Grenfell Tower Memorial (Expenditure) Bill

Lord Garnier Excerpts

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

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, only someone who was there on the night of the Grenfell Tower fire or who experienced the loss of a loved one in that disaster can truly understand what it must have been like to suffer the physical and emotional losses that it caused. Death, injury, mental trauma, the sudden removal from a home, and the incalculable and continuing difficulties and questions for the emergency services and their personnel are just some of the consequences that come to mind, but there will be others. The noble Lord, Lord Roe, powerfully spoke about this, as others have pointed out, and I commend him for what he did with his colleagues on the night of 14 June 2017 and for what he said to us today.

It is right that there should be a memorial to the people whose lives were lost or damaged by this fire. Its design is not a matter for this debate, but I hope that it—in its entirety—will be a thing of beauty and utility that will last as a solace and as a continuing reminder not just of the lives lost but of the need for public authorities and the corporate world to behave with responsibility for and to others. In short, I ask that we do not just look back but that we look forward to the creation of a better regime for government and corporate conduct.

In the compressed procedure that governs the narrow compass of the Bill, there will not be time—indeed, it may not be appropriate—to introduce an amendment to describe the idea that I wish to advance, but it is one I would like the Government seriously to bear in mind. I interrupt myself by making it clear that, although some members of my barristers’ chambers have been involved in the Grenfell Tower inquiry and its related litigation, I am not a construction law practitioner and have played no part in the inquiry, nor in any related cases.

Although a memorial of the type envisaged by this Bill is a fitting way to commemorate what happened on 14 June 2017, that is not all that we should do. What connects the 72 deaths in Grenfell Tower and other cases of corporate decision-making resulting in loss of life are the bereaved families waiting for justice. The 72 Grenfell Tower deaths and others elsewhere caused by corporate failure make it clear that we need to strengthen corporate criminal law.

We may think that corporate crime is only financial: bribery, tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, cash in brown envelopes, false accounting and clever schemes that cheat the Revenue. Britain has, to its credit, taken a leading role in tackling those offences. However, where corporate misconduct kills rather than steals, our legal system is failing.

It does not have to be like this. The Bribery Act 2010 introduced a powerful weapon: a company commits a criminal offence if it fails to prevent bribery by those who work for it or on its behalf. Companies can no longer shelter behind ignorance or delegation. If a company benefits from wrongdoing and has not put reasonable procedures in place to stop it, the company itself can be prosecuted. We later extended that model to the failure to prevent tax evasion and fraud offences through, respectively, the Criminal Finances Act 2017 and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. The effect of those laws on corporate culture has been profound. Rather than turning a blind eye, companies now invest in procedures to prevent financial crimes.

Without new UK legislation, the same cannot be said about the prevention of death, assault, forced labour and other non-financial crimes from which companies benefit. It is now nearly nine years since the Grenfell Tower fire. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry, so ably and sensitively led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, concluded that the 72 deaths in the 2017 fire were, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, pointed out, “wholly avoidable” and resulted from “decades of failure” by government, industry and regulatory bodies.

The final phase 2 report, published on 4 September 2024, identified a “merry-go-round of buck-passing”, where every party involved in the building’s refurbishment failed to take responsibility for fire safety. Sir Martin revealed that persistent and deliberate prioritisation of commercial interests over human safety played a direct part in causing this tragedy. A cladding company that knew about the safety issues was

“determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes”

in the United Kingdom.

By 2023, the financial cost of the Grenfell Tower disaster had reached nearly £1.2 billion; that is 4,000 times the amount that was saved by replacing fire-retardant cladding with a cheaper combustible alternative during the disastrous refurbishment. The bulk of the cost is being met from the public purse, dwarfing the compensation to the bereaved and the survivors paid by companies involved in wrapping the tower block in combustible materials before the fire in June 2017. Although the biggest fire in a residential block, Grenfell was not the first, and there have been others since. So far, no one has been held criminally accountable.

I could cite other examples where corporate decision-making, or the lack of it, both here and overseas, has caused or been alleged to have caused hundreds of people to lose their lives, homes or livelihoods. I will not say more, as at least one of the cases that I have in mind is currently the subject of High Court proceedings here in London. What I can say is that the law of the United Kingdom makes it difficult for cases like these to result in effective accountability, let alone access to justice for those who have suffered.

Jurisdictional arguments aside, holding corporations accountable for criminal activity is complicated, whether it is based on the identification principle or on attribution to a senior manager—an improvement now proposed in the Crime and Policing Bill, which is shortly to receive Royal Assent. Crucially, existing laws do not impose a proactive duty on companies to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm arising from their commercial activities.

The introduction of effective corporate accountability laws here in the United Kingdom is long overdue. I first wrote about the need to plug the gaps in our legal system more than eight years ago, in the Times newspaper. Since then, other countries have moved ahead. Norway, Germany, France and the EU as a whole have all introduced a legal requirement for companies to prevent human rights and environmental abuses in their operations and supply chains.

Now is the time for us to act. The failure to prevent model is an effective British legal innovation. It is pragmatic and it is fair. It does not criminalise accidents. It does not promote meaningless box-ticking. It simply asks whether a company that has benefited from serious wrongdoing took reasonable steps to stop it. If the company can prove to the civil standard that it did, it has a defence. If it did not, it should answer in the criminal courts and compensate its victims.

Calls are growing to extend this model beyond financial crime to discourage harm to human rights, workers’ rights and the environment. They come from campaigners, parliamentary committees, trade unions, investors, businesses themselves and the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. The argument is no longer seen as radical. It is not, as others have already said, party political; it is humane and it is orthodox. The Government’s trade strategy proclaims that responsible business conduct is a priority, and a review of the UK’s approach is under way. If Ministers are serious about this and they wish to be taken seriously about this, they should build on what works. A new law cannot bring back the dead of Grenfell, but the failure to prevent model has changed corporate behaviour before and it can do so again. Would not such a reform of our laws be a practical and above all a fitting memorial to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire?