Grenfell Tower Inquiry

Tulip Siddiq Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I want to speak about my experience of meeting Grenfell survivors in Speaker’s House last week. I spoke to people who had lost family, and was impressed by the dignity of their reaction. I spoke to a man called Antonio, who had survived the Grenfell Tower fire. Having lived to tell the tale, he wanted to speak to me about his experience. I hope that the House will bear with me as I describe something of what he went through.

Antonio was nodding off when he suddenly got a text from a family member telling him that the tower was on fire. He was on the 10th floor and had not realised it was on fire, but when he looked out of the window he saw thick black smoke circulating outside. He was not sure what to do, and decided to try to escape down the main stairwell. As he tried to do that, he realised that the smoke was so thick that there was no way he could survive. He said he felt he would have choked if he had gone down the stairs, so he went back to his room.

Hon. Members will be able to imagine Antonio’s agony while he waited there. He said he thought about whether he would ever see his friends and family again, so he tried once more to go down the main stairwell and escape from the burning tower. Once again he saw the thick smoke and realised there was no way he could go down the stairs. He decided once again to go back to his room—unsure this time whether he would make it out.

Then, at 6 am, our firefighters came and saved Antonio. They took him outside and he was reunited with his son, whom he lives with on the 10th floor. He told me that after the tragedy and upheaval he had faced, and the dreadful wait in that room, unsure whether he would live or die, he was put in a temporary hotel. He asked the council when he would get a permanent home and was promised that it would take three weeks.

Those three weeks came and went and Antonio was not placed anywhere. He was passed from pillar to post, hotel to hotel and temporary accommodation. Then he was promised that he and his son would get a permanent home by Christmas. The House needs to bear in mind that Antonio and his son were not even together but were in separate temporary accommodation; but he looked forward to being with his son in December. Christmas came and went and he was still not placed in a permanent home. He went back to the council, which said, “If you give us six months we will make sure that you are placed in a permanent home.”

Not only had Antonio had to suffer the fire, and the loss of friends, families and neighbours; he also did not have a permanent home to go to. That is why I appeal to Ministers today to say that we have already failed the Grenfell survivors, and the people who did not survive, once, and that we cannot fail them again by not giving them permanent homes. I make a plea for the council to be held to account on the promises it made, and for the promises of permanent homes to be carried out. The statistics about one in three households not getting permanent accommodation, and a further third being in hotels, can wash over the people who read them, but meeting someone who lived through the fire and still does not have permanent accommodation leads to the realisation of the impact on their lives.

In the time remaining to me, I want to talk about Richard Stone, who has been mentioned a few times. He was an advisor to the judge in the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. I have known him since I was a teenager. The inquiry dominated a large part of Richard’s life. I see him often and he has spoken to me about it many times in the past 20 years. He has said that in his mind the inquiry served a few purposes. The first was justice—justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence, but also for all the young black men out there who had faced institutional racism. In the same way, this inquiry must be about justice—not only for the people who died in Grenfell Tower and the families and friends who are still mourning their loss, but for all those families who live in high-rise buildings in London and around the country, and who feel so unsafe.

Anecdotally, I have had Bangladeshi families from across the country emailing me. Many hon. Members will have heard the tragic story of two Bangladeshi young people who refused to leave their elderly parents in Grenfell Tower. Their elderly parents could not move and they did not want to leave them, so they died along with them. Bangladeshi families who live in tower blocks have been emailing me to say that they feel unsafe.

The second thing Richard Stone keeps coming back to is how the inquiry must look into the institutional and systemic failures in society. The Stephen Lawrence inquiry was about institutional racism; here, it is about our collective failure to make people feel safe in tower blocks and the fact that we have not tested the claddings in tower blocks and private blocks across the country.

In Camden, we did test one of our high-rise blocks. There was immense disruption to residents, but the council took them out and replaced the cladding. It cost £40 million, but you cannot put a price on people’s lives, and now people are back there. We know that we caused immense disruption to the residents, but it was the right thing to do, because if we want to address this failure, we have to test the cladding in all tower blocks and not just in a few.

Finally, Richard Stone comes back to one thing over and over when he talks about the Stephen Lawrence inquiry: that there is no point in conducting an inquiry such as this if it is just about giving politicians a pat on the back, saying we are doing it because we have to, making ourselves look good or getting votes. The reason why we do it is that we want to address the injustice of what has happened. If the Government do not commit now to implementing the report’s findings, there is no point in having an inquiry. The whole point of implementing the findings of a report is to show that all lives matter, that black lives matter and that, whether people live in a mansion in Chelsea or a tower block in Kensington, all lives are equal for us politicians in this room.