Fire Safety and Cladding — House of Commons, 2019-01-23
Topic: Housing
Steven Mark Ward Reed (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention, and she is absolutely right. I have seen previous Secretaries of State stand at the Dispatch Box and say that those responsible need to take responsibility. It is the Government who are responsible because the Government failed to act on the instructions and advice of the coroner following the tragic and fatal Lakanal House fire in 2009. The Government are responsible for the situation that these people find themselves in, and the Government should take responsibility for giving those people a way out of this, without burdening them with unmanageable debt or pointing the finger at all sorts of other people who they say have a moral obligation to act, when that is unenforceable in any court The only way this can be dealt with is if the Government take direct action. As my hon. Friend said, the Government failed to clarify the regulations and guidance after the fire at Lakanal House. It is not about an individual Minister or Secretary of State—there has been a whole string of them ever since that time: Eric Pickles initially, but subsequently Greg Clark, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab—[Interruption.] I am sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker, I cannot remember their constituencies. A string of Secretaries of State have failed to take appropriate action in line with the guidance that they were given. A previous Housing Minister, who is now the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, failed to act in this circumstance. I am afraid that collectively the Government are culpable for what has happened, and failed to act when they were told that action was necessary to prevent a repeat of Lakanal House. Of course, it was repeated horrifically in the disaster at Grenfell Tower I thought long and hard about why the Government would not act on that advice, and I have come to the conclusion that what is going on in this sector is nothing short of a national scandal. There is a tangled web of conflicts of interest that have led to the framework for fire safety regulations being wholly inadequate. The Building Research Establishment is a privatised organisation that helps to write fire safety regulations and drafts fire safety guidance. Its chief executive sits on the Government’s expert panel on fire safety, and one of its trustees, Sir Ken Knight, was until recently the Government’s chief fire safety adviser The BRE has a direct financial interest in the sector. It makes money by allowing cladding manufacturers to run fire safety tests on rigs that it sets up. The manufacturers are allowed to rerun those tests multiple times, with various adjustments, until they get the result that they want. There is no requirement on them ever to disclose the outcome of the final successful fire safety test—it is considered commercially confidential—nor is there any requirement on them to report publicly how many times their product failed a fire safety test before finally passing it The BRE makes money every single time a different rig is put up and a product is tested for combustibility. It has a direct financial interest in permitting the use of flammable cladding, because testing it is how it makes its money, and it was people with a direct interest in the BRE who advised Ministers not to ban combustible cladding. It is an absolutely shocking and scandalous network of conflicts of interest that the Government should never have allowed to happen.