Florence Eshalomi

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell) on outlining the concerns of his constituents. In the short four-and-a-half months that he has been here, championing their cause has been central to his role as an MP. This evening a number of colleagues will touch on the technicalities outlined in the report. I want to focus my remarks on the survivors and victims of Grenfell. The shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), said that we all remember where we were on 14 June 2017. I remember very well where I was, because my son was just a week old—he was born on 7 June. As a new mum, though a second-time one, I was sitting up nursing him through the night. I remember my husband coming into the room and asking “What are you watching? Why’ve you still got the TV on? What film is this?” It was not a film; it was real life. I sat there during the night, which many Members probably did as well, just watching that fire. Remembering back to that scene, things were dropping that we might have thought were items, but they were people. Today’s debate has to be about the victims of Grenfell, their families and the 72 people who died. In May 2023, I went to the Serpentine gallery to watch a short film produced by Steve McQueen. It is a 24-minute film that follows a drone or a helicopter coming in from way out near Heathrow. It is an aerial shot, and quite silent—at first, you can hear the sirens and the noise in the background, but as it gets closer and closer to Grenfell Tower, there is just silence. That aerial shot gives a good overview of just a tall, charred building. As the helicopter goes around the building, you can see inside—the debris, the remnants and the forensic cases. But what is glaringly obvious in that film is blackness. You can almost smell the burning as you watch the film. I challenge anyone who has not seen it to try to watch that film. I think about the families and the victims, and their long battle for justice. We are now going into the eighth year. This is a fight that they should never have had to endure in the first place. We as a House must have the courage to deliver a fairer society for them—one where the pain they feel can never be inflicted on anyone again. I cannot imagine the anger they feel at the deep failures outlined in the phase 2 report. It outlines over a decade of missed opportunities to identify the risks associated with combustible cladding. The shadow Secretary of State quoted it, as did the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos), and I will quote again. There were “deliberate and sustained strategies” from cladding providers “to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data and mislead the market.” Shame on them. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] That was compounded by a complete failure of oversight within the Government at every level, and the local council, which ignored residents who raised those safety concerns. The Grenfell disaster represents nothing less than a catastrophic failure of the duty to provide people with even the most basic level of safety. Yet here we are, more than seven years down the line, and those responsible for this tragedy have still not been brought to justice. As a slap in the face, thousands of people up and down the country still go to bed every night knowing that their building is wrapped in this unsafe cladding. Can you imagine the mental toll? We asked those same people to sleep in their homes and not leave during the covid pandemic, knowing full well that if their building went up in flames, they could not escape. Many of those people are my constituents in Vauxhall and Camberwell Green. Like many other Members of this House, I have had conversations with constituents who are caught up in the cladding scandal through no fault of their own, with the ripple effects of this crisis ruining their lives to this day. We must solve this as a national emergency. I was shocked that the National Audit Office said that we could not expect an end to the remediation until 2035, which would be 18 years after Grenfell. I therefore welcome the Government’s commitment to step up the pace and finally set a deadline of 2029 for the completion of the remediation. I also welcome the fact that the Government adopted measures to improve fire safety standards on 2 September, and that they have promised the House that they will address the recommendations of the phase 2 report within six months of its release. As Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, I look forward to that, and will be holding Ministers to account. However, as important as those steps are, we cannot pretend that these announcements do enough—they do not address the systematic failures that led to the Grenfell disaster. I urge Members to read part 4 of the report, if they have not already done so. It outlines how residents felt that the tenant management organisation was an uncaring and bullying overlord that belittled them, marginalised them and regarded them as a nuisance. That behaviour is something that I saw growing up on a council estate, and it may feel familiar to others who grew up in social housing: we know the stigma we faced and the assumptions made about us; we know the disdain we faced from housing providers; we know how often we are ignored, despite knowing our communities better. I take on the challenge raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater in putting the question of how we address the systematic culture back to the Government. Like I said, it does not cost anything for someone to respect their constituents or customers. We must not ignore how this systematic discrimination against people and treating them as a box-ticking exercise leads to tragedies such as Grenfell. While there are no recommendations on the TMO and tenant relationship in this report, I urge Ministers to look closely at how such relationships work, and at how we can swing the pendulum back to ensure that tenants are listened to. While it is not mentioned in this report, we must acknowledge that those killed in the fire were disproportionately from black and minority ethnic communities, which suffer from racism and the hostile environment. I want to speak specifically about disabled people, too; they were failed by a basic lack of safety provisions at Grenfell. They have also been failed by delays to the implementation of personal evacuation plans, which leaves disabled people with no clear escape route in a fire, unable to evacuate with everybody else—left to simply hope, pray and wish that the fire does not reach them. I first raised the issue back in 2022 with the then Prime Minister, and nothing has changed since then. I therefore welcome the Government’s commitment today to deeper information sharing between the authorities and emergency services on the requirements of disabled residents. However, I am concerned that Ministers are falling short on four of the recommendations of the Grenfell inquiry. I will be following this up with the Department. These are people who were never listened to back in 2017, and they are not being heard now. They could not hold their local authority to account when their problems were not dealt with, and some of them still cannot do that today. I urge the Government to act on the findings of the phase 2 report in full, but they must go further to address the inequalities at the heart of the Grenfell fire disaster. It is more than seven years since 72 people lost their lives. If we are honest as a House, the problems faced by Grenfell victims are still faced by people up and down the country today. This will be fixed only if the Government look beyond targets to address the toxic culture in our housing sector that Grenfell so tragically exposed. This work demands a lot from all of us, but we can and must ensure it never happens again.