Hilary Benn

I unreservedly welcome the Bill. The story of the cladding crisis arose out of the appalling tragedy at Grenfell on that night over nine years ago, when all those people died in the place they should have felt most safe—their home. They died because of a series of catastrophic failures. The first and most obvious failure was that cladding was allowed to be put in combinations on the sides of buildings when no one had actually tested what would happen if those combinations caught fire. It is astonishing, when one looks back at it, that architects were able to specify combinations. We now know that when some of those combinations had been put on rigs and set fire to—boom!—they had gone up very quickly. The second thing—my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell) spoke so well—is that we are here, over nine years after the event, and we still have not sorted it out. I am much struck by the example that he quoted from Australia; he is right. Many of my constituents have been affected by the cladding scandal. For most of them, it is fair to say, their homes have now been dealt with, but there are still far too many people whose homes have not been. The reaction of the Government at the time was, “Well, it’s not really our responsibility.” They had to be forced by stages, over the years, to do more and more. There was also a failure to build the blocks in line with the building regulations at the time. It is one thing to look at the cladding—people said, “Oh, I didn’t know that was a problem”—but as it was pulled off buildings, one after another, what did we find? We found that the fire-stopping measures, the firebreaks, were missing—even though that was a requirement of the building regulations at the time. This is a story of a load of jerry-built buildings that people lived in for many years, as one Member said, with no idea that they were living in a fire trap. I make that point because, on occasion, I have heard Members in this Chamber lambast Britain as an over-regulated society. I mean, give us a break! This story is a monumental failure of regulation. People died as a result, and many other people’s lives have been put on hold, as we have heard. I join others in paying tribute to the End Our Cladding Scandal group, Leeds Cladding Scandal, and the many constituents who have raised cases with me and who have worked so hard to try to change the circumstances in which they find themselves. Time and again, people have said to me, as they have to all other hon. Members, “I thought I’d bought the home of my dreams, and I find I’m living in a nightmare that I don’t seem able to get out of.” Many Members have referred to people’s lives being put on hold. That is absolutely true: they cannot get on with things, whether having a family or moving to another part of the country where they have been offered a good job, because they cannot sell their flat. There appears to be no escape. The bills go up, the waking watches are costly, insurance is expensive and service charges go up. I remember the first constituent who told me, “I’ve had to move out of my flat.” I said, “You’ve moved out of your flat?” He said, “Yes, I couldn’t afford the bills, so I moved out of my flat; I’m now renting it, so I can pay the bills that I can’t afford in the flat that I thought was the home of my dreams.” Each block, particularly the ones that have not yet been remediated, is a very complex story—changing ownership, developers disappearing or going bust, the legal pass the parcel, which was mentioned in a previous speech, and mortgage lenders refusing to lend. The hard truth is that no legislation is going to require a mortgage lender to lend on a property it does not want to lend on. The mortgage lenders therefore have to have confidence.