[Relevant Documents:Seventh Report of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, Session 2019-21, Cladding Remediation—Follow-up, HC 1249, and Seventh Report of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, Session 2021-22, Building Safety: Remediation and Funding, HC 1063; and the joint Government response, Session 2022-23, CP 863.]
Before we come to the important debate on the fifth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, I remind Members that, under the terms of the sub judice resolution, they should not refer to active legal proceedings in the debate. That includes proceedings on inquests.
That this House has considered the fifth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate, and I especially thank those MPs from across the House, including Back-Bench MPs from the governing party and all the Opposition parties, who supported its application. It is essential that we have a moment like this in the House to remember the events at Grenfell, to mark the worst domestic fire in living memory, to commemorate the 72 people killed and to acknowledge all those whose lives were changed for the worse that day. Such a debate is an important moment of reflection. It should also be an opportunity for the House to show that it is learning the lessons of that atrocity by taking the action needed to prevent it from ever happening again.
I ask the Government for an annual debate in Government time when the House can receive and debate reports on progress made on the Grenfell fire inquiry recommendations and to discuss changes to our justice system and the changes that must be made to make homes safe if we are to show that lessons are truly being learned. If we allow the memory of Grenfell to slip away, there is a real risk that the changes needed to prevent another Grenfell will slip away with it.
I want to focus on two areas: the need for justice for all those killed, for the survivors, for the bereaved families and for the wider community; and the changes that we need to ensure that it never happens again. Five years on from the fire, it is clear that bereaved families and survivors feel deeply let down by our justice system, and they have every right to do so. They are rightly asking, “Where are the criminal charges? Why are those who made the decisions that turned Grenfell into a deathtrap still walking free, and why, five years on, have those who ignored residents’ warnings not been held to account?”
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I am sorry that I will not be able to make a speech in this debate as I will be in Committee.
Does my hon. Friend agree that it was quite extraordinary that plans for people with disabilities to leave in the event of a fire were not already in place and legally required in the first place? It is even more extraordinary that, with the evidence that emerged during the inquiry that such plans were needed, the Government, having said repeatedly in this House that they would implement the findings of the Grenfell inquiry in full, are now backtracking and putting at risk our most vulnerable people, which we find quite unacceptable.
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. I hope that after this debate the Government will revisit their position and their rejection of that important recommendation from the first phase of the inquiry.
That is not the only concern about fire safety measures not being addressed. Government officials did not heed coroner advice after the Lakanal House fire killed six people in 2009. It was followed by an even more deadly fire. We cannot allow the same to happen after Grenfell. Yet as David Badillo, the first of many firefighters who went into Grenfell Tower, wrote this week:
“Apparently 72 lost lives is not enough. There is still no requirement for a second staircase in high rises. No requirement to fit fire alarms in all high rises. No national strategy on how to evacuate high rises.”
The figure revealed this week by the Fire Brigades Union, of 221 firefighter positions cut since Grenfell, represents a serious failure to change course after the loss of 11,000 firefighter roles between 2010 and 2017. Of course, a failure to sufficiently address the housing safety crisis is another reason why we have to take with a healthy dose of scepticism claims that lessons have so far been learned. Even on the ground in Kensington and Chelsea the situation is not yet resolved. Three Grenfell households are still to be rehoused, while 50 more have replacement homes unsuitable for their needs in numerous ways. After five years, it is unacceptable that people are still being treated as second-class citizens.
More widely, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are still at risk in unsafe housing. Work is still to be completed on 111 buildings that are over 18 metres tall and have exactly the type of aluminium composite material—ACM—cladding identified by the Grenfell inquiry as a leading cause of the 2017 atrocity. Some 640,000 people are still living in buildings with that exact type of cladding. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Last week, after accessing Government figures, LBC reported that almost 10,000 buildings in England are unsafe due to dangerous cladding and other associated fire risks. Those shocking figures include at least 903 buildings over 18 metres tall with cladding systems that need to be removed. A study last year estimated that between 6,000 and 8,900 mid-rise residential buildings, between 11 metres and 18 metres in height, require remediation, partial remediation or mitigation works.
The last few days have been very intense, emotional and difficult for my constituents as we remember the 72 men, women and children who lost their lives so horrifically and so needlessly. You will never be forgotten.
It has been my great privilege over the course of the last few years to get to know many of the bereaved and survivors. They have borne so much with so much dignity. It was humbling to spend time with them at Westminster Abbey on the anniversary on Tuesday, and a few days before that at Al-Manaar mosque in north Kensington in my constituency. Their individual accounts of what happened to them that evening are truly harrowing. I do not think that any of us can imagine the pain, anguish and suffering that people went through that night, or indeed the pain and anguish that relatives, friends and the community continue to suffer from.
On the morning of the anniversary, I went to Grenfell Tower. It was 7 o’clock in the morning, but there were already students from the neighbouring Kensington Aldridge Academy there, paying their respects. KAA, as it is known, lost five students in the tragedy. In total, 18 children died, their lives cut horrifically short.
We will never be able to right the wrongs of the past, but we can ensure that there is a lasting legacy from Grenfell. I am very clear that that legacy must be that everyone has a right to be safe in their homes, and that the voices of all residents and all communities need to be heard.
Last week we had a debate on building safety and social housing. I will not repeat the remarks that I made then, but I did say that I had been very frustrated over the last five years at the speed at which many of the changes were being implemented. There is no question but that we have made progress. We have enacted the Building Safety Act 2022 and the Fire Safety Act 2021, and lots of developers have said that they will contribute towards the cost of remediation. However, there is a lot more to be done, and it needs to be done quickly.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) on securing this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), whose constituency includes the area of Grenfell Tower. Of course, for 13 years I represented the constituency of Regent’s Park and Kensington North, including Grenfell Tower, and I knew it and the people living in it well. When the phone calls began in the middle of that fateful night five years ago, it was a personal horror to me as well.
The inferno engulfed Grenfell Tower just days after the 2017 general election. Parliament had not reconvened, but Ministers and MPs gathered in Westminster Hall for a special meeting, for which an official parliamentary record could not be provided. The newly elected Member for Kensington in 2017, Emma Dent Coad, was plunged into probably the most challenging set of circumstances that almost any newly elected Member of Parliament has had to face outside of wartime. She went on to make the case over the following two years, and she continues to do so outside this House. We should commend her for coping so well with that extraordinary challenge.
I believe that Emma Dent Coad is with us today, watching from the Public Gallery. I also came to Parliament in 2017, and this has absolutely been the defining issue of my entire five years. What happened was such a huge thing for those of us who were new, and I can only imagine how she managed to cope with the challenges she faced.
I thank my hon. Friend and agree very strongly with her.
That gathering of parliamentarians, which is not on the parliamentary record, was very intense indeed. We pressed Ministers very hard for answers. In addition to the obvious shock that everybody was still feeling, there was an absolutely overwhelming demand for urgency not only in response to the catastrophe that happened in north Kensington but in relation to the wider lessons, which I will come to in a moment.
In the days that followed, including the day on which we gathered, it became immediately obvious that there was a failure of epic proportions on the part of the state, and particularly the local council in Kensington, and those of us who went to the Grenfell area to offer support in the immediate aftermath could see that. During that parliamentary debate, I asked what we were going to do, immediately and urgently, to deal with the homelessness crisis faced by hundreds of people. That quickly became a larger number, because over the following days there was an evacuation of residents from the Lancaster West estate surrounding Grenfell Tower. Having been the Member of Parliament for that area, I knew well the sheer scale of the homelessness diaspora resulting from Kensington council’s behaviour, and indeed of the wider homelessness problems in London.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, people were sleeping rough. How was that allowed to happen? We discussed the issue, yet it was allowed to happen. It is important that we remember that five years on, because the way in which the institutions of the state failed the survivors, the relatives and the wider community set a tone for the whole of the following five years. Understandably, that fed into a deep and profound sense that they could not rely on the institutions of the state to offer them support and justice. One of the things that we have to do today is recognise that epic failure and collectively apologise for it. I am ashamed. Anybody who went down to north Kensington over those following days could not believe their eyes in seeing a failure on that scale.
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. I have been in this place for only five years; the Grenfell fire and its aftermath have been a defining part of my term. A number of buildings in my constituency are still wrapped in unsafe cladding. Despite many years of promises that leaseholders would never have to foot the bill for fire safety and remediation work, and despite the Fire Safety Act and the Building Safety Act, leaseholders are still being burdened with thousands of pounds of debt to pay for all the fire safety and remediation work to be completed.
I totally agree. So many people still live with the fear, the risk and the stress of having to contribute financially. As we have said again and again, so many of the people who bear the burden of cost and risk are the very last people in the chain of responsibility to have had anything to do with the circumstances in which they are trapped.
Five years on, as the inquiry continues its work, the Home Office’s decision not to implement the inquiry’s recommendation
“that the owner…of every high-rise residential building be required…to prepare personal emergency evacuation plans”
sends out the worst possible signal, particularly to survivors and to the north Kensington community, who are looking to the inquiry for answers on the long road to justice.
This is the fifth anniversary of an avoidable tragedy of epic proportions—a tale of corporate malfeasance, incompetence, indifference and institutional inertia, even after the Lakanal House fire had given us all the signals that Government action was needed. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East, I pay tribute to Peter Apps and Inside Housing for years of painstaking work in following the inquiry, reporting on it and giving us the information that we need to follow what would otherwise be a very complex story.
The chains of reporting by Peter Apps make salutary reading for every Member of this House, because they lay so bare what has gone wrong. For example, contractors and developers knew that the cladding system would fail. As Peter Apps has reported:
“In an email exchange…designers of the tower’s cladding system wrote: ‘There is no point in “fire stopping”. As we all know; the ACM will be gone rather quickly in a fire!’”
It is worth reading the dozens of reports that have been put on record in the inquiry, which give us revelations of that kind.
I can only agree with the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) about the complacency that infused the entire safety system and the emergency planning. I hope that the Moore-Bick inquiry will address that point in the fullness of time, although it is taking so long, which is what I want to address today. If my comments today have a theme—I appreciate that this is possibly controversial—it is about learning, not necessarily blaming. There may be people to blame, but we need to learn.
It is terrible for survivors and for victims’ families and friends that we are here five years on, but there is still no closure or resolution for them. As every hon. Member knows, people come to see us after a terrible accident or mistake with the words—echoed by the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), who so capably opened the debate, and by my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan)—“I just want to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.” The living victims of Grenfell still feel as far as ever from that confidence, and I dedicate my speech to them.
I will set out the two main recommendations made in the submission to the Grenfell inquiry that I co-authored with the right hon. Nick Raynsford, former MP for Greenwich and Woolwich and a former Minister for housing and for fire and rescue services, who is now chair of CICAIR, the Construction Industry Council Approved Inspectors Register; Kevin Savage, a leading figure in the building control profession; and Keith Conradi, current chief investigator of the health services safety investigations body, which arose from a recommendation from the Public Administration Committee, which I chaired, and previously chief investigator of the air accident investigation branch of the Department for Transport, who therefore brings a wealth of expertise to the panel of drafters of our submission on the question of safety systems and safety management, and accident investigation. The inquiry has not yet published our submission, but has given me permission to place copies in the Library. I hope right hon. and hon. Members will find it helpful.
When I think of Grenfell, which I often do, I think first of the people who died; not just that they died—72 people, including 18 children—but how they died. I forced myself to read the accounts of what happened—the phone calls made that night, the people waiting for rescue that never came. It is harrowing. They are well documented, partly through the inquiry and partly through what the families themselves have done. I cannot look at the pictures of the building in flames, but nevertheless I cannot get them out of my head because they were everywhere when the fire happened.
Next, I think of all the thousands of people whose lives were changed by the fire: the survivors and their families, and the wider community. It was a very mixed community in Grenfell, with many people of middle eastern and north African descent, often second and third generation, who had settled in the area and had wider families not only across Kensington but in my constituency of Hammersmith and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who spoke so well earlier. These are big, close communities and this has had an effect on the whole area, and indeed the whole of London and beyond.
I also think of the scandal of the negligence that has been revealed, in its infinite complexity, leading up to this one event. The breadth and depth of the mistakes that were made and the things that went wrong are affecting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people across this country. Too many people have insulted all these groups of people by the way in which they have responded over the last five years. That includes the Government, the building industry and other industries involved, local authorities and other social landlords, and private landlords. Everybody has failed on a catastrophic level by causing the problems that now have to be dealt with, but the Government bear a particular responsibility, not only because they created the climate that enabled much of this negligence to happen but because they have not stepped up to the plate in tackling it.
The hon. Gentleman is completely right in what he is saying. The 18-metre limit is a completely arbitrary distinction. Far more people die in fires in low-rise buildings, especially houses of multiple occupation, than in high-rise buildings. The 18-metre limit is a media-driven preoccupation, and I could even say that the preoccupation with cladding is a media-driven preoccupation. This whole process has been driven by public pressure, not real risk assessment, which is what we need. That is why we are proposing the reform of building control.
I very much thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention; he has put it very clearly and succinctly. I started with cladding and insulation—I have quite a long list—because that is where we have seen some activity. As I said, it is not the correct activity and it has not been done quickly, comprehensively or logically enough, but there has been a focus on cladding, then on cladding and insulation, and then on other matters that relate to cladding. It has spread out very gradually and slowly from there, but I just make the point that when we drill down, we find that there is still a long way to go, and it is impossible not to conclude that the reasons for that are partly financial and partly that the Government are overwhelmed and do not have the support they need.
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The deep sense of injustice goes all the way back to day one of the atrocity. Hours after the fire, a public inquiry was announced, even though families had wanted the criminal investigation to go first. I remind the House that, while bereaved and affected families were mourning their loved ones, seeking a new place to live and trying to continue to bring up their children and look after their parents, they had to launch a public campaign over the nature of the public inquiry to stop it from being done to them rather than with them. They were initially refused the simplest of demands for the public inquiry to be led by a broad-based panel; a demand to help them have trust in it. There had to be protests, marches and petitions signed by more than 150,000 people to get the House to even debate such an inquiry panel before it was belatedly granted. As shadow Justice Secretary during the fire and its aftermath, I was privileged to work with the families as they campaigned for that simple demand, but I remember feeling sick to my stomach that their energies had to go into fighting for something that should be a basic right.
From the very outset, the confidence of the survivors and bereaved family members in the justice system was damaged and it is clear that it has not been repaired. As Grenfell United said this week:
“For 5 years we’ve had to endure a justice system that protects the powerful. A system that prevents justice. Whilst this system exists, we face the same unachievable battle as the many before us. From Aberfan, to Hillsborough, justice has been denied & #Grenfell is no different. They left us to search for answers, they mocked us publicly. Now, they stand in the way of justice. We must pave a new way forward. We must hold those responsible to account.”
We know that this experience of our justice system is not a one-off. Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday are just two examples of when the state blocked the truth and justice for years, sowing distrust and undermining justice.
Going forward, one way to show that lessons have been learnt would be to make changes, so that families do not have to fight for years more than necessary in inquiries to get justice. For many, the history of inquiries in this country often gives the impression that they are there to slow down justice and deny justice. We should implement the Hillsborough law, backed by the Grenfell families, as a matter of the utmost urgency. It would not address all the issues that led to such appalling treatment of the Grenfell families, but it would ensure that in future the scales of justice are not so tilted against ordinary families and in favour of public authorities who hold all power. But of course, true justice will only be done when those responsible, be they politicians, officials or company decision makers, are fully held to account, including through the criminal courts.
We have heard a lot in recent days about ensuring that this atrocity never happens again, but the Grenfell families believe that, five years on, another Grenfell is a very real possibility. Already at the inquiry there has been a mountain of evidence of how profits were prioritised over safety, how privatisation and deregulation watered down building standards, and how cuts and austerity contributed. All that must be tackled if the words “never again” are not just platitudes from politicians. The lessons from the inquiry must be implemented in full, however uncomfortable that is for the Government. But there are already deep concerns that lessons will be ignored and that they already are being ignored.
The Government, so far, have failed to implement a single recommendation directed at them from the first phase of the inquiry. Worse still, they are actively rejecting some of the recommendations. One key recommendation from the inquiry’s first phase was to make it mandatory for owners of high-rise flats to arrange personal emergency evacuation plans, known as PEEPs, for disabled people. Of the 37 disabled people living at Grenfell, 15 lost their lives—41%—yet the Home Office recently rejected that recommendation. It is a total scandal that once again profits seem to be being put before life, with the Government labelling this recommendation impractical and too costly. That breaks a previous Government promise to implement the recommendations in full. What is the point of an inquiry if the recommendations are then rejected?
Peter Apps, the journalist who has perhaps best covered housing and fire safety in the aftermath of Grenfell, says that that happened after the Home Office had one-to-one conversations with building owners and ignored its own consultation responses. No wonder Edward Daffarn, a Grenfell resident who warned of a catastrophic fire months before it happened, says that the Government are playing Russian roulette with people’s lives.
As well as the danger to their lives, as End Our Cladding Scandal has so well documented, there are the financial costs, with many living in unsafe homes that they cannot sell and facing bankruptcy because their house has plummeted in value. This is affecting their physical health and their mental health. Surely, five years on from Grenfell, one of its legacies should be an end to all unsafe homes.
I want to conclude with the words of the families in a statement made this week:
“We don’t want our 72 to be remembered for what happened, but for what changed.”
Those are their words. We need more than the apologies of politicians. We need more than an inquiry. We need to see justice properly done and we need real change to the practices, cultures and policies that led to so many people needlessly losing their lives five years ago.
One of the first things that I did when I got to this place was to give a speech on Grenfell. It was January 2020, following my election in December 2019. I called then for all the recommendations of the Grenfell inquiry to be implemented, and to be implemented at speed, and I reiterate that call today.
What we collectively need to do is to ensure that a tragedy of this kind can never be allowed to happen again, and I am determined that I will do what I can to ensure that such a tragedy does not happen again.
Homelessness was one of the first issues raised, but it took months—it took years—for the housing needs of Grenfell survivors, relatives and the community to be dealt with, even though they were recognised within hours of the fire. The second immediate issue raised in Parliament on that day was the need for justice—the need for those responsible to be held to account for what had happened. We did not immediately know exactly who was responsible—which components of the system, from building design and maintenance to the emergency response—but people knew that there was a need for justice.
I do not think anybody would now say that the passage of five years means that justice has been served. That is not in any way a criticism of the inquiry, which has been profoundly rigorous in going about its work, but justice delayed is justice denied. Five years is far too long for the community to wait for justice. Urgency was the prevailing tone in the immediate aftermath of the fire, but five years on, the promise of urgency and the commitment to urgency have been denied. The community has been let down profoundly as a consequence.
Building safety has been a dominant theme in Parliament in the intervening five years, but we need to reflect again on emergency planning. The fact that it failed so catastrophically in Kensington tells us something quite profound, which we continue to raise in other contexts: there is an institutional belief that these kinds of things cannot happen here. There is a complacency about risks that should have been shattered comprehensively, forever, by what happened five years ago, but it has not. Again and again, we see the expectation that we should drive towards a deregulatory approach to services and a de minimis public sector, even though the capacity of the public sector, which failed so badly on that day, is so essential to ensuring that such things cannot happen again.
Within days and weeks of Grenfell, it became quickly apparent that hundreds of thousands of people across the country were living in buildings where such things could happen again—in some cases, they still are. That possibility has dominated our discussions in this Chamber. Ten days after Grenfell, I had to attend a meeting of desperate and frightened residents of a six-block, 22-storey estate in north Westminster that overlooked Grenfell Tower and had been covered with the same form of cladding. In many ways, they have been the fortunate ones: they went through terminal upheaval as the cladding was removed over the following winter. However, 10,000 buildings continue to be covered with some form of cladding. The people in them live with that risk. In many cases, they also live with the reality that they face financial ruin and are trapped, unable to move.
I completely recognise that the Government have taken some steps in their legislative programme to implement proposals on fire safety and building safety, but so little has been done compared with what is needed.
Five years on, I pay tribute to the survivors, the relatives, their representatives, the mosques, the churches, the community and Grenfell United, who have done such extraordinary work, in the aftermath of this tragedy, to hold the community together and support people, their dignity and their campaign for justice. But five years on, there is not yet justice.
Our submission is addressed not to who should be blamed but to some of what should be learned. The remit of the inquiry includes “the scope and adequacy” of the relevant regulations, legislation and guidance. The Building Safety Act reflects in large part the recommendations of the review commissioned by the Government from Dame Judith Hackitt, called “Building a Safer Future”. I thank her and Peter Baker, the chief inspector of buildings, who leads the new building safety regulator; they have both been extremely helpful with our submission, although they may not agree with all of it. We have presented our submission to Ministers, but they are, naturally, awaiting the outcome of the Grenfell inquiry before responding formally.
The Building Safety Act establishes the new building safety regulator based in the Health and Safety Executive. It is responsible for a wide range of activities, including overseeing the safety and performance of all buildings and taking responsibility for control and approval of higher-risk buildings—currently defined as buildings of a height of 18 metres or more, or comprising more than six storeys. It also deals with residents’ complaints, oversees a new competence regime for people working on buildings, advises on the need for changes to building regulations, and oversees and reports on the performance of building control bodies.
We looked carefully at the Hackitt review recommendations and how they have been interpreted by the Government. We recommend, first, that there should be a new, independent building safety investigation body. The interim Hackitt review did not consider how future fires should be investigated, and this seems to me to be a gap in the thinking so far. Under the new regime, investigations will still be carried out by the Health and Safety Executive or by new public inquiries. The length of time that the Grenfell inquiry is taking is yet another example of how public inquiries are likely to leave survivors and their families feeling betrayed for far too long, even though I am certain that, in the end, the Moore-Bick inquiry will be of great value.
There is also a problem that we discovered after Ladbroke Grove: investigations conducted by the regulator can turn out to be conflicted, because the cause of the failure might be a failure of Health and Safety Executive oversight and its regulation. That is not a criticism of the Health and Safety Executive; it is a criticism of the system. The Health and Safety Executive, of which the new building safety regulator is a part, should be precluded from any possibility of having to investigate itself, because it is inherently conflicted. Many, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning), feel that the inquiry into the Buncefield fire was conflicted for exactly that reason, with the result that the inquiry was less authoritative than an independent investigation would have been.
Our proposal for an independent building safety investigator is based on the Rail Accident Investigation Branch of the Department for Transport, which in turn is based on the AAIB—the air accident body. That is what the Cullen inquiry recommended following the Ladbroke Grove rail crash. In rail and other sectors, including aviation, this approach is much quicker, much less costly and more effective than public inquiries, because these bodies acquire a permanent body of expertise and experience.
Like a public inquiry, an accident investigation body establishes the causes of a major incident, but these independent bodies seek not to find who to blame, but to learn from failure for the future. In the case of Grenfell, there may well still be people to blame and to prosecute, but people who make mistakes are very often blameless because they are part of a defective system or failing safety culture. There are many instances of aviation accidents where pilot error has been a contributory factor but the pilot is not blamed for that failure. We have all watched the wonderful film “Sully” about such a failure. These independent bodies make safety recommendations to regulators and to the Government, who are accountable for ensuring that they are implemented.
The hon. Member for Leeds East complained about delayed prosecutions having to defer to the judicial inquiry. Unlike with a public inquiry, the regulator may still conduct a parallel investigation to the safety investigator’s to establish responsibility and, if necessary, to prosecute those at fault, as the Civil Aviation Authority prosecuted the pilot in the Shoreham air crash. The crucial point is that the regulator cannot force the accident investigation branch to reveal witness statements except by High Court intervention. That is essential in accident investigation, because it creates a safe space for those giving their account in which they can talk freely and be completely candid, whether or not they think they are to blame. That speeds the whole process of investigation and engages survivors and their families and the bereaved. There is no safe space for candour under the Building Safety Act, and this must change.
Our second principal proposal concerns building control. We propose a new regulatory system for building control. We propose that approved inspectors, who are the private sector, and local authority building control, which is the public sector, should both be regulated on an equal basis, as in any other safety-critical profession. There is currently no licence regime or register for local authority building control and no dedicated independent scrutiny or regulation of its service, yet the failure of local authority building control appears to be one of the factors that led to the Grenfell disaster. Ironically, the proposals that have been brought forward seem to treat the private sector with more suspicion than the public sector, even though it seems that the public sector is what failed in the case of Grenfell.
Building control bodies are responsible for checking building work to verify that it complies with building regulations. Building control work can be carried out either by private firms, known as approved inspectors, or by local authority in-house building control bodies, which have a statutory duty to provide building control services in their area. To be approved to provide building control services in the private sector, authorised inspectors, unlike local authorities, must be licensed by CICAIR. Approved inspectors are subject to a code of conduct, regular auditing and a complaints and disciplinary regime leading to suspension of their licence if they are acting improperly or seriously underperforming. Local authorities opposed being subject to the same oversight and inspection regime. There is no credible case for accepting that.
Those are the two recommendations that we submitted to the inquiry. I have not spoken to the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the hon. Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes), who is in his place on the Treasury Bench, so I do not expect him to respond in detail to these proposals. I thought it would be helpful to the House if I laid them out. I repeat that the full text of our submission is now in the House of Commons Library. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will take an interest in it.
When I say that people have been insulted, I mean, for example, why did we not have a full-day debate in Government time on the anniversary? I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) for securing this debate, but it is a Backbench Business debate on a Thursday afternoon, and I think that a full-day debate on the anniversary is the very least that could have been done. People have also been insulted by the response in terms of rehousing—or failure to rehouse—people from Grenfell and the surrounding damaged properties. People have been waiting for years in temporary accommodation or hotels. Other examples include the lack of a proper memorial and the pace at which the inquiry has gone. None of this shows respect, in my view, and at the end of it, people have not been held to account.
Also, we have not what I would call a permissive response from the Government, and that is what I want to spend most of my speech talking about. The Government have been asking experts to tell them the full extent of the problems, and then responding. Every step of the way, everything has had to be dragged out, whether it is money, concessions or legislation, in order to get only a very little distance down the road to where we need to be. Let me just run through some of those issues on which we are failing.
We know a lot about cladding and insulation, but determining the types of cladding that have been banned—whether they have been banned in the sense of being removed from existing buildings or not being allowed to be put on to new buildings—and what types of buildings are affected has been done in a very slow and erratic manner, and the most recent changes are pretty de minimis, frankly. The Government have now decided that hotels, hostels and boarding houses over 18 metres should be included in the ban, but what about residential and other buildings that are under 18 metres—and indeed, under 11 metres? What about other buildings that might be at risk, possibly because of their function or because of the people who live in them or go to school in them, such as hospitals or hotels? There is no comprehensive response.