Grenfell Tower Memorial (Expenditure) Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading & Report stage & 3rd reading & Committee negatived
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier.

The late great Martin Amis described the sensation of ageing as feeling like breakfast comes around every 15 minutes. Dare I say it but, for some of us in your Lordships’ House, 2017 feels like yesterday. For the survivors and the bereaved, it must feel like every day. I welcome this Bill to fund a memorial, but I agree with everyone else that the best memorial would add action on culture, governance and regulation in the field of building and fire safety and more generally.

This was no natural disaster, nor one caused by overt acts of terrorism or war as normally understood. Instead, it was a catastrophe—a loss of life caused by public, private, central and local negligence, complacency, cover-up, corruption and greed. Greed in the late 1990s and 2000s was given political voice through the zeal for deregulation and privatising regulation, as we see in the report, and against the so-called health and safety culture that was derided at times by senior politicians, including very distinguished ones and including in your Lordships’ House. This was done with an enthusiasm now reserved for the denigration of human rights alone.

In pursuit of the cutting of red tape, some lives mattered a great deal less—as we have heard from the noble and learned Lord—than corporate profit. These are the profits of architects, builders, manufacturers of building materials and all those who purported to regulate and kitemark all of the above—again, for profit, which is a bit of an oxymoron. It is not so much regulatory capture as regulatory corruption and cancellation. This is so clear from Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s damning inquiry report.

What of the public sector? What of central and local government, which should have been on the side of the poor and the vulnerable—those tenants in the richest borough in one of the richest cities in the world? Sir Martin was appropriately scathing about the negligence of central government.

As for local government, Kensington and Chelsea is consistently rated as our capital’s richest borough in terms of average household income, property prices and the concentration of what are described as “high net worth” residents. Is this what led a so-called royal borough to behave more like a rotten one, via its tenant management body? There is an idea: a tenant management body that, in the years before the fire, and, some would argue, even in the immediate aftermath, treated the repeated concerns of Grenfell residents, even after earlier comparable high-rise fires, with such contempt.

As for the fire brigade, I need say little more than how well represented that service has been today by my noble friend Lord Roe of West Wickham. He said that we failed as an institution, but our people, our firefighters, did not. His courage and humility in describing his experience is something that few of us will forget in a hurry. If that approach to public service could be distilled and distributed more widely, our country would be a much better place.

I hope that this draft legislation has already made some contribution by prompting all of us who are attempting to contribute today to reread the findings and urgent recommendations of the Grenfell inquiry report. I know my noble friend to be fierce in her defence of human rights and renters’ rights, and I know that memory without action will be insufficient for her, so can I ask for her view of the implementation to date of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report?

Public sector, if not private sector, obfuscation in the aftermath of disasters would be significantly lanced by the prompt passage of the long-promised Hillsborough legislation. Can the Minister advise the House on the likely timetable for that? Can she also advise, or say anything more, on what my noble friends have alluded to regarding the timetable for relevant criminal prosecutions, given that the report lays considerable breadcrumbs for the police and prosecution authorities to follow?

Is the Minister of the view—this is where the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, comes in—that the current criminal law is adequate? I think few that heard him would be reassured that it is. Are the laws of corporate manslaughter and director regulation and disqualification adequate to provide corporate and personal accountability for the kind of unadulterated neglect and corruption that we saw in this and other scandals, including that of the postmasters? In the wake of all sorts of other debates about AI and exciting challenges, will the Government always remember the importance of transparent and effective regulation, not just in housing but in every other aspect of everyday life?

Housing is no mere commodity; it is a fundamental human right. Sir Martin’s report emphasises the importance of safe, private and dignified housing to any quality of life. Perhaps the denigration of human rights might be resigned to the dustbin, like the denigration of health and safety that came before it.