Fire Safety and Cladding — House of Commons, 2019-01-23
Topic: Housing
Steven Mark Ward Reed (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful again to my hon. Friend for her intervention. One really cannot exaggerate the pain that has been caused. When anybody puts their most beloved and treasured possessions in a facility and are assured that it is safe, they deserve to know that it actually is safe. I met an artist who had lost a lifetime’s artworks, which she had created. I met a DJ who collects first-edition reggae albums on vinyl. All of that is gone in the fire, all of it irreplaceable. No money can replace that Of course, many businesses today keep their stock in facilities like these, and many businesspeople have lost their stock. Even if it was properly insured, the short-term loss of that stock means that they have lost a whole quarter’s trading, which is enough to put many small businesses under. I really do think that the Minister needs to consider what emergency support is available for the people facing real hardship and crisis as a result of the fire Many colleagues have raised concerns about the level of fire safety at the Shurgard facility, and I share those concerns. When I met a group of customers, that was one of the biggest areas giving them cause for concern that they raised with me. A customer putting their possessions in a self-storage facility would assume that there had been some effort, when designing it, to prevent the spread of fire, should a fire take hold. In fact, the walls in the individual units in this facility did not go right up to the ceiling—there was a gap between the top of the unit and the ceiling—so a fire that started in one unit could quickly and easily move into the next, and then the next and beyond. It seems to me shocking that these facilities are built without designing in measures to prevent the rapid spread of fire Customers using that facility reasonably assumed that a sprinkler system was installed in case of fire. In fact, there is no sprinkler system in that facility, and there is no requirement for self-storage units to have sprinkler systems. Another point is that Shurgard did not ask their customers to report or keep a record of what they were storing in that self-storage facility. Someone could put all their most treasured possessions in the unit they were renting, but the next-door unit could be filled up with barrels of oil or something equally flammable, and nobody would ever know If we put all that together, there were in effect no fire safety measures whatsoever in this facility. It was advertising a service as safe and secure for people to keep their goods in, but it simply was not. It was taking money from people, and then not providing the service that people expected. If things go wrong—and on new year’s eve in Croydon they went severely wrong—everything people owned would have gone: it would have been taken away, and they would have lost it Shurgard has been very clear with me—I have met it to discuss this—that it has complied with all UK fire safety regulations. I do not know whether that is true, but that is the point it has made to me. If what it says is true and it was fully compliant, those regulations need to be reviewed and tightened as a matter of urgency.