My Lords, I begin by acknowledging the bereaved family members of those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire, as well as survivors and members of the local community. Nothing that can be said in this House can diminish the loss they have endured or the impact this tragedy has had on their lives, but they have the respect of this House and of the country as a whole.
The fire at Grenfell Tower, which claimed the lives of 72 people, was a profound and avoidable tragedy. Its consequences continue to be felt by bereaved families, survivors, the local community and far beyond. Grenfell must never be forgotten, and we must continue to ensure that nothing like it can ever happen again. There remains much work to do on justice, reform and making homes safe, but this Bill is concerned with one clear and specific responsibility: how we remember Grenfell and how we ensure that remembrance is properly supported over the long term.
From the outset, I want to be clear with noble Lords. This is a simple Bill with a focused purpose. It exists to provide the statutory authority necessary to support the construction and long-term care of a Grenfell Tower memorial and related activities. The design of that memorial and the way it is shaped must remain with the bereaved families, survivors and the community. This Bill is intended to support that work, not to replace or override it.
Grenfell has never been, and must never become, a matter of party politics. It is about doing what is right and keeping our word. A commitment was made to support the bereaved families and survivors to create a fitting and lasting memorial at the site of Grenfell Tower. This Government are honouring that commitment. That is why the independent Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission was established in 2019. From the beginning, its work has been community led: listening to bereaved families, survivors and the immediate community, and helping to shape a shared vision for the future of the site.
My Lords, none of us will forget the events of 14 June 2017. The shock we all felt is nothing to the pain that the Grenfell community have suffered. We can never fully appreciate the cost of the Grenfell fire to those who were there that night and those who are part of that local community. They have shown such bravery in their fight for justice and I pay tribute to that community, who have demonstrated such resilience in the wake of this tragedy. Through the inquiry, they have been fighting for justice for eight years now. I know that noble Lords across the House share my hope that that community will soon get some further closure.
I thank the Minister for bringing forward the Bill, which represents an essential step forward for the delivery of a lasting memorial for the 72 people who tragically lost their lives as a result of the events of 14 June 2017. Every one of them deserves to be remembered. Their memory ought to be cherished, and Ministers are right to progress this important work to deliver a fitting memorial for the whole of the Grenfell community. Indeed, the memorial is not just for the 72 who died as a result of the Grenfell Tower fire; it is also for the 74 people who were injured and for the friends and families of all those affected by the fire. It is also for those who live nearby and who have links to that community. It is for all those who have been affected by the fire.
I pay tribute to the Minister for continuing the hard work that was initiated under the previous Government. I am also grateful to the Minister in the other place, Samantha Dixon MP, for taking the time to meet me to discuss both this Bill and the ongoing work to support the entire Grenfell community. I also pay tribute to all those who have supported the Grenfell community since the fire, in both national and local government—the MHCLG in particular—the RBKC and its officers, the NHS, the voluntary sectors, the community groups and the memorial trust. Their work has been vital and I know that they will continue to support the Grenfell community.
My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend the Minister for her words and for the continued commitment, which she is correct to say started with the previous Government. I welcome her comments that this is not a political matter but one of moral duty and the necessity to recognise that a tragedy of this scale speaks to the state of our nation—not just of our politics, of our housing, of people’s class or where they come from, but actually the state of the nation. The sensitivity with which my noble friend the Minister spoke is greatly appreciated, and I hope that those out in the community and the immediate families of those who lost their lives will recognise the intent, as spoken, that they are to be given the power to determine what the physical manifestation of this memorial should be.
In that context, I do not intend to speak to the principle of the memorial that has to exist on that site, because I do not believe it is for anyone in this House to speak to that, nor to define it. It is not our privilege nor is it our right, because we did not lose our loved ones. I hope that those conversations will continue and, as the speakers clearly expressed in those first two opening statements, the way it progresses has to lie in the control and power of those who lost their dearest loved ones. I hope we do not rush that, and I commend my noble friend Lord Boateng, who so ably led the commission with that in mind and charted such difficult waters. I think it is the sole job of this House and the other place to hold the Government of the time to account on that matter, and to demonstrate and evidence that there has indeed been conversation with those families, and that there has indeed been a richness of process that allows for divergence of thought, because grief is personal.
In that sense, I have nothing further to say. I did not have any notes, because I tried to write something, but I could not. Instead, I would like to speak to what I think “memorial” must mean for the state and for society, because I think they are separate things. Sometimes they are conflated, whether in statements around justice or around change, but what we are talking about today, in respect of a physical memorial, is very different from what I think the memorial should be for the rest of the nation, and the reason I say this is because of what I witnessed that night.
My Lords, any community that forgets its memory becomes senile. Remembering Grenfell Tower and those who died in the fire, which should have been preventable, will save us from becoming senile. The memorial will be a visible reminder, lest we forget.
At the first memorial service held at St Helen’s Church in North Kensington, I was invited to preach by Clarrie Mendy. I described the tower as a tall coffin in the air—a symbol of forgotten people, but people we will constantly remember.
Clarrie Mendy had lost two family members in the fire, and she became a powerful voice in the campaign for justice for those who were affected. She brought in a wide range of community and church leaders from across London. If you Google “Clarrie Mendy Grenfell”, there is a lot of information about the impact she had. Sadly, Clarrie died in 2020 of motor neurone disease, but her legacy is that of somebody who, in spite of loss, saw her work as galvanising everybody so that nobody forgets. May she and all the others rest in peace.
When I went to that service, I took bay leaves from Bishopthorpe Palace gardens for everyone present, and I focused on the leaves of the tree for the healing of the nation—words taken from the Book of Revelation, chapter 22. I am glad that we took a lot of bay leaves, because the church was heaving. Everybody was again determined to never forget what happened at Grenfell Tower. I played a lament on my djembe drum, which went on for some nine minutes. In the silence that followed, we had a community that was determined to make sure that we will not forget.
St Helen’s Church was nearest to Grenfell Tower, and its vicar, Steve Divall, and its people did a lot of work to help. I used to visit it regularly in order to ensure that what we committed ourselves to doing would happen. The Bishop of Kensington was Graham Tomlin, and he too did a lot to help people on the ground. My final words were, “No stone should be left unturned”, and I am very glad that the inquiry left no stone unturned. The Grenfell Tower commission has done an excellent job of making sure that we remember.
My Lords, I rise to speak in support of the Grenfell Tower Memorial (Expenditure) Bill, a piece of legislation that carries with it profound responsibility, as my noble friend Lord Roe of West Wickham said.
The tragedy at Grenfell Tower in June 2017, in which 72 lives were lost, remains one of the darkest moments in our recent history. It is a loss that is measured not only in numbers but in the absence of loved ones, in the silence left behind, and in the enduring grief carried by families and the wider community.
Before I continue, I just want to thank my noble friend Lord Roe for his contribution and for sharing his experience and his memory. His words today really left a mark on me, so I thank him for sharing that and for driving home the importance of this memorial and the lessons and changes that need to be made as a result of this devastating event. We need to make sure that we move forward so that there is change, and that it is long lasting.
The Bill comes before us as a poignant time. Next year will mark a decade since this tragedy. Ten years on and the pain remains, the memory endures and the responsibility to honour those who were lost is undiminished. As my noble friend the Minister said earlier, in legislative terms this is a modest Bill. It does not seek to resolve the many complex issues that arose from this tragedy, nor does it replace the ongoing work of justice, accountability and reform.
But what it does do is essential. It enables the creation of a permanent memorial: a place of remembrance, a place of reflection and a place that ensures that those who lost their lives are never forgotten. That matters, because memory is not passive. It shapes how we honour the past and how we act in the future. The importance of this memorial lies not only in what it represents but in how it is created. It must be led by the voices of the bereaved, the survivors and the community. Their experience, loss and resilience must sit at the heart of this process. This is not simply about building a structure; it is about creating a space that carries meaning, dignity and truth.
My Lords, like every other speaker, I start by remembering the 72 lives lost and the countless others—the victims’ families, friends and the community—whose lives were for ever changed by the fire. The tragedy that took place at Grenfell Tower in the early hours of 14 June 2017 must never be forgotten. I, like others, was deeply moved by the direct witness of my noble friend Lord Roe of West Wickham and the heroism that he described, as well as the horror.
I welcome the Bill so empathetically moved by my noble friend the Minister. It will ensure the establishment of a fitting and lasting memorial, shaped by the community. It will not only commemorate the victims but serve as a lasting reminder of the avoidable actions that must never be repeated.
It is worth reminding ourselves of the stark words of Sir Martin Moore-Bick, chair of the Grenfell inquiry, when phase 2 of his report was published. He said that
“the simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable and that those who lived in the tower were badly failed over a number of years and in a number of different ways by those who were responsible for ensuring the safety of the building and its occupants”.
I and my party welcomed the previous Government’s commitment to delivering the recommendations of the Grenfell inquiry in full, and I support the current Government’s plans to implement them all by the end of the current Parliament to ensure that a lasting legacy of this tragedy will be that everyone is safe in their own home. It was heartening to hear the commitment to this legacy from across the political spectrum when colleagues in the other place considered the Bill last month. I am proud that the same commitment is evident in this House today.
I particularly highlight the need for a change in culture towards one of transparency and accountability: a necessary change that the Grenfell inquiry emphasised. Collaboration across all these Benches is crucial if we are to ensure that such a change in culture is cemented in practice and in delivery, so that a tragedy like this is never allowed to happen again.
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.
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.
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After extensive engagement over several years, the commission published its report, Remembering Grenfell, in November 2023. The report set out clear recommendations, including the creation of a permanent memorial at the site of Grenfell Tower: a private space where elements of the tower can be laid to rest with dignity and respect, and a physical and digital archive, alongside a permanent exhibition, to ensure that the story of Grenfell is preserved honestly, sensitively and with care.
This work has been guided throughout by those most directly affected by the tragedy, and it must continue to be so. Views about the future of the site are deeply personal and not always shared by everyone. The process supported by this Bill is one that remains firmly community led. The Government have welcomed the commission’s recommendations and will support it to carry them forward. Community led design work is now under way, following the appointment of a design team through a selection process that involved bereaved families, survivors and members of the local community.
This is a focused Bill. It provides the statutory authority required for the Government to spend public money on the construction of a Grenfell Tower memorial and on its long-term management and care. It also enables spending on preservation, an archive, an exhibition and a site where elements of the tower can be laid to rest, and allows for land to be acquired and works to be carried out where necessary. Although preparatory work and community-led design are already under way, Parliament must provide the statutory authority required to fund the delivery of this national memorial and ensure its upkeep over the long term. The Bill provides that authority.
I underline one important point for noble Lords. The Bill is deliberately narrow in scope. It does not determine the design of the memorial, make planning decisions or set governance or ownership arrangements. Instead, it does one essential thing: it ensures that the expenditure connected to the memorial is properly authorised, in line with the rules governing public spending and with Parliament’s consent.
Community-led design work will continue while Parliament considers the Bill, allowing progress to remain on course. The memorial will honour those who lost their lives and those whose lives were permanently changed by the tragedy. It will be a place for remembrance, reflection and respect.
The memorial does not diminish the other work that must continue following Grenfell. Bereaved families and survivors have waited far too long for justice. Those responsible must be held to account, and I fully support the Metropolitan Police in what is one of the largest and most complex investigations it has ever undertaken.
We must continue to reform the system so that residents’ voices are heard and safety concerns are never ignored. The Government remain committed to implementing the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry to deliver real and lasting change, and to ensuring that everyone can have confidence that their home is safe.
This is a modest Bill in form but it carries real weight. As I said, it is not about party politics but about how we remember Grenfell, what we learn from it and what we choose to do as a country. It does not address every issue arising from the tragedy, and we acknowledge that there is still much to be done. What it does is ensure that the national remembrance is properly supported and protected, with Parliament’s agreement and in a way that respects the central role of bereaved families, survivors and the community. Above all, it helps to ensure that Grenfell remains part of our national memory and that its lessons continue to shape a safer and fairer future. On that basis, I beg to move.
I turn to the memorial itself. This has taken a long time and that is the right approach. It continues to be essential that work progresses at the community’s pace, not anybody else’s. The Conservative Government ensured that the memorial was budgeted for and I am pleased that the current Government have continued that support. As the Minister said, this is not a political issue. We must work together across political divides to do the right thing for the Grenfell community. Indeed, this is not just a memorial: for many of those who lost their lives in the fire, Grenfell is their final resting place. The site deserves to be treated sensitively and with dignity, particularly for their sake.
In government, we had a cross-governmental committee to ensure that the Government were supporting the Grenfell community. I ask the Minister: how are the Government continuing that cross-government work that we started? The work we did, for example, was on health. This community has health issues unlike any other, both mental and physical: fire, smoke, contamination and all those mental issues that come from being involved in such an incident.
Children’s services were particularly important to me when I was the Minister. The children who had been in their early primary years were now becoming teenagers. Many of them had spent all their childhood in families where Grenfell and the fire were continually there. They saw it day to day when going to and coming back from school, or going to the leisure centre, but their families were also damaged by what they had seen and heard, and what they had lost. I particularly hope, as those young people become teenagers, that we are making sure, across government, that they are supported, protected and helped.
When I talk to the bereaved and survivors, they tell me that there is still no justice, so what are the Government going to do to move this on, to give this community peace and the ability to move forward with their lives? With that in mind, will the Minister confirm that Ministers will continue to engage fully with the Grenfell community as work progresses on the memorial? My honourable friend in the other place, Gareth Bacon MP, said:
“The victims of the Grenfell Tower fire belong at the heart of everything we do in this place and outside it to remember the tragedy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/3/26; col. 706.]
That is a principle that Ministers should keep in mind whenever they are working on the memorial and the other measures to support this community. This was a local tragedy but also a national tragedy, and it is right that the nation should remember in a fitting and lasting way all those who were affected by the Grenfell fire.
We on these Benches are clear that the Government must make good all their commitments on funding, so can the Minister confirm that all the funding pledges will be delivered on time and in full? On a related note, the refurbishment of the Lancaster West Estate for those still living there is an essential project to ensure that the estate is fit for the 21st century, and as a lasting legacy from the bad times to a better time in north Kensington.
Will the Minister update the House on progress on the refurbishment? This work is ongoing, but there is still not clarity on the level of further financial support that may come from the Government. Will the Minister confirm when that final detail will be available? If she cannot, will she at least give your Lordships’ House a commitment to expedite this in the interests of local residents who would benefit from urgent clarity? It is clear that any further delays will only be for the worse for that community.
We have debated the Grenfell inquiry in your Lordships’ House on a number of occasions, and we know that there are people who bear some responsibility for the fire who have not yet been held to account. That is very important to the community. Will the Minister please provide the House with an update on progress towards delivering on the recommendations of the inquiry? How are Ministers furthering efforts to ensure that all those who bear responsibility for the events of 14 June 2017 are held accountable?
Before I sit down, I want to reiterate our firm support for this important Bill which will enable the delivery of the much-promised Grenfell Tower memorial. Ministers are right to continue the work of previous Governments to deliver a memorial that will serve the entire Grenfell community and indeed the nation. We wish the project godspeed, with the hope that it will give some closure and peace to the north Kensington community. We will support the Government in everything they are to deliver on promises made to the Grenfell community.
Since that night, I have thought long and hard about what my place was in that tragedy and what might motivate me to keep going to, I would hope, drive better change in the spaces where I might have a good effect. What has motivated me was both the profundity of what I saw that night and the courage that was embodied in individuals, both rank-and-file firefighters and those who lost their families. Because I have no notes and I could not think of something suitably strategic to say, I would like to tell the story of the night from the eyes of someone who stood there, having been sent in to try to do something to resolve what was a desperate situation on the ground.
In telling the story of these two men, I hope it might bring home to this House the horror of the night. We use words like “tragedy” and “loss of life”, but I cannot explain the granular horror of the night without telling the story of people, of humans, and the courage embodied in both the family of the young man who lost his life, and who I will describe in a moment, and the rank-and-file firefighter. In doing so, I hope we will understand our privilege and that of those who lead industry and who build and refurbish houses. We have something to aspire to, and we should be led by them and not pretend that we lead them. In the same way that the power in respect of the memorial must be given to the families, we must let them, with their courage, lead us in a continued journey and endeavour, not only to improve the built environment but to restore our reputation as a country, because I saw Grenfell as a statement on where the UK had got to. I will now tell the story.
Having arrived at Grenfell, I was confronted by the absolute failure of the building almost immediately—it was so graphic and profound. It was unbelievable that it had happened in this country; it looked like something you might see in another country. Having realised that we would have to end “stay put” immediately—all the investigation that has followed since has shown the trauma that all of it placed, completely understandably, on families—I wanted to go inside the tower to understand what I was sending firefighters into. I queued to run in—we ran in under the shields of our policing colleagues because of the debris falling. I was standing behind a firefighter I had known for some time; I had served with him earlier in my career. Both of us were scared because of the scale of what we were heading into. Then, due to the ferocity of the fire, and due to the nature of where this poor young man had been trapped, the young man jumped from the building. Having jumped from the building, there was a terrible shout. I will never forget the noise of the impact, nor the shout as it came. He hit my colleague full on. He died in the most terrible way, this poor young man, and I thought my colleague had died, because they were both inert on the ground.
Surrounding me were 100 firefighters waiting to go into the tower, so I asked that the body of the young man be moved with dignity and that the body of the firefighter be moved. I went into the tower. Inside the tower, I was confronted by a situation where there were no real services of any kind to provide protection to firefighters on their way in. We did not have enough water, so we were going to commit them, without water, right into the upper reaches of the building. We were in a situation where multiple members of the public were trying to get out of the tower, desperate to save their lives. Bodies were being carried down the stairs. It was a scene of absolute horror on a scale that I had not witnessed before, and I had seen many awful things in my careers in both the Army and the fire service.
It became clear to me that I could not provide any comfort to my colleagues in terms of what we were ordering them to do. So I came back outside the tower and briefed 200 of them. I basically said to them, “Our radios are failing. We have no water. I’m going to ask you to commit into the building—I can’t order you; you have families and you have places you might want to go home to—but I believe it is in the best traditions of our service. At the end of the day, we’ve got breathing apparatus and we’ve got protective kit; it’s what we have to do and it is in the best traditions of our service to the community”. Not a single one of them stepped back; they were terrified but not a single one of them stepped back—and it was the same throughout the night. We had failed as an institution, but rank-and-file firefighters did not, and their courage to this day has lifted me.
As I walked away from that briefing, I came across the gentleman who had been standing in front of me, who I had believed to be dead. He was sitting on the ground serving his breathing apparatus set, having discharged himself from the back of an ambulance. He pulled his drip out, gathered his breathing apparatus set and committed himself into the building to save lives.
A month after taking over the role of commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, charged with changing the institution that needed desperate change and failed that night—along with government, the industry, the local authority and anyone who should have demonstrated any care—I met the family of the young man who had jumped from the tower. Their courage was shocking. Their courage was as significant as the firefighter who had suffered serious injury and then gone back into the tower. They had clarity about what had gone wrong. They told me what had gone wrong. They explained the failure of my institution to me. They explained the failure of government to me. They told me that they expected justice, and they told me what they wanted. To echo the words of both my colleagues here in the House, we are not there yet. They set clear and straightforward expectations.
I am going to end—I apologise for the time taken—simply by saying that the physical memorial that must be laid in Lancaster West is for the families and those who survived. We have a different job to do. If noble Lords ever doubt the necessity of it, I ask them to think of my colleague, the family of that young man, the desperate situation they found themselves in and the courage with which they have lifted themselves since then.
I thank the Minister for her words, and I hope she will agree that it is the duty of this House, along with the other place, to hold ourselves and wider society to account to make sure that those changes are made real.
Let us remember Grenfell Tower and give the Bill before us a resounding yes, lest we forget. Our memory will become senile if we do not do what the commission is asking and what the Bill wants: to enable some financial provision, which needs to be done through an Act of Parliament. I wholeheartedly support the Bill. I wholeheartedly want to thank the Minister for the way she introduced it, and I thank the other two speakers before me, who also focused on the whole question of memory. Memory matters, and when we do not remember, we find ourselves in real, deep trouble. The physical memorial will remind anybody who passes by or who visits that place that some great tragedy happened, but out of it, we are determined to make sure that we remember, because without remembering we find ourselves sometimes drifting into oblivion or thinking that the present troubles are where we need to do all the hard work. We will remember.
While the Bill is focused on funding, it carries the weight of wider moral justice. It is part of our collective duty to remember, to honour and to ensure that the legacy of Grenfell leads to lasting change. A permanent memorial will serve not only as a tribute to those we lost but as a place for future generations to understand the consequences of failure, including the failure to listen to a community and to act on their worries and concerns, as well as the importance of accountability, safety and humanity in public life.
As I said, remembrance must never be passive. It must shape how we act. This Bill gives us the means to do what should always have been done: to create something lasting, respectful and worthy of those whose lives were taken. We cannot undo the past, but we can honour it with purpose and ensure that it is never forgotten. I support the Bill.
I will focus briefly on the social housing sector’s role in the remediation process. Housing associations are crucial to the delivery of the policy. The safety of their residents is of the utmost importance to them, and I know they are working at pace to remediate the buildings under their care. The collaborative approach of government and the social housing sector in the development of the joint plan to accelerate the remediation of social housing and its deadlines has been welcome. There is now a clear plan of action, which is coupled with sufficient resources to deliver the ambitious numbers planned.
The Government have given the social housing sector, including housing associations, equal access to the cladding safety scheme, which was announced in the 2025 spending review. This will be a transformative step towards securing the necessary resources. As everybody has said, progress has been far too slow. Now, alongside the package of measures the Government have introduced to bring about a decade of renewal for social housing, this has given housing associations more capacity to remediate buildings at a faster pace.
Progress is at last being made. Analysis by the National Housing Federation of the building safety remediation data published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government shows that the social housing sector has been completing works at around twice the rate of the private sector. However, it is clear that there is much more to be done, and we need to see this welcome commitment to securing residents’ safety from all actors across the wider housing sector.
It is crucial that the social housing sector has the resources available to continue delivering on its commitment to carry out remediation works as fast as possible. In conclusion, I ask my noble friend to commit to continuing to work closely with the sector to secure the on-time delivery of the deadlines outlined within the joint plan, to ensure that the tragedy that took place at Grenfell is not allowed to happen again elsewhere.
This Bill enables the delivery of a memorial that should be a stark reminder to us all of our duty to ensure the safety of people across the country in their own homes, which should be a long-lasting legacy of this terrible tragedy. I also hope that the memorial, the design of which will be led by the bereaved and the wider community, will be a place of remembrance of those who tragically lost their lives on that dark day in 2017.
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?
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.