the fire safety escape routes than if they are living in a block of flats, where they may have lived for some considerable time.

Many people at work have disabilities and are immobile. Why do we assume that somebody on the 18th floor of a tall office block will be able to get out, but that somebody living on the 18th floor of a residential block needs protection from flammable cladding? It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, and I would like the Minister to explain to the House today what evidence there is that hotels and office blocks of more than six storeys or 18 metres are any safer than blocks of flats of the same height.

As my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) said, after the new partial ban, the Government will still permit the use of flammable cladding on schools, care homes and hospitals under six storeys high, which of course most of them are. I wonder whether the Minister would feel comfortable telling a group of parents that he is allowing flammable cladding to go up on the building where they take their children every morning for an education. I certainly would not.

[Emma Hardy]

One justification for not having sprinklers in schools is that it is easy to vacate a building. Having been a teacher for 11 years, I know that it would need only a couple of young children to go a-wander, as they can sometimes do, to create a risky situation. If I can dare to use this opportunity to put another point to the Minister, I would ask him not only to look at banning combustible materials, but to look again at putting sprinklers into schools.

[Mr Reed]

I look forward to the Minister’s response, but I agree completely agree with my hon. Friend.

I will draw to a close soon and I look forward to the Minister’s response to hon. Members, but we need to recognise the scale of Government failure to put things right in any acceptable way, given that it has been 10 years since Lakanal House and 19 months since Grenfell Tower. The best way to meet the Lakanal House coroner’s demand for clarity is to implement a complete ban on the use of flammable cladding on all buildings where people live or work. It is crystal clear; it is understandable to the building industry and everybody else; and it could be implemented if the Government had the will. In addition, we cannot look only at new builds. We need to look at all buildings where flammable cladding exists and continues to pose an unacceptable danger to people’s safety and even to their lives. We need an action plan from the Government, for which they take responsibility, to strip flammable cladding from every single building where it exists. Many European countries have such a ban. Scotland is introducing a ban. We need that ban here, too.

There is one fire a month on average in buildings with flammable cladding. It is only a matter of time before one of those fires is not put out. The Government simply cannot risk the horror of another Grenfell. This is a time for action, not for words.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the next speaker, I must inform the House of an error in calculating the number of votes of Members for English constituencies in the Division on Lords amendment 36. The figures for the England-only vote should not have been announced as Ayes 265 and Noes 193; they should have been announced as Ayes 261 and Noes 194. The result is unaffected.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend has made a telling point. We will not find things that are wrong unless we go and look for them, and I do not feel that the Government are going to go and look for them.

[Mr Reed]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s point about the cladding manufacturers seeking better reassurance for themselves. Of course, it is not just the cladding that is flammable; it is the combination of the cladding with the insulation. Because the Government permit what are called desktop studies—

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

[Mr Reed]

—which have allowed a particular cladding to be enriched with a particular form of insulation, they do not always know what is being put together and how dangerous that will be, and the cladding manufacturers do not want to know that their products are being used in ways that threaten life.

[Andy Slaughter]

I think that the Minister was trying to intervene on an intervention. I am glad to see that he at least has some interest in the subject. I shall make a little progress, and then I will take an intervention from him.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I do not think we are being paranoid about this. What concerns us is that a whole industry has developed on a defective basis over time, and has not been corrected: it continues to function as an industry and to make profits. No one is saying that we are going to wipe the slate clean overnight, but a lot of people have a lot to hide, and I therefore think it particularly important for the Government—who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas) said, may have something to hide as well—to be rigorous in shaking this out. They should look at the history—at the defects and malpractices that have grown up over the last 10 years or more—but they should also be very sceptical in future about some of the advice that they are getting. They should obtain the broadest possible range of advice.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

I commend the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), notwithstanding his partial recitation of Government policy in this area, for recognising the importance of fire safety and cladding, and for securing this debate. I am always grateful for the chance to talk on a subject of such importance as fire safety and ensuring that residents are safe, and feel safe, in their homes.

I take this opportunity to express my sorrow at the obvious emotional distress caused to the hon. Gentleman’s constituents and others by the Shurgard fire. He spoke very movingly about the fire’s impact, particularly on families who are between homes, and I recognise the distress it may cause. Although I am sure he will recognise that building regulations are largely focused on preserving life, I nevertheless recognise the importance of what he says, and I will come back to that later.

A tragedy like Grenfell should never have happened in 2017, and this Government are determined to ensure that such a tragedy can never happen again. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, we acted quickly to establish a comprehensive building safety programme, which has involved many people working tirelessly to identify and remediate buildings with unsafe cladding. We also established the independent expert panel to advise the Secretary of State on immediate measures, and we agreed to fund a comprehensive testing programme for all building owners to establish whether their units are cladded with unsafe ACM material. We have also worked with local authorities and with fire and rescue services, as I have explained, to implement interim safety measures in all buildings to ensure that people remain completely safe in their homes until remediation is completed.

Through the testing and the hard work of local authorities, we are confident that we have identified all social housing in England with unsafe ACM cladding systems. We have made good progress in making those buildings permanently safe. Of the 159 social sector buildings, 118 have either started or completed remediation. There are plans and commitments in place to remediate the remaining 41 buildings. To help to ensure swift progress, we have made £400 million-worth of funding available to social sector landlords to fund the removal and replacement of unsafe ACM cladding.

However, I regret that remediation in the private sector has been more challenging, with negotiations in some instances disappointingly slow. Since Grenfell, we have worked intensively with local authorities to identify and collect data on high-rise buildings with ACM cladding. We have also provided £1.3 million of funding to assist local authorities in that work. Local authorities across England have assessed around 6,000 private sector high-rise buildings. They have needed to take samples to test and, in some cases, take legal action to get owners to co-operate. We have taken strong action to give local authorities the support they need to enforce the removal and replacement of unsafe cladding, we have established a taskforce chaired by me and the Secretary of State to actively oversee the remediation of private sector buildings, and we have set up a joint inspection team to support local authorities and to give them the confidence to pursue enforcement action.

On 29 November 2018, the Government went further and announced that we will back local authorities to step in and take emergency remedial action where building owners are not co-operating in the remediation of cladding. This includes financial support, where necessary, to enable the local authority to carry out the emergency work. As a result of our interventions, we have made progress on securing commitments from owners to replace unsafe cladding. At the end of December, of the 268 privately-owned buildings, 212 have either started or completed remediation, or have commitments in place to remediate. There remain 56 private buildings where the owners’ plans are unclear. That number has fallen from over 200 buildings last June.

We remain concerned about and engaged with the many leaseholders who find themselves in this difficult situation through no fault of their own. We have made it clear that we expect building owners in the private sector to protect leaseholders from the costs of remediation, either by funding it themselves, or by looking to alternative routes such as insurance claims, warranties or legal action. A growing list of companies have done the right thing by protecting leaseholders, including Barratt Developments, which has agreed to fund remediation at Citiscape in the constituency of the hon. Member for Croydon North. I am pleased to say that I sought and received confirmation that Barratt has started on site this week and is on site today.

The Government have made the remediation of ACM cladding a priority. That is because our large-scale testing programme has conclusively shown the particularly high risk posed by that form of cladding. However, it would be wrong to say that that has been our only focus. The expert panel has regularly considered the risks of non-ACM material and the action we should take. As a result, in December 2018, we issued updated advice to building owners about how to investigate non-ACM cladding systems on their buildings, and how to remediate them. In addition, we have commissioned the Building Research Establishment to conduct a testing programme on non-ACM materials, and we expect the first test results by the summer. We have also issued specific advice on other fire safety risks, for example, spandrel panels and external wall insulation.

However, it is clear that, while we must do all we can to protect people now, we need a systemic overhaul, as several hon. Members have pointed out. With that in mind, we commissioned Dame Judith Hackitt to undertake an independent review of building regulations and fire safety. Her report concluded that the current system is not fit for purpose, and charted the direction for a radical new system.

There is no question but that such a change will take time. None the less, the Government have not hesitated, and will not hesitate, to act where we can make a difference now—today. That has been clear for all to see, as we have gone further than the review’s recommendations, including banning combustible cladding. Regulations were laid in November to give effect to the ban, ensuring that cladding of that nature is no longer allowed on the external walls of new buildings over 18 metres containing flats. We are also testing and trialling elements of the new system to ensure that they are effective before they are implemented at scale.

[Mr Reed]

The Minister talks about the ban for residential blocks over 18 metres high. What evidence does he have to show that hotels and office blocks over 18 metres are safer than residential blocks? Why has that led him to exclude them from the ban?

[Kit Malthouse]

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that issue, which the expert panel has obviously considered. I would be happy to write to him with its considerations. In broad terms, it has focused on ensuring that purely residential buildings, where people sleep overnight, are inherently safe.

[Mr Reed]

Hotels!

[Kit Malthouse]

Exactly. Although the hon. Gentleman is right to say that people sleep overnight in hotels, staff members are present in hotels and office buildings. There is always an awake watch in a hotel and that is not necessarily the case in a residential block. However, those matters are obviously open to review, and if the hon. Gentleman wants to put forward evidence that contradicts the expert panel’s, I will be more than happy to consider it. On all the issues, I do not want to give hon. Members the impression that our mind is closed. If evidence is presented to show that measures should be taken because there is a significant safety concern in buildings other than high-rise residential buildings, we will be happy to look at it.

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way again and for saying that he is keeping an open mind on these issues. That is the right thing to do, and I commend him for it. He mentioned the independent expert panel again. I reiterate a point that I tried to make in my speech. An expert panel is not fully independent if some of its members have a financial interest in a particular outcome. Will he commit to reviewing the panel to ensure that there are no such conflicts of interest?

[Kit Malthouse]

I am happy to review the panel, but I have confidence in its members and the advice that they are giving, not least because they are a plurality of voices. The panel does include Dame Judith Hackitt, along with several other people who have been involved in the fire and rescue service over the years, but I am happy to review its membership, as we would do generally, to make sure that we have the right range of expertise thereon.

As part of our plans, we also have our new joint regulators group and our early adopters group. They have come forward to help to drive culture change and demonstrate that the industry can put building safety first. I recognise, though, that there is much more to do. Our implementation plan, which we published before Christmas, sets out what the far-reaching overhaul of the system will involve over the coming years. The work spans four areas: first, a stronger, more effective regulatory and accountability framework; secondly, clearer standards and guidance to support better understanding by those carrying out building work of what is required to make buildings safe. This is an area in which we have already taken action, by consulting on a clarified approved document B to enable the guidance to be revised. We have also completed a consultation on restricting the use of desktop studies and published amended guidance on this matter. Thirdly and most crucially, a stronger voice for residents will be at the heart of the new system. Finally, the implementation plan sets out how we will work with industry to help it to prioritise public safety and lead the culture change—a change that we all agree is badly needed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

I am certainly happy to investigate that issue but, as I say, one of the delineations that the expert panel has made in its the consideration of safety is the notion of residence and people sleeping overnight in a building. As the hon. Lady will know, all schools have to conduct regular fire drills to make sure that they are prepared. It is also worth remembering that, sadly, fires happen in all sorts of buildings, many of which do not have cladding on them. There are all manner of buildings made from materials that are potentially flammable—wood, asphalt or whatever it might be—so we need to be proportionate in respect of the risk, while bearing in mind that we want to minimise it in all circumstances, when possible. A range of measures can be taken to ensure fire safety beyond the pure construction of the building, such as evacuation procedures, fire suppression techniques—sprinklers or whatever—heat sensors or smoke sensors. A number of things can be done to ensure that buildings are safe, but I am happy to take the hon. Lady’s request away and consider it.

[Mr Reed]

I take all the points the Minister makes in a generous spirit, but parents clearly would not want there to be flammable cladding on their children’s school, whatever other fire safety measures are in place. It is a simple thing to do, so why do not the Government just ban its use on new school buildings?

[Kit Malthouse]

As I have said, the Department for Education has conducted an exercise in which buildings have been reviewed and measures have been taken to ensure that those buildings are safe. I speak as somebody who has two children at school, and I understand that schools go through their fire drill, have fire doors, know where all the children are and are very focused on the notion of fire safety. I am more than happy to have a think about the point the hon. Gentleman makes. As I say, we constantly keep these things under review, and the vehicle for that will be the review of approved document B in the building regulations in all circumstances.

I am not saying no, but the hon. Gentleman would expect us to have a proportionate response that minimises the threat of fire in all circumstances. If we were to extend his thinking, we might say that we do not actually want anybody in a wooden building. A single-storey wooden building—a mobile classroom or whatever it might be—is an issue that we need to think about. [Interruption.] I understand, but that is why height matters. The particular height of 18 metres has been selected by the expert panel.

As I have said, I am happy to keep that under review, and my mind remains open. The hon. Gentleman would expect me, I hope, to be constructive in such a way. None of us has an interest in there being fire casualties; we all have an interest in getting this right. My objection to the tone of some of his speech was that he should not infer that we do not care. Indeed, there is a huge amount of effort to get this right, both politically and on the part of the remarkably hard-working and dedicated civil servants in the Department. That is why we have a comprehensive work programme, with lots of calls for evidence. A number of groups are meeting to discuss the various issues and early adopters are moving towards a new building regulations system. As I have said, it is quite obvious that the Grenfell tragedy lifted a big flat rock on a system that has not been working for many years, and our commitment is absolutely to get that right.

My understanding is that phenolic foam is covered by the ban. However, I will commission a report from the Department to give me a quick review of the points raised by the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas) to satisfy myself about our approach on that particular issue. I recognise his point about the potential toxicity of fumes that may occur, whatever the height of the building. We ought to have a look at that, and I am more than happy to do so.

This is a major programme of work—now slightly more major, given the undertakings I have made to do some more work—but it is one that befits the challenge we face. It ensures that everyone with a stake in keeping people safe plays their part, and it is the programme we need to rebuild public trust and to deliver meaningful and lasting change. I believe that this is the best tribute we can offer to those who lost their lives at Grenfell Tower and those who are left behind.

Once again, let me thank the hon. Member for Croydon North for securing this valuable debate. I want to assure him and everybody in the House that this Government are determined to learn the lessons of Grenfell Tower and to ensure that nothing like it can ever happen again.

Budget Resolutions

Steve Reed Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Thursday 1st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

Just two weeks ago, a group of Ministers sat on the Treasury Bench and launched the Government’s cross-departmental loneliness strategy. They were right to do that, because, as the Prime Minister says, this major public health issue has as big an impact as obesity or smoking, and affects up to one in five adults often or always. As part of that strategy, the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), promised that we could look forward to a loneliness test in respect of major decisions in future. Disappointingly, there is not one with this Budget. So I thought I would do the job for the Government and review its impact on loneliness to see whether the fine rhetoric we heard in this Chamber two weeks ago has been followed up with action.

The loneliness Minister, speaking with refreshing honesty, admitted that past cuts had “inadvertently” made loneliness worse—here is how. Since 2010, Government funding cuts have led to the closure of 428 day centres, 1,000 children’s centres, 600 youth centres and 478 public libraries. Those are all spaces where people can go and loneliness can be tackled. Government funding cuts have also led to the loss and closure of lunch clubs and befriending services; the loss of funding for voluntary and community groups and for community centres; and care visits being shortened in time and reduced in number, and being denied to 1.4 million older people. Again, those are all services that help to tackle and prevent loneliness. So has all that come to an end in this Budget, now that we have a loneliness strategy? Sadly, I do not think it has, because according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, over the next three years we can look forward to an average cut of 3.1% each year in the local government funding from which all those services are funded. There is no end to austerity there.

While Ministers have been trumpeting £650 million extra for social care, they have neglected to point out that the previously announced £1.3 billion cut is still going ahead. Rather than more money for social care, then, we are looking forward to another £650 million cut in services.

In my borough, Croydon, we have a very high number of children seeking asylum. The Government’s severe underfunding of asylum services means that the support that those children need does not even exist yet. Isolation is of course a major problem for a child living in a country without their family or members of their social network. Even among that group, loneliness is going to get much worse.

Despite the fine words in the loneliness strategy launched just two weeks ago, the Budget will result in more and deeper cuts to all the services that tackle or prevent loneliness. I have to ask: what is the point of a cross-departmental group of Ministers sitting on the Front Bench to trumpet their new loneliness strategy if the Chancellor comes along and trashes it with his Budget just two weeks later? No wonder the Government dare not apply a loneliness test to the Budget—it is a test they would fail.

Tower Block Cladding

Steve Reed Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I committed to working with the hon. Gentleman in respect of Birmingham, and I hope that he recognises the announcement last week about additional funding. The point is that it is retrospective. I hope that will give him some assurance, but I will continue to pursue it with the urgency he asks for.

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

There is no enforceable legal obligation on builders, freeholders or insurance companies to pay for the removal of flammable cladding from private sector blocks, which means that the cladding will remain in place. Leaseholders feel that they are being hung out to dry and that their safety is being disregarded. If the Government believe that they can enforce a moral obligation, why do they not pay to take the cladding down, keep people safe and recover the funds from whoever they believe is responsible for paying for it?

[James Brokenshire]

I do not want to let the private sector off the hook for its responsibilities. That is why in the time for which I have been Secretary of State I have underlined my commitment and why I will be talking to industry this week and next to underline that clear message. I can then consider the right next steps to ensure that this is followed through with that intent.

Grenfell Tower

Steve Reed Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

Just a year ago, following the tragic and horrific fire at Grenfell, the Prime Minister promised to

“do whatever it takes to keep people safe”.

Nearly a year later, every piece of failed safety regulation and every piece of flawed guidance that was in place before Grenfell is still there. That is not acceptable.

Although it is welcome that the Government have belatedly found the funding to help with the remedial works on social housing blocks, they have offered precious little to people living in privately owned blocks. I want to focus on the plight of leaseholders, who feel that the Government have abandoned them and hung them out to dry.

Let us consider briefly why this cladding is on buildings in the first place. Following the deadly Lakanal House fire in 2009, when six lives were lost, an inquest was held. It reported to the Government in 2013. The coroner told the Government that the fire safety regulations were confusing, not fit for purpose and needed to be revised, but the Government did nothing. The same ACM cladding with a polyethylene core continued to be put up on residential buildings. It was put on Grenfell in 2016, and Grenfell went up in flames 2017 with such lethal and tragic consequences.

If the Government had acted on the coroner’s advice after Lakanal, people would never have died in Grenfell Tower. The cladding is on buildings because the Government did nothing to correct the flawed regulations when they were told they were a problem. The moral duty to act was on the Government, but instead of accepting that, the previous Secretary of State made an art form of palming off the blame on anybody else. In this Chamber, he said that it was the responsibility of developers, freeholders, managing agents and insurers, even though there is no proven legal obligation on any of those people to pay for the removal of cladding. The two first-tier housing tribunals found leaseholders responsible for the costs. However, the previous Secretary of State said that he wanted no costs to be passed on to leaseholders, yet he took no action to ensure that. Leaseholders have been left living in unsaleable homes, fearful for their safety, and in fear of unaffordable debt that is often more than they earn in a year.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

Constituents in Bromley and Chislehurst have exactly the same problem. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, as was mentioned earlier in the debate, the difficulty is that there is no mechanism for enforcing a moral duty and no means whereby leaseholders can get recompense? Should the Government consider some emergency funding comparable with the help that is being given to those in publicly owned blocks?

[Mr Reed]

The hon. Gentleman makes the legal point much more eloquently than I could. I hope that the Secretary of State will listen to that.

Here is a proposal for what the Government might do. First, they should fund the removal and replacement of flammable cladding on all residential blocks on which it is found, whether in the private or public sector. We simply cannot leave leaseholders living in limbo, their lives on hold for years while these issues are dragged through the courts at a snail’s pace. If it turns out that developers, freeholders or whoever are legally liable, the Government can then claim the money back. My guess is that it will turn out that the Government are liable for failing to correct guidance and regulations that they knew were flawed for years before this happened.

The Government’s first priority must be the protection of human life. We cannot allow any more Grenfells. It is not acceptable just to leave this cladding on buildings in which people are living. This dangerous cladding must be taken down, wherever it is found. No more delays, no more Grenfells; let us get this cladding taken down.

Fire Safety Remedial Work: Leaseholder Liability

Steve Reed Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have secured this important debate. The issue of liability for fire safety remedial work is of great concern to many Battersea residents, as it is to people in many parts of the country, and for good reason. The horror of the Grenfell fire made it clear, if greater clarity were needed, that there should be no complacency on fire safety.

While we await the final publication of the Hackitt review, which is investigating the fire safety regulatory system and identifying who is responsible for failures and what system is needed, the interim report stated that the regulatory system, at present, is “not fit for purpose.” I fear that is the result of successive Governments not treating fire safety with the appropriate importance.

Of the 158 social housing blocks with unsafe cladding, just seven have had the cladding fully replaced. One of the blocks waiting for work to begin is Castlemaine Tower in my Battersea constituency. Its residents have known for 10 months that their building, like Grenfell, has unsafe cladding. No data is available on the progress on privately owned blocks, and Wandsworth Council has not published the number of blocks that have the aluminium composite material cladding that has been deemed unsafe. Given the number of blocks in Battersea, it is imperative the council publish that information. I have requested the information from the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

The Government must get their act together and ensure that fire safety work is carried out, but to do that they need to resolve, as a matter of urgency, questions on what work needs to be done, who needs to do it and who should pay for it. It is the Government’s responsibility to resolve those questions and, so long as they do not do so, the risk of another tragedy is prolonged.

Here we arrive at the crucial question of leaseholder liability. I welcome members of the Sesame Apartments residents association to the Public Gallery. They have come to Westminster desperate to hear reassurance from the Government. They are leaseholders of an apartment block in Battersea that was completed just four years ago and that last year was found not to meet fire safety standards after a fire in the block damaged multiple apartments, revealing that compartmentalisation had failed.

Worryingly, the fire occurred while a “stay put” policy was in place. Subsequent testing found that the cladding was defective and in need of replacement. In the light of the fire safety failures, the “stay put” policy was changed to immediate evacuation, and a waking watch system was put in place as a temporary solution.

As we know, such fire safety failures need proper rectification, and that work needs to be paid for. The waking watch and fire alarm system are anticipated to cost approximately £700,000, which is more than £8,500 per flat. Replacing the cladding is expected to cost around £2 million, which is £25,000 per flat. In total, the cost per flat is estimated at between £30,000 and £40,000.

After a tribunal ruled last month that leaseholders of Cityscape in Croydon would be held liable for replacing defective cladding, the residents of Sesame Apartments fear the entirety of those eye-watering costs will fall on their shoulders, which cannot be right. They cannot be held liable for these costs. These are hard-working people who scrimped and saved to buy their flats.

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. She mentions Cityscape in Croydon North where the leaseholders have a similar problem to the residents she represents. When the issue has previously been raised in the Chamber, the Government have pointed the finger and said that the insurers of the builders, freeholders and managing agents should be bearing the cost of removing and replacing that cladding, but no legal obligation has ever been found on any of them.

The Government are leaving leaseholders hanging with unaffordable debt and living in homes that have become unsellable—homes that they fear are not safe to live in. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should act now to get the cladding removed from every building where it exists? They can sort out the legalities afterwards. The only body in a position to act now to keep people safe is the Government. Why do they keep refusing to do it?

[Marsha De Cordova]

I thank for my hon. Friend for making that valid point, which I will certainly be addressing. He is spot on in saying that the Government are the only people who can respond to this issue and deal with the problems that our leaseholders face.

So many of these people are first-time buyers, and many are living in shared ownership properties. They do not have tens of thousands of pounds to pay for the work that needs to be done, and they have done nothing wrong. They bought their flats in good faith and they are in no way responsible for the fire safety failures. To date, the Government have seemingly agreed, saying that, morally, leaseholders should not be held liable for these costs. But my constituents need those words to be backed up by action. For as long as that does not happen, the leaseholders will be beset by fear. After all, how would we feel if we were told that our home did not meet fire safety standards, that we might be asked to pay £40,000 to rectify that and that our largest financial asset, our home, was now a huge liability? That is the situation that residents of Sesame Apartments find themselves in.

I have heard from a teacher who lives in the block and who had hoped to move in order to start a family, but is now weighed down by this liability, unable to sell and trapped in her home. I have heard from a resident, who spoke to me about the heartbreak of the money they had saved for IVF—in vitro fertilisation—treatment now needing to be set aside for fire safety work. I have heard from another whose pride in getting a foot on the housing ladder was crushed when they were told that, just by owning 25% of a shared ownership property, they are now potentially liable for 100% of the costs. Every resident I have spoken to tells me of the stress and fear caused by this liability hanging over their head.

The same is true of leaseholders across the country. Why are leaseholders being put through this ordeal? The Hackitt review is identifying who was responsible for fire safety failures, but this is causing anguish. The review might conclude that the Government are responsible, because fire safety regulations are not fit for purpose. It might conclude that the building inspection regime is responsible, because some local authorities have privatised inspections, leading to a serious decline in standards. Or it might conclude that developers are responsible, because they have been cutting costs to maximise their profits. It might conclude any of or indeed all those things, but what it will categorically not conclude is that leaseholders are responsible—of course it won’t.

These are working people who have had no say over the regulations, or over the design or the building of the property, yet it seems that, legally, they are going to be held responsible for these life-shattering costs. As anyone would, they are attempting to contest that, but they tell me how powerless they feel in that process.

We are talking about a small community of hard-working people, but they are confronted by a web of opaque freeholders, management companies, insurers and unresponsive developers, none of whom wants to take responsibility. The residents do not have armies of lawyers at their disposal. It is a David and Goliath situation, and the law is not working for these people. But it not just about that, as for the corporations involved their profit lines are at stake, whereas for the residents it is their homes and their lives. There is a real concern that if this is allowed to run its course and the Government do not intervene, the working people will be paying for failures that are not of their own making—that is unacceptable.

The Government seem to recognise that, because they have already said on multiple occasions that they acknowledge that it is morally wrong for leaseholders to be held liable for these costs, but those must not be empty words. The Government have the power to intervene and make this right, and it is their responsibility to make this right. They need to do more than just encouraging freeholders not to pass on these costs. They need to do more than support the Leasehold Advisory Service. They need to step up to the plate and intervene on behalf of leaseholders.

There are actions that the Government could take. They could, and should, properly look to see whether the developers or the freeholders that profited from cost-cutting and lax regulations are liable for the costs, or they could cover the costs themselves, which is what the residents I have spoken to believe should happen.

If the Government refuse to do that, the least they could do, as suggested by one of the Sesame Apartments residents, is provide loans to cover the costs, thereby allowing fire safety remedial work to begin immediately. The loans could be attached to the freehold and stretched over the 100-year duration of the leasehold, with repayment instalments reflecting that. That would ensure that if leaseholders were held liable, the additional yearly service charge would be close to negligible. It would achieve the key requirements of any intervention: first, it would allow remedial work to begin as soon as possible, thereby minimising the risk and fear of fire; and, secondly, it would allow leaseholders to get on with their lives and not be weighed down by an unaffordable debt. I urge the Government to take action to achieve those goals.

I conclude with two straightforward questions for the Minister. First, it might become clear from the courts that leaseholders are legally liable for the costs. If that happened, does she think it would be acceptable? Put otherwise, does she think that residents should be held legally responsible for the costs of fire safety work, even though she knows that residents are in no way at fault?

Secondly, if leaseholders are found to be liable, what do the Government propose to do for those leaseholders who cannot afford the remedial work? I am asking, in essence, whose side the Government are on—David’s or Goliath’s. I thank the Sesame Apartments residents for coming today. I know that they will be listening with interest to what the Minister has to say.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Mrs Heather Wheeler)]

I thank the hon. Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) for speaking so passionately about the situation in which some of her constituents find themselves. I thank all Members for their contributions. I recognise that the recent fire in Sporle Court will mean that fire safety is at the forefront of people’s minds in Battersea, although we understand that on that occasion there were no injuries.

Let me begin by making it clear in the widest sense that the Government are committed to promoting fairness and transparency for leaseholders in England. To that end, on 21 December 2017, we announced a package of measures to tackle abuses and unfair practices in the leasehold market. That includes introducing legislation to prohibit the development of new build leasehold houses other than in exceptional circumstances, and restricting ground rents in newly established leases of flats to zero financial value. We are working with the Law Commission to support existing leaseholders, including by making buying a freehold or extending a lease easier, faster, fairer and cheaper. With that context in mind, it is hugely important that leaseholders, like any other residents, are kept safe in their homes.

The fire at Grenfell Tower was a terrible tragedy. The Government are determined to learn the lessons and take all necessary steps to ensure that nothing like it can ever happen again. I wish to set out some of the steps that the Government have taken since the tragedy. The Department’s building safety programme, set up immediately after the fire, is working hard to ensure that all high-rise residential buildings are safe from the threat of fire, and that residents feel safe in them. To support that, the Secretary of State appointed an expert panel to ensure that the necessary steps are taken to ensure the safety of residents of high-rise buildings. Following the panel’s recommendations, the Government provided advice to building owners on the interim measures that they should put in place to ensure the safety of their residents. We swiftly identified social housing blocks and public buildings with unsafe cladding. All the affected social sector buildings that we have identified have these measures in place.

[Mr Reed]

The Minister will recall the lethal fire at Lakanal House in 2009. In 2013, the coroner who investigated that tragedy urged the Government to change the fire safety regulations that govern the use of cladding—specifically, approved document B. The Government failed to amend that regulation in 2013 and now, five years later, they have still failed to amend it. The criticism was that it was unclear what kind of cladding could and could not be put on a building. For that reason, flammable cladding exists on hundreds of blocks today. Will the Minister explain why the Government have done nothing in the nine years since Lakanal House?

[Mrs Wheeler]

The important thing is that the Hackitt review has already released interim recommendations, which we have accepted. We await the review to report later this summer. That will be the answer going forward.

All the social housing blocks and affected social sector buildings that we swiftly identified had the measures in place. In parallel, we tested different combinations of cladding and insulation to see which of them met the building regulations guidance. We published consolidated advice in September, confirming the results of the tests with advice for building owners. We have also been working with building owners and industry to support remediation work.

At the same time, the Government asked Dame Judith Hackitt to undertake an independent review of building regulations and fire safety to ensure that buildings are safe in future. We are taking forward all of the recommendations for Government contained in the interim report, and look forward to the publication of her final report shortly.

We believe we have identified all affected social housing blocks and public buildings. With regard to private sector buildings, the Government have made the testing facility at the Building Research Establishment available free of charge, and we continue to urge all building owners to submit samples for testing if they think that they may have unsafe cladding. In addition, the Secretary of State wrote to all local authorities in August asking them to identify privately owned buildings with potentially unsafe cladding in their area in line with their statutory duties.

[Mrs Wheeler]

I hear what the hon. Lady says. We have close contacts with Wandsworth Council.

In addition, the Secretary of State wrote to all local authorities in August asking them to identify these properties. The majority of local authorities recognised the urgency of that work and provided relevant information, and we are very grateful for their hard work. However, this is not a straightforward task, particularly when building owners cannot be traced or are unresponsive. We have been in constant dialogue with local authorities ever since. Last month, to support local authorities in that work, we announced a financial support package of £1 million to assist the most affected local authorities in identifying the remaining private high-rise buildings with potentially unsafe cladding.

We are progressing work to issue a statutory direction as to local authorities’ reviews of housing conditions in their area in respect of cladding-related issues. We are also working to publish additional operating guidance to support local authorities in assessing the risks to residents posed by potentially unsafe cladding.

These measures will help local authorities to take enforcement action to ensure that hazards in residential buildings in their areas are remediated as quickly as possible. I am confident that these steps will strengthen local authorities’ hands when carrying out this work. I can assure hon. Members that, as soon as we are notified of buildings with potentially unsafe cladding, we work with local authorities and the National Fire Chiefs Council to ensure that interim measures are put in place.

The Government have been clear that remediation should be done as quickly as possible, but it should also be done properly. Let us be clear: the remediation of buildings with ACM cladding is a complex process, involving major construction work which needs to be planned, consulted on and carried out carefully. Rushing any phase of the remediation process could jeopardise the safety of residents. I am encouraged that remediation has started on 103 affected social sector buildings and that, of those, seven have finished remediation work. There is clearly a long way to go, but that is significant progress.

I understand that funding is a concern for Wandsworth Council. In the social sector, all the local authorities and housing associations that we have spoken to have indicated that they have no plans to pass on the costs of essential remediation work to individual flat owners within their buildings. We will consider financial flexibilities for local authorities that are concerned about funding essential fire safety works to the buildings that they own.

In the private sector, we continue to urge those with responsibility to follow the lead from the social sector and not attempt to pass on costs. They can do that by meeting costs themselves or looking at alternative routes such as insurance claims, particularly warranties, or legal action.

[Mr Reed]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mrs Wheeler]

No, I am going to finish.

We are aware of cases in Battersea where freeholders are seeking to do just that.

[Mr Reed]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mrs Wheeler]

No, thank you.

Where building owners are seeking to pass on remediation costs to leaseholders, it is important that leaseholders can access specialist advice to understand their rights. We have provided additional funding to the Leasehold Advisory Service—LEASE—which provides independent, free, initial advice to leaseholders to ensure that they are aware of their rights and are supported to understand the terms of their leases. LEASE continues to provide valuable support to affected leaseholders around the country. On 15 March, the Secretary of State announced an industry roundtable on the barriers to the remediation of buildings with unsafe aluminium composite material cladding.

[Mr Reed]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mrs Wheeler]

No, I will not.

I hope that the points I have made have reassured—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mrs Wheeler]

No, I will not, sir.

I hope that the points I have made have reassured hon. Members just how seriously we are treating the building safety issues that the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower brought to light, and our commitment to supporting leaseholders and all residents throughout this process.

Question put and agreed to.

Grenfell Update

Steve Reed Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

Ever since this terrible tragedy, my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary has been looking at this issue. The hon. Gentleman will know that certain criteria have to be in place before a product recall can happen, and I know that, in the light of this tragedy, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is looking at this again.

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State spoke earlier about the need for more empathy and emotional intelligence, but he has shown precious little of that towards the tens of thousands of people across the country who are still living in residential blocks that are covered in flammable, Grenfell-style cladding. There is no point in him pointing the finger at developers and builders, because nobody has yet shown any legal basis under which they can be made to pay, so if the Government do not act, the cladding stays up and we risk a second Grenfell Tower. When will he stop talking, start acting and make these people’s homes safe by taking that cladding down?

[Sajid Javid]

The first point to emphasise for everyone in that situation, including the hon. Gentleman’s constituents, is that their buildings are not unsafe. That is a result of the interim measures that have been implemented, including with regard to fire wardens. It would be wrong unnecessarily to make people worry that they are living in unsafe buildings, because measures have been taken. He is right to point to the longer-term action that is needed. He talks about legal responsibilities, but there is also a moral responsibility, and that has worked in some cases. I think that there will be more cases in which builders and freeholders step up but, as I have told him before, we are reviewing the situation and looking at what more can be done.

Fire Safety and Cladding

Steve Reed Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

Before I call Mr Reed to open our debate on this important matter, you can all see that there is a cast of thousands. This is a very important subject. When Mr Reed has sat down, I will let you know exactly what the time limits will be. You should plan for three or four minutes, and we will see how we go.

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered cladding and remedial fire safety work.

Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Streeter. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I am grateful so many colleagues have turned up to the debate, which emphasises how significant this issue is for so many of our constituents.

I first came to the issue because of a block called Citiscape in my constituency. A group of residents came to see me because the block has the same kind of cladding on it as Grenfell Tower: aluminium composite material—ACM—cladding with a polyethylene core. Polyethylene is a kind of compressed paraffin. At Grenfell, this cladding had the equivalent combustibility to 32,000 litres of petrol over the outside of the building, so it is understandable that Citiscape’s residents were so concerned.

The residents were told that it would cost them as leaseholders up to £31,000 per flat to remove the cladding—a bill many of them simply could not afford—and that if everybody did not pay, none of the work would start. One older resident had to cancel his move to a care home because the flat he was going to sell to pay for that move was unsellable because of the cladding on the building. These people are stuck in a building that they describe as a deathtrap, unable to move and unable to afford the cost of making their homes safe.

The industry estimates that some 800 blocks across the country have flammable cladding: 300 are council-owned and will eventually be made safe, although it is worrying that nine months after Grenfell only three have so far been completely re-clad, and around 500 blocks are privately owned, but the Government are doing nothing to help the people living in them.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has made a good start to an important debate. Does he have ideas for what more could be done to encourage owners and landlords to improve or replace the cladding on the buildings that they own?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful for that question; I intend to cover exactly that in my speech. I am going to argue that it is the Government’s responsibility to remove the cladding because their flawed regulatory system is what allowed it to go up in the first place.

When I challenge the Secretary of State on this, he justifies doing nothing by pointing the finger at freeholders, whom he claims have a moral responsibility to replace the cladding. The problem is that a moral responsibility is not the same as a legal responsibility. Freeholders, like leaseholders, developers, managing agents and insurers, all deny legal liability, and so do the Government. It could take years for the courts to resolve this and all that time people would be left living in fear. On average, there is one fire every month linked to this kind of cladding. Eventually, one will not be put out in time. Is the Minister really going to do nothing and risk a second Grenfell Tower fire?

[Emma Dent Coad (Kensington) (Lab)]

Decades of inaction led to the fire at Grenfell Tower and the loss of, now, 72 lives. All the fine words and sympathy in the world will not save lives. We need regulation now and a commitment of Government finance. What are we waiting for?

[Mr Reed]

I completely agree. I hope colleagues will forgive me if I restrict the number of interventions I take. There are so many people trying to get in on the debate that I would like to leave room for them if I can.

The Housing Minister told the House of Commons last month that he recognises no systemic problem with the fire safety regime. Let us look briefly at what he thinks is good enough. The Building Research Establishment’s fire testing system is so weak that manufacturers can design the testing rigs that test their own materials, and can then keep quiet about how many tests their materials fail before they eventually get a result they want. Developers, builders and buyers are never told, because the test results are treated as commercially confidential. Conflicts of interest are everywhere in this system. The BRE makes money by running tests on flammable materials—

[Karen Lee (Lincoln) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way briefly?

[Mr Reed]

Yes, but for the last time.

[Karen Lee]

The interim Hackitt report asserted on fire safety:

“Those responsible for high-risk and complex buildings should be held to account to a higher degree.”

Does my hon. Friend agree that after nine months the Conservative Government have shown no willingness to act?

[Mr Reed]

I agree, but I hope that we will hear from the Minister that things have changed.

The BRE makes up to £40,000 per test that it conducts for manufacturers. As it also drafts the guidance, as an organisation it has a financial interest in permitting the use of combustible materials that it then tests. The fire safety tests after Grenfell were carried out by Kingspan, which manufactured part of the materials on Grenfell in the first place. Some individuals from the BRE who drafted the Government’s flawed guidance are now advising Ministers that there is not a problem with the regulations that they drafted. What a surprise! It is even possible to bypass safety tests completely by paying somebody to carry out a desktop study, which does not involve doing any testing whatever. The privatised National House Building Council makes money by signing off flammable cladding that has never been tested, and because flammable materials—combustible materials—are cheaper to make, the industry has a perverse incentive to keep costs down by using combustible cladding.

No other country in the European Union permits a system this lax. Many EU countries do not permit the use of combustible cladding at all. The UK building industry has alerted the Government to materials authorised by the BRE that subsequently failed fire safety tests in other countries. The Government chose to do nothing. The Association of British Insurers, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Association of Residential Managing Agents and other building industry groups all want flammable cladding banned.

Back in 2013, the coroner investigating the deadly Lakanal House fire in Southwark told the Government to amend fire safety guidance

“with particular regard to the spread of fire over the external envelope of a building”.

She said that BRE Approved Document B, which relates to fire safety, was unclear and needed to be reviewed. However, the Communities Secretary at the time, Eric Pickles, did not do that. Nor have a string of Housing Ministers—every one since then—taken any action, including the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Gavin Barwell. The current Housing Minister is relatively new in post. He could take a different course. I hope he will, but it is a worrying start that a consultation is under way on further weakening these already weak fire safety regulations by extending the use of desktop studies instead of insisting on rigorous, independent fire safety tests every time.

The industry has repeatedly asked the Government for clear and unequivocal advice on how to deal with the various forms of flammable cladding being found on hundreds of buildings. I wrote to the Secretary of State in January asking for the same on the industry’s behalf. As of today, the Government have given no direction at all on how these cases are to be dealt with.

After Grenfell, the Government said that cladding with a polyethylene core, like that on Citiscape in my constituency, does not comply with the guidance. The Prime Minister repeated that claim, yet I have here a certificate signed by Sir Ken Knight, chair of the Government’s independent expert panel on fire safety and a director of the BRE Trust, that says that it does comply. Quite simply, the Government are all over the place. They do not have a clue what is going on. Every single loophole and error that led to Lakanal House and Grenfell Tower is still in place. This is no one else’s fault and no one else’s moral responsibility except the Government’s.

Thousands of frightened people living in blocks with flammable cladding need to hear from the Minister today that it will be taken down without delay. They do not need any more buck-passing. They cannot afford to spend years in the courts while the cladding remains on their buildings. The Government’s flawed fire safety regime created this mess; the Government must now clear it up. We cannot risk a second Grenfell Tower. The time for the Minister to act is now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Reed]

I am grateful to everybody who has taken part in today’s debate and provided such powerful testimony from across the country. The Minister seems to be heavily relying on the expert panel that he mentioned, but that panel is chaired by the man who signed off the kind of cladding on Grenfell as safe—I have the document that shows it here, and will give it to the Minister afterwards. I wonder whether he should question a little more, rather than just listen to the advice that he is receiving.

The industry is still very confused about what it needs to do when this kind of cladding is found on buildings. The Department needs to issue clearer advice. Finally, we bailed out the banks when they broke the banking system. Why can we not bail out leaseholders, who are innocent victims of the Government’s failed, flawed fire safety regime?

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered cladding and remedial fire safety work.

Grenfell Tower

Steve Reed Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

We are in constant dialogue, so the suggestion that the council has not heard a peep out of the Government is not accurate or responsible. I will chase up the hon. Gentleman’s specific question and ensure that we get a resolution as swiftly as possible. We are having detailed conversations. We often ask further questions of local authorities and they come back with the specifications. We then know how to get the issue resolved properly.

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I fear that the Minister has been misadvised. Government guidance in paragraph 12.7 of approved document B still permits the use of cladding with a polyethylene core, which industry experts advise is dangerously combustible. It is still being put on buildings today, including on one block in Lewisham, because Ministers have consistently ignored professional advice from the building industry. Hundreds of other buildings across the country are affected, and an average of one fire a month is already being linked to such cladding. When will the Minister issue clear advice on what action should be taken in all circumstances where limited combustibility cladding is in place? When will he order its immediate removal from every residential block where it is present, which includes Citiscape in Croydon?

[Dominic Raab]

The hon. Gentleman is wrong to suggest that we have not taken the expert advice. We have consistently done that and have acted on it, but I am happy to look again at the material he mentioned. I have been involved in relation to the Citiscape case in Croydon and we have made it clear to the freeholder there, just as we have done everywhere else, that there is a moral case for avoiding any unreasonable costs to leaseholders or tenants. The leaseholders and tenants also of course have the option of going to the first-tier tribunal to settle an issue legally, and it would be wrong for Ministers to interfere in that process.