Building Safety and Resilience

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali]

We recognise the impact on those with high insurance premiums. We will take action to protect them, and will have the necessary dialogue to address the right hon. Member’s points and ensure that there are not high insurance premiums.

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Ind)]

Does the Minister agree that firefighters and the Fire Brigades Union need to be listened to, and that the Government need to deliver the statutory advisory body to ensure that the lessons of Grenfell are learned?

[Rushanara Ali]

We have already had discussions with key stakeholders, including firefighters and the head of the FBU. We want to ensure that we speak to all relevant stakeholders. We need to work across a range of institutions to get this right and tackle the root causes of fire risk.

I want to focus on the number of affected properties. The remediation of 4,630 residential buildings above 11 metres is being monitored by my Department. For half of them, remediation has started; 1,350 have completed remediation. However, counting the buildings that we know about is not enough. We estimate that as many as 7,000 buildings that need remediation have not yet applied for the cladding safety scheme. That is a maximum estimate—there may well be fewer than that—but those responsible for those buildings have no excuse for failing to apply. We will work with regulators to ensure that the buildings are identified.

--- Later in debate ---

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Penrith and Solway (Markus Campbell-Savours) and everyone else who has made their maiden speech today and welcome them to their place here.

I rise today with a heavy heart as we remember the 72 lives lost in the Grenfell Tower fire—an avoidable tragedy fuelled by systemic neglect, corporate greed and an ideology that prioritised profits over people.

I begin by sharing the call of Grenfell United for the removal of flammable cladding from buildings now, for sprinklers, for the Hillsborough law, and for speedy criminal prosecutions of those whose negligence, greed and dishonesty killed 72 people. But there is something more here, which I urge hon. Members to understand. The Grenfell Next of Kin group call this report “10 kg of words on pages” rather than justice. The anger that Grenfell survivors have expressed is an anger that many of us feel—that in Britain today, working class people are treated as expendable.

Less than a year before the fire, the Grenfell Action Group warned that their “dangerous living conditions” would cause

“a catastrophic event...an incident that results in a serious loss of life.”

They predicted their own deaths, because they knew how little anyone in power cared about keeping them alive. That is the inescapable conclusion of this report.

Building firms engaged in “systematic dishonesty”—that is what the report says—to profit without ensuring safety. Some of them knew that their insulation was a “raging inferno”, but they kept selling it anyway.

After the earlier fires at Knowsley and Lakanal and after large-scale tests warned of the dangers of cladding, neither the British Government nor Kensington and Chelsea council came to help the residents of Grenfell. Then, after the fire, a former Secretary of State responsible for housing, Lord Pickles, loudly told the inquiry to not take up too much of his time.

Nobody seriously thinks that the residents of London’s wealthier streets would be so ignored, so derided, treated with such contempt for decades and left to die. Let us tell the truth about the society in which we live: when two billionaires drowned on a submarine voyage to see the Titanic, powerful countries united in a global rescue effort, but when poor people and persecuted people drown in the English channel or burn in Grenfell Tower, we do not mobilise every single resource to save their lives and bring them to safety. That is a kind of class war—a war on exploited and persecuted people wherever in the world they are born.

Grenfell Tower was named after Sir Francis Grenfell, a general who carried out colonial violence in Ireland, Sudan and South Africa. When the British ruling class wants cheap labour from places like those, it houses workers in an unsafe building named after a man who may have killed their ancestors, and then ignores their warnings and leaves them to die. That was Grenfell Tower.

Residents have spoken up beautifully in recent days of the community in the tower, and of how people stuck together and looked after the weakest among them. They share the working-class values that we all should and they are entirely alien to the values that, unfortunately, rule in this society. The dead and the living deserve safe homes for all. They deserve corporate and state accountability and a different kind of society. Grenfell’s 72 dead are forever in our hearts. Thank you.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Alex Ballinger to make his maiden speech.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Alex Norris)]

This has been an important debate on the safety of our residential buildings and, more importantly, the safety of the residents who call those buildings home. The final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry sets out the appalling failures of the industry and successive Governments. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Prime Minister set out in his statement to the House, we apologise on behalf of the state to each and every one of the bereaved families and survivors, and to the immediate Grenfell community.

We will demand responsibility for building safety—responsibility from this Government and responsibility across the industry. Too many buildings still have unsafe cladding, and the pace of remediation has been too slow. Like many colleagues in the House, I was in this Chamber seven years ago. Had we said to ourselves then that we would still be in the same situation seven years later, I think we would have considered that we had failed. That is very much the case, and this Government intend to address the failure. As I say, too many buildings have unsafe cladding, and the funding is there. There is no excuse for a building owner not to enter a cladding scheme for which they are eligible. We will accelerate efforts to bring all remaining buildings into remediation schemes, and empower regulators and local authorities to act, including by considering new legislation.

For good reason, much of this debate has been about safety rather than resilience, but as the Minister with responsibility for local resilience, I want to make the point that we are looking very closely at resilience at both national and local levels in response to the Grenfell Tower inquiry and the inquiry into the covid pandemic. We are looking at ways in which we can response to crises, and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is leading a review of resilience, which will include work with the devolved Governments, regional mayors, local leaders and local resilience partnerships. Again, the reports have said that we ought be doing that. We are looking at the recommendations very carefully, and making sure that local areas are empowered and have the capacity to respond in times of crisis.

[Zarah Sultana]

I thank the Minister for giving way on the point about resilience. Obviously, firefighters and the FBU are key stakeholders in resilience work. I want to ask a question that I asked earlier about the statutory advisory body in response to Grenfell: what is the Government’s timetable for developing that and getting it on board?

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for her question. I was the shadow Fire Minister before the election, and I was very proud to get into our manifesto the commitment to get the fire family in the same room and drive standards. I cannot give her the exact date today, but I can tell her that dealing with this issue is a priority for the Home Office and we are getting on with it.

This has been a slightly odd debate, because its substance is exceptionally serious and rooted in one of the nation’s greatest tragedies, but we have also had the joy of a dozen Members making their maiden speeches. The hon. Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) said in his eloquent speech that he hoped those watching would understand why it has been this way. I will pay due respect to those colleagues by reflecting on some of the things they have said.

I start with the hon. Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill. Everything he said about his predecessor, Bob Neill, was true. Bob is so respected on both sides of the House, and the way the hon. Gentleman started was very much the way that Bob finished, which was very encouraging. He mentioned the brave pilots leaving his constituency to go to war, and their sacrifice so that we can hold debates today. That represents the spirit that we should all hold to, every day that we are here. His point was well made. He also bravely said that the only football league team that had a Conservative Member of Parliament was his team in Bromley, and that Notts County fans might remind people of that at the weekend. As a Member of Parliament for Nottingham, I will let my Pies-supporting friends know, although I think the language might be more choice than the suggestion the hon. Gentleman came up with.

My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn) has shown incredible persistence in getting here. As he said, this was his fourth time standing for election, and that says a lot about him, because others might not have bothered. It is really hard to run for election, certainly in the face of disappointment and, in 2017, of an incredibly narrow loss. Others might have looked for alternative seats, but he loves his community. Calder Valley and he are one and the same, so it does not surprise me that he stayed on, and it is a source of great joy that he is here. He talked about the longest running No. 2 in the charts having originated from Calder Valley. He was No. 2 for a long time, but now he has reached No. 1.

Similarly, the hon. Member for Guildford (Zöe Franklin) she said that this was her third attempt to get elected, and she has shown similar persistence. She said that she brought with her a message of change. She mentioned special educational needs and water quality; this Parliament —and indeed this Government—will be measured by the progress made on those two issues.

Like me, my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Oliver Ryan) is proudly one of the 43 Labour and Co-op Members of this Parliament. We join 11 Mayors and more than 1,000 councillors as Labour and Co-operators. It is a great joy to see him in his place. I was struck by what he said; it made me feel similarly about my community. He talked about the proud heritage of his town, but also its ambitious future. He said that the industries might change, but the principles will be the same. As Minister for towns, I give the commitment that I will work closely with him to make that a reality, although I thought he was brave to say that a Labour leader had come from his constituency very early on; I saw the Whips making notes straight away.