Contribution
I pay tribute to the hon. Members for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) and for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), who both spoke very movingly on behalf of the victims of this tragedy who want to see justice done. I venture to suggest that what they want above everything is to know that nothing like this will ever happen again—that whatever happened that night, there will be some glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel and that some good will come of it.
I praise the Secretary of State for recognising that it is the system itself that needs the most fundamental reform, and that the failures of individuals—whatever incentives existed and whatever conflicts were unresolved—were system failures. The cultural shift will come about as a result of a systemic review—a system change.
Hon. Members might well ask why I am taking an interest in this debate. I do not think I represent any community in a high-rise building with cladding problems in leafy Essex. The only interest I have to declare is that it turned out that my late mother was living in a block with unsafe cladding, so, to a very limited and minor extent, my family are suffering the loss of being unable to sell her flat. That is very small beer, but I put that down as an interest I should declare.
I have long taken an interest in safety management systems—ever since I was shadow Secretary of State for Transport at the time of the Ladbroke Grove disaster, when I took an interest in what was being submitted to the inquiry and made a submission of my own, recommending that there should be a systemic approach to the safety system. That resulted in the formation of the rail accident investigation branch of the Department for Transport, with the result that no public inquiry into a rail accident has ever taken place again.
Similarly, as Chairman of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, I took a close interest in patient safety because we received the reports from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. We had Mid Staffordshire and all the maternity scandals, and we had public inquiry after public inquiry, until somebody suggested that there should be an investigation body accountable and answerable to the Secretary of State to look at why things go wrong in patient care and investigate the causes of incidents—without blame, incidentally—to find out what went wrong in order to make recommendations and put it right. Those are the lessons drawn from all the effective safety regimes in other industries, which should perhaps be applied in this case.
I co-authored a submission to the Grenfell inquiry with three others. The first was former Labour Housing and Fire Minister Nick Raynsford, who, at the time, was chairman of the Construction Industry Council approved inspector’s register—CICAIR—which relates to the private sector building control surveyors the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) spoke about. I will come on to that conflict, which the hon. Gentleman is very concerned about.
Another co-author was Kevin Savage, a leading figure in the building control profession; he happens to be a constituent of mine, but that was a coincidence. The third was Keith Conradi, the former chief investigator of the air accidents investigation branch of the Department for Transport—who, as it happens, became the first chief investigator for the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, which, as a result of the inquiry conducted by my Committee, is now a statutory body. He helped set that body up; he is now retired. He helped with the submission.
Keith Conradi in particular enabled us to understand building safety management as a safety management system. The events leading to the Grenfell disaster were not just the random failings or crimes of individuals. Where there is culpability, prosecutions must certainly follow, but that is not the main point. Grenfell and previous fires, such as Lakanal House, demonstrated that there was a comprehensive failure of the safety system that should exist to keep buildings as safe as possible.
We made our submission in September 2021. After seven years—a disadvantage of public inquiries is that they take a very long time—I was disappointed that the inquiry did not really find time to engage with our recommendations. It did publish our submission, but from the recommendations, I think it is fair to say that a number of issues have been handed back to the Department to be resolved. Paragraph 113.58, entitled “Implementing change”, simply suggests that the London Fire Brigade should
“establish effective standing arrangements for collecting, considering and effectively implementing lessons learned from previous incidents”.
That is an odd recommendation when we think about it, because the London Fire Brigade was itself very, very severely criticised in the report. That it should be left responsible for marking its own homework and making recommendations about itself underlines that the lacuna in the recommendations is the lack of an investigation body. There were two other paragraphs about building control that I shall come to: paragraphs 113.37 and 113.38. Those were our two urgent priorities to be addressed in our submission.
By the way, I am very grateful to the Minister for accepting our request for a meeting, which the Prime Minister promised on the Floor of the House when he announced the outcome of the inquiry. We had a very good meeting with the Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention. I think she was taken with our recommendations but I think that they fall to the Minister’s Department, so I look forward to meeting him later this week.