Update on the Grenfell Tower Fire and Fire Safety

Baroness Pinnock Excerpts

Monday 26th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer the House to my interests, specifically as a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and vice-president of the Local Government Association.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, for repeating the Statement made in the other place by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families of this terrible tragedy at Grenfell Tower, and with our emergency services, which responded so bravely and quickly to the unfolding disaster. Their actions saved countless lives. The whole nation owes these heroes a debt of gratitude.

The Prime Minister acknowledged that the response by Kensington and Chelsea Council was not good enough and a firm grip on the situation needed to be taken. The response by charities, faith organisations, businesses and local residents has rightly been praised and I pay tribute to them all. They add to the shame with which the response of Kensington and Chelsea council is viewed by everybody. I find it staggering that the council leader did not resign immediately. He should resign without further delay. The chief executive of Lewisham, Barry Quirk, has taken over as the chief executive of Kensington and Chelsea council. He is a public sector manager with years of experience and will get a grip of the situation quickly. The command centre is under the joint leadership of John Barradell, the chief executive of the Corporation of London, and Eleanor Kelly, the chief executive of Southwark council. Both are experienced public sector managers. Eleanor Kelly is known to me, and she will do an excellent job, I am sure, with the chief executive of the Corporation of London.

I have no intention of speculating on matters that are best left to the police and the inquiry. I have confidence that robust work will be undertaken, and where criminal activity is found to have taken place, prosecutions to the full extent of the law will be brought. But lessons have to be learned and things have to change. I hope that we never again hear the nonsense that we have heard in the past about red tape and health and safety regulations. It is clear that, rather than having too much regulation, there has in this case been a catastrophic failure. Regulations were either not good enough or were not followed and applied thoroughly and properly.

The checks on tower blocks throughout the UK need to continue as quickly as possible. I pay tribute to the residents of Camden who have been affected by the right decision to evacuate their blocks, which are deemed by the authorities to be unsafe, and to the leadership shown by the leader of Camden council, Councillor Georgia Gould, who has been there on the ground speaking to residents. It would be welcomed by the whole House if we were given further details of the work being undertaken by the Government Property Unit to oversee checks on wider public sector buildings.

Cladding is not the whole story. That is clear from the Lakanal House and Shirley Towers fires, as the respective coroners’ reports show. Can the noble Lord tell the House what plans the Government have to provide up-front funding to local authorities to take recladding measures, the installation of sprinkler systems or other fire precaution measures rather than the after-event funding through the Bellwin scheme? I welcome the independent advisory panel that is being set up, but the Statement repeated by the noble Lord seems to suggest that the system is at the point of collapse, and urgent action must be taken. We need to do that quickly.

Last Thursday, the Prime Minister said,

“we simply have not given enough attention to social housing”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/6/17; col. 169.]

I would suggest that the Government have given plenty of the wrong attention to social housing. Schemes such as the National Tenant Voice have been scrapped. The social homes build is down from 37,000 to 1,000, and Homes and Communities Agency funding for the Decent Homes programme has been ended. What we need now from the noble Lord is a commitment to do everything to ensure that the Prime Minister’s promise is not just empty words and that we will see a complete change of course by the Government in support of funding for social housing so that we have truly affordable homes in this country.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as a councillor elected in Kirklees and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I join with what has already been said in tribute to both the fantastic work of the emergency services on the night and to the ongoing support that has now been put in place by a combination of charities, faith groups, community groups and finally—although too late—the Government and local government. I have three major areas of concern following the Grenfell Tower fire.

The first area is that of care for the victims of the fire. The initial co-ordination of this huge and probably preventable catastrophe was a fiasco. As I said in this House last Thursday, accountability in the political process is absolutely vital if we are to retain trust between those who are elected and those who are represented. I called for the leader of the council in Kensington and Chelsea to take responsibility for the fact that 79 people have died in a council building on his watch. I cannot believe that a leader elsewhere in the country would not have resigned by that point. I repeat my call of last Thursday and I trust that some Members on the government side will talk to the leader and urge him to take responsibility.

A second element in the area of care for the victims is the co-ordination of ongoing support for them. I understand that the Government are implementing the Bellwin scheme, which provides recompense to councils and other authorities for the emergency costs of the work they do. That is positive, but I am concerned about the work that they ought to be doing to support the children who have been involved in this awful trauma. They are a particular concern of mine because of my interests. Are their welfare and ongoing education needs going to be well supported for a very long time, because that is probably what they will need?

My second major area of concern is that of prevention, referred to by the Minister in the Statement. What we absolutely must ensure is that there are no other buildings where further loss of life could take place. My understanding is that all building materials have to be passed by the British Board of Agrément, which determines whether the materials are fit for purpose and how they can be used. I have not heard in any of the statements in either this House or the other place whether this is the case for the materials referred to by the Minister; that is, the aluminium cladding. I would welcome an answer to that point.

The second element in the area of prevention is that I am particularly concerned about schools. I am a governor of a school which should be opening in September. It is being built through the government scheme. As I speak it is being clad and does not have a sprinkler system because the requirement for such systems in schools has been removed. No doubt the Minister will not be able to respond, but a number of schools are currently being built around the country. Will they have sprinkler systems put in and will the cladding be checked?

My third area of concern is that of costs. We have heard that the emergency costs are to be covered by the Bellwin scheme, but we expect that cladding which fails the checks will have to be replaced. Who is going to pay for that? If there are some 600 tower blocks, numerous schools and some hospitals which did fulfil the building regulations but latterly discover that the cladding material is combustible, who will fund the enormous cost of recladding those buildings? I doubt whether cash-strapped local authorities will be in a position to fund replacement cladding, and similarly I doubt whether the NHS will be able to meet the cost of recladding buildings. It is not responsible in the sense that, if the building regulations were complied with, in my view the costs ought to be met by the Government.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for their contributions and I acknowledge, as I think I did in the Statement, the importance of the role played by the emergency services. They were truly heroic and the events demonstrated in a very graphic way how much we owe to them on a continuing basis. Of course, as has also been said, the response has not been limited to the emergency services, although their role was extraordinary. I was reading this morning about a young Latvian-born Russian man who went five or six floors up into the tower to rescue people. The human response was extraordinary, while the continuing response of charities and faith organisations has also been first class. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, mentioned Barry Quirk, Eleanor Kelly, John Barradell and indeed the work of many London boroughs which have contributed massively since Kensington and Chelsea, as it were, stood down. Their response has been extraordinary too. Elected representatives are responsible and should be held accountable, and that is a matter for them to consider, but I certainly hear what has been said by both the noble Lord and the noble Baroness.

Let me deal with some of the specifics that were mentioned: I shall start with the victims, then move to costs and shall try to pick up some of the other points that were made. As I indicated in the Statement there is a Grenfell Tower victims’ unit which looks at many things through the medium of the Red Cross, with the funding assistance I have just mentioned, and a hotline. It is helping with advice on health, education and finance. Many of these people, it has to be recognised, do not speak English, so language support is being offered as well, for the various languages that are necessary: it is quite right that that should happen. There is counselling, including grief counselling and counselling to deal with the dreadful situation there.

On the cost, first, one should not ignore the significance of the Bellwin scheme. It has been used on many occasions, such as the Buncefield disaster, floods and so on. After 0.2% of the authority’s budget—in the case of Kensington and Chelsea, £300,000 is not significant in terms of that budget—the other money is supplied by the Government within the scheme, up to 100%. One should not ignore the significance of that: it really is important, it is in place already, as I understand it, in relation to Grenfell Tower, and in relation to Camden, it will obviously be utilised. On top of that, primary responsibility, of course, rests with the landlord of the relevant body, whether that is public sector or private sector, but of course we recognise that there is a cost here. The most important thing is the safety of individuals. That is something we want to stress and we will obviously be talking with local authorities about the cost. At the moment we do not know what that cost will be: even in relation to the 75 examples I cited of non-compliance, it is not necessarily clear that removing the cladding will be necessary overnight, as it were. We just have to look at how that is to be taken forward, but I recognise the importance of the point; of course, I do.

The general, broader point about social housing is well made. We know that many of the authorities concerned are of all parties, I think, and all parties have to look at how we address this on an ongoing basis. There are certainly lessons to be learned there. The noble Baroness mentioned prevention—I do not think the noble Lord did, but it is clearly an issue that needs looking at. Fire safety checks on cladding and so on are needed, not just on residential buildings but on all buildings. We have already put in place a system for the NHS and for education, but of course in the private sector there will be office buildings and so on, which while perhaps not as urgent as residential buildings will still need to be looked at. I know that some hotels—Premier Inn, for example—have stated that they will be removing cladding. So the private sector needs to look at this too and there are many issues to be looked at.

The sprinkler situation has been mentioned. Residential blocks above 18 metres since, I think, 2007, need sprinklers. That raises the question, clearly, which I think the public inquiry will certainly want to look at, that if it is right for them, what about retrofitting other buildings within that system? I would be astounded if, when we see the terms of reference, that is not part of the inquiry. Those terms of reference will be discussed not just with tenants and representatives of tenants of Grenfell Tower but with the chairperson of the inquiry. Those matters need to be looked at too.

Once again I thank the noble Lord and the noble Baroness for the genuinely consensual way that they have been seeking to move this forward, which I am sure is the right way. I think that certain statements made elsewhere are unhelpful, but this is a national position which we have to deal with in a national, consensual way. I do not think that victims would welcome any other approach than the one that has been demonstrated today.