Andy Slaughter
MP for Hammersmith and Chiswick · Labour · United Kingdom
“I welcome the Bill, and thank the Government for introducing it and bringing it back to the House before the summer recess. It is the result of years of committed campaigning, led by the families of the victims and survivors of Hillsborough.”
“I know that case means a huge amount to the hon. Lady as a constituency MP, and I thank her for all the work she does on the Justice Committee. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface. This Bill will be a transforming piece of legislation. I will make one final comment.”
“This would be a new, independent public body that collated, analysed and followed up on the conclusions and recommendations made after official investigations into deaths and state failings, in order to improve oversight and implementation of them.”
“I think I have taken enough time, but I thank the Member for that intervention. This afternoon, the Justice Committee signed off a new major report on legal aid, which will be published on Friday. Those who are interested can read more there.”
“In the time that I have, I will focus my remarks on clauses 1 to 16, which create a new appeals body for immigration and asylum cases known as the independent immigration appeals authority.”
“From that visit, our diagnosis was that these are operational problems. There are two key questions for the House: will the IIAA fix the problems with the current system, and will it be truly independent from the Home Office?”
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“We cannot expect the Government to deal fairly with the profession and, more importantly, with its clients—particularly their poorest clients, who go without representation now—if at the same time they are denigrating those who are trying to carry out this essential work.”
“It is trivial and it is what we have come to expect, particularly from this Prime Minister, but it has serious consequences, as we saw with the attack on lawyers’ offices. The specific aim of the attack—a man has been charged with serious criminal offences as a consequence—was to punish people for simply doing their job. Given the Minister’s distinguished career in the profession, I know he will share those views. I hope he is able to say them publicly. We are told that the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General have expressed their reservations privately to the Home Secretary. I know the Minister is a trusting and ambitious man in Government, and perhaps he will want to put on the record that he also deprecates those attitudes. It is a serious matter.”
“Can the Minister say a bit more about what is promised from those reviews? In a way, it is dispiriting that we are still looking at reviews 10 years on. We all know about the level of need, but it is in the Government’s hands. Can we at least have a sense of urgency and a promise that if it is a fair review and serious problems are found, as I think will be the case—underfunding, or the way that the Ministry acts with the profession—they will be seriously corrected? I repeat what the chair of the all-party parliamentary group, my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North, said: it is not an auspicious time when we have the Home Secretary, and indeed the Prime Minister, making frankly childish and incendiary remarks about lefty lawyers, legal activists and things of that kind.”
“Two years after we were first promised a review, there is still no timetable for the principle of sustainability and the majority part of that review. We have a review of the means test—again, long overdue—but that was paused in June. What is happening on that? Although we do not have a formal review of civil legal aid, I will here quote from the Select Committee’s brief, which, as always, is extremely useful. The Lord Chancellor’s cover letter, which is attached to the Government’s response to the legal professions report, states that, alongside the legal aid means test review, the Government are “looking into the sustainability of the civil legal aid system and will consider the delivery and contractual model for civil legal aid within this work.” Again, that is long overdue.”
“I am pleased to say that, thanks to the generosity of the local authority and others, but in no sense thanks to the Government, our law centre is now growing and thriving again. It is now almost entirely reliant on grant aid and charitable funding rather than legal aid starts. The reviews that are under way have already been mentioned and we welcome them. I am pleased to be taking part in the Justice Committee and the all-party parliamentary group reviews. I hope they will throw up some arguable points to bring to the Government. I am also aware that the Government are themselves undertaking a series of reviews. Will the Minister tell us a little more about the scope and timetable of those reviews and their ambition? Part 2 of the criminal legal aid review was announced in August—part 1 did not do very much—but there is no timetable.”
“The number of providers of civil legal aid has been cut by half over the last seven years, but the number of cases starting has gone down by more than 80% over the period 2010, when austerity first came in, to 2017. A particular point of sorrow for me is the way that law centres and other advice agencies have been treated. I declare an interest as a non-practising barrister, but also as somebody who sat on the management committee of Hammersmith and Fulham law centre for nearly 30 years, and have seen it struggle for survival. Organisations whose very existence is to help other people in need were themselves living hand to mouth from month to month, just to keep going. Frankly, sometimes they were not able to provide anything like a comprehensive service.”
“I am sure that if the Minister were speaking freely, he would say it is wrongly conceived and executed. It is a sin crying out for justice, if not vengeance. The Chair of the Justice Committee said quite a lot about criminal legal aid, so I will not say a great deal about it. The most striking figure is the 8.75% cut in fees—until very recently there had been no increase in fees for about 20 years. There was a cut in 2014 and the net effect of that—the median net profit for practitioners after that—was minus 3%. In other words, businesses were on average running at a loss. Where else would the Government, even in their most intolerant mode, expect people to work for nothing or less than nothing and not complain about it? It is equally true on the civil side.”
“Those are laudable aims, but I would nevertheless urge the Bar Council, the Law Society and other representatives of the profession not to give up yet, because I do not think we can turn our back on LASPO quite yet. I heard what the hon. Member for Henley said, but my understanding of the briefings I have read is that there has been a cut of about 38% in legal aid funding over the past 10 years, from about £2.6 billion to about £1.7 billion. At its lowest point, it was £1.6 billion. In any case, there have been such large cuts that they have threatened the whole sustainability of the field. The changes to the means test have excluded many people on low and moderate incomes from having any access to legal aid. We have the abhorrent innocence tax.”
“I am struck by the fact—I noticed it in one of the briefings we had for today’s debate, from the Bar Council—that there has been a slight change of approach by the professions, perhaps because they have been bashing their head against a brick wall for 10 years. In the Bar Council’s spending review submission, to which it alludes in today’s briefing, it is almost starting from scratch: rather than saying, “Can you put this back into scope? Can you change this back?” it is saying, “This is the basis of what a modern legal aid system should look like.” It talks about access to early legal advice, non-means-tested legal aid for all domestic abuse cases, and early access on social welfare issues.”
“Finally, we got the review of LASPO, slightly beyond the five-year period in which it had been promised during LASPO’s passage. I distinctly remember that report, because it was a well-written report by civil servants that gave all the justifications for why LASPO was wrong, and then threw a few crumbs on the table at the end of it. Yes, it is welcome to have £3 million to support the now huge number of litigants in person; yes, it is great to have £5 million for innovation in the justice system; but compared with the hundreds of millions of pounds that have been sucked out, those sums of money really do not touch the sides.”
“A number of concessions were allegedly made in response to the Government’s many defeats in the House of Lords when LASPO was going through, which turned out to be nugatory. There were a number of significant—but again, small—victories in the court under judicial review in the areas of domestic violence, children’s law and refugee law, which corrected some of the worst features of LASPO. There have been several very moderate and well-reasoned reports over the years, such as the Bar Council report and the Low commission, which have tried to appeal to the Government’s better nature by saying, “At least look at these areas of law in which the most suffering has occurred.” Those reports have mainly fallen on deaf ears.”
“I am afraid that Ken Clarke, now Lord Clarke, who we all appreciate for his stand on Brexit and other matters, was the axeman in these cases, as he so often was in other Governments. He cut a swathe through civil legal aid in particular; that was not his area of practice, so I wonder whether that is a case in point. He was followed by the next Lord Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), who caused the chaos and confusion in criminal legal aid that we are still living with to this day, not just through the cuts in funds but through the way in which it has been so shambolically reorganised. Of course, his reverse Midas touch is known across the piece in the MOJ, and is now a matter of legend.”
“Instead of allowing matters to come within scope unless they were specifically excluded, it required matters to be entered into. The consequence was that the majority of welfare law, private family law, social welfare law, and a whole range of other disciplines—housing, immigration, and so on—was wiped out, or almost entirely wiped out. In practice, those disciplines were wiped out, because most firms could not keep going with what little remained in scope. That was a mistake, and I hope the Government will come to admit that. If they do not, I hope that a future Labour Government will reverse that trend, which has been detrimental to access to justice and equality of arms in the courts ever since. I do not want to dwell on this too much, so I will race through what I think have been the developments over those 10 years.”
“To save time, I would like him to make a series of admissions. I think he probably would admit that the cuts to the Ministry of Justice have been some of the highest, if not the highest, in any Government Department over the past 10 years, that legal aid has been in the frontline of those cuts and, indeed, that those cuts have gone too far. I think that is axiomatic: given that the Government are rowing back from some of the cuts now, there must be some appreciation of that fact. I do not know whether I can stretch my luck and ask the Minister to admit that the premise of LASPO and the criminal legal aid changes that followed it was the wrong approach. As Members present will know, the main feature of LASPO was that it overturned 70 years of practice in legal aid.”
“It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh, and to follow the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill); the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on legal aid, my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck); and a fellow member of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell). We have the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris), a shadow Home Office Minister and the shadow Justice Secretary to come. I hope the Minister is taking that on board and realises the quality, if not the quantity, of what he has. I hope he is not thinking, “Oh, it’s Thursday afternoon in Westminster Hall. It must be Members from London and the home counties present.” I know he is a better man than that.”
“We have heard many excellent speeches in support of amendments that would substantially improve the Bill—God knows it needs improvement—and we have had some excellent briefings from Reprieve and others on what the deficiencies are. It is therefore appalling that we are so constrained by time and by the attitude of Government in pushing this Bill through, possibly to score political points, or just in a cavalier fashion.”
“My hon. Friend is right to highlight Serco. Does she agree that another problem with test and trace is the number of consultants being employed, with more than a thousand from one firm alone—Deloitte—which charges several thousand pounds a day for its senior consultants? Should we not be told how much it is costing and what these people are doing?”
“The Minister mentioned the private sector. Three weeks ago, in named-day questions, I asked her Department for details of the private consultants working at the Joint Biosecurity Centre, but she has still not answered, even though some of the information has been published in the press since. What have they got to hide about the employment of consultants and their cost? Will she now answer those questions and publish that information?”
“With reference to the resolution of the House of 13 October 2014, what steps the Government are taking to recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel, as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution.”
“That is not an answer. Six years ago today, this House voted by 274 votes to 12 to recognise the state of Palestine. Three years ago, the Prime Minister, then Foreign Secretary, said that “you have to have a two-state solution or else you have some kind of apartheid system”. How can there be a two-state solution without two states? The UK’s recognition of the state of Israel shows that we respect its non-negotiable rights. Why should our recognition of the state of Palestine be a matter for negotiation? Are Palestinians entitled to less respect and fewer rights than the Israelis?”
“The removal of section 106 agreements, which, as Shelter says, are one of the few methods of getting affordable homes, the exemption up to 40 or 50 units allowing developers not to include affordable housing, and the permitted development rights will together destroy a majority of the very limited provision for affordable housing that we have. We need subsidy. We need developers to stop sitting on a million approvals that should already have the green light. We need the Government to actually work to incentivise and enable the building of housing. It is a red herring to say that the planning system is preventing that. These are appalling proposals, which will make misery for our communities, and I hope that Government Members will also oppose them.”
“Between them—not only using their own skills and expertise, but through judicial reviews and planning consultants—they make a real difference, and stop the worst excesses of the state when it is brought to bear locally. I can think of, in the last 10 years, the campaigns we fought to stop the demolition of Charing Cross Hospital, the West Kensington estate—750 good social homes—and Shepherd’s Bush market. We have a history in this country of mistakes made by top-down planning. Look at the destruction of communities and charities that occurred in the ’60s and ’70s. A lot of political capital is expended on stopping things happening. I do not regret a moment of that time, but I do regret that those powers will now be taken away from local communities. The Government have a terrible record on affordable housing.”
“Removing the locus of the public from individual applications destroys half a century during which local communities, either through their elected representatives or directly, have been able to influence the built environment—the very substance of where they live. I do not know about other Members, but I regularly speak at my planning committee. I am engaged with about 30 schemes at any one time. I meet—now, I Zoom—residents and I make representations to developers on their behalf. Councillors do the same, and there are the formal powers that a local authority has. However, this is not just about elected politicians. I have the most amazing amenity societies, such as the Hammersmith Society, the Fulham Society, the Hammersmith and Fulham Historic Building Group and many ad hoc groups.”
“It will mean fewer social and affordable homes being built every year, poorer quality housing and local people left with out-of-place buildings and no opportunity to have their say.” Shelter says: “Section 106 agreements between developers and councils are tragically one of the only ways we get social homes built these days, due to a lack of direct government investment. So, it makes no sense to remove this route to genuinely affordable homes”. Is anyone happy? Yes, developers are happy because it slays their opponents, the provision of affordable housing and local democracy, and in the time I have I want to touch briefly on those two points.”
“The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects says that “these shameful proposals do almost nothing to guarantee the delivery of affordable, well-designed and sustainable homes… they could also lead to the creation of the next generation of slum housing.” The Campaign to Protect Rural England says that the “acid test for the planning reforms is community involvement and on first reading, it’s still not clear how this will work under a zoning system.” The Mayor of London says that it “will be a disaster for London and will ride roughshod over communities and locally elected representatives.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), not least because it means that I am second on the grid for once. I notice that there are 55 Conservative Back Benchers hoping to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, no doubt all to heap praise on the Government’s overhaul, or shall we say overturning, of the planning system—not only in the White Paper, but in the consultation and the changes to permitted development rights. These certainly do bring many disparate expert practitioners to the same conclusion.”
“I haven’t heard of a single operator who has said the Job Support Scheme is any good or is even something they can work with.” He says that whereas the Europeans say that “there’s no question of making mass redundancies…Sunak’s Job Support Scheme is all smoke and mirrors. It’s time we started shaming the actions of the government. The support we will be getting is appalling and we will face huge redundancies.” That is the truth and the challenge that the Government are not meeting at present.”
“That is three times what Netflix does, which is half of what public service broadcasting does. Yet that is also being undermined by the further cuts that are going through at the BBC. Finally, let me quote from something I saw when I was waiting for this debate to start—an email that I got from a very successful hospitality business called Beds & Bars, based in my constituency. It also operates in Europe. One can feel the anger when the managing director, Murray Roberts, points out that the UK faces mass redundancies in these sectors while jobs in mainland Europe will be saved. He says: “What we see in the rest of the Europe is that those governments want to help the hospitality sector but the Job Support Scheme in the UK is not going to help anyone.”
“What all these enterprises have in common is that they are the worst affected. They cannot operate but they are getting the least help. Government schemes do not work for them. They do not work for their staff and they particularly do not work for the freelancers on whom many of them depend. I will make just two points. First, these are successful organisations that help themselves. Secondly, the Government schemes are not working for them. I also have the privilege of having had 75 years of the BBC in my constituency. However, we are losing Television Centre because of the cuts in support for the BBC made by the Cameron Government in not supporting the licence fee, and now the BBC is being further undermined in so many ways. The BBC supports the culture sector with £1.2 billion, the largest single such investment, going into its content.”
“In a small borough, we have two premiership clubs and one championship football club—Chelsea, Fulham and Queens Park Rangers—again, all doing really well, whether in building new stands, looking for new grounds or rebuilding their existing grounds. Last but not least, in terms of exhibitions and events, we have lost Earl’s Court but we still have Olympia, which is being refurbished and restored to its Victorian splendour by its new owners. These are great successes, but that is not mirrored by the support that they have been getting from Government over this time. I urge Members to sign the letter that the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) is writing on the events industry, because the neglect of that industry has been one of the great scandals throughout covid.”
“Like other Members, I spoke in Tuesday’s Westminster Hall debate on the contribution of the culture sector to local economies. While I do not intend to repeat what I said then, I do want to re-emphasise just how vital culture, media and sport organisations are to my constituency, not just culturally in terms of promoting diversity and their success in the way that they represent this country, but economically. In constituencies like mine they are as important as manufacturing or finance are to other constituencies. We have live music and entertainment venues such as the Eventim Apollo, which is a beautiful art deco building that has been fully restored by its new owners, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Bush Hall, and the Riverside Studios, Lyric and Bush theatres, all of them in new or expanded premises, and all of them thriving before covid.”
“We need support for freelancers—70% of people who work in this area are freelancers—and that has not been in place throughout the crisis. We need insurance, because without proper insurance schemes it will not be possible to put together productions and put them on at the risk of another lockdown. We need clarity, because it takes at least three months to put together such exhibitions or productions. We need the Government to say: “We will support you until lockdown has ended”. That is the only way we will achieve something. Without that, I fear for the cultural sector across my borough, which I care for deeply, and across the country. I hope the Minister will respond to this.”
“They all do excellent community work, which does not appear to be reflected in the Government’s funding. Notably, the arts fund was directed to prioritise institutions of national or international significance, but that does not cover the whole body of good work that the institutions do. For example, there would have been 45,000 visitors to Christmas shows at the Lyric on Hammersmith Broadway. The Bush theatre is in one of the most deprived parts of my constituency and it drives a large part of the local economy. That is all suffering at the moment. What do we need? We need a payment support scheme—either grants or loans, as applicable to the type of institution—to keep those institutions above the water line for the next year; it probably will be a year.”
“We have lost some iconic venues in the last few years, such as Hammersmith Palais and the Earls Court exhibition centre, but we have Olympia, which is undergoing a major renaissance, the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo and Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and three fantastic theatres—the Lyric, the Bush and the Riverside—all of which were thriving before covid hit and had new or substantially enlarged premises. We have a lot of good smaller venues, such as Bush Hall, which has provided live music for 20 years. They are particularly vulnerable, because they do not have good income streams or reserves of finance, and many of them are in danger of closing down as we speak. The Lyric is consulting on losing about 20% of its staff. None of these theatres can stage productions, because on a 30% capacity they cannot make productions commercially viable.”
“It is a pleasure to be here under your chairmanship, Sir Charles, and to take part in this debate instigated by my fellow west London MP, the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken). For one of the smallest London boroughs, Hammersmith and Fulham packs a big punch creatively in the arts, theatre, live music and exhibitions. These institutions are the lifeblood of our cultural life, but also a main driver of the local economy.”
“We acted within days in relation to the occupation and annexation of the Crimea. Why can we not do the same for the occupied Palestinian territories?”
“As for Gaza, where most of the water is undrinkable and most people are reliant on international aid, as far as the international community is concerned it is still under occupation. So what do we do in the light of this situation? I repeat what the right hon. Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones) said about recognition. The Government say, “When the time is right.” I wonder what would make the time right. Perhaps the Minister can tell us. Recognition would be a positive step. We cannot continue trading with settlements that are illegal under international law or supporting companies that do that. One positive thing is that many groups, from all sides of the equation, have come together to condemn the recent threats of annexation. I hope that that is a way forward, but it comes at a bleak time.”
“It does rather look as though all of this is rewarding bullying, in the sense that, by taking the threat of annexation off the table, albeit temporarily, Israel gains benefit. However, that is something of a distraction compared with what is happening on the ground in terms of settlement expansion. Some 610,000 Israeli settlers are living in the occupied territories and, as we have heard, thousands more units are being built. Area C is being annexed de facto as we speak; indeed, just today I heard from the villages in the south Hebron hills—12 villages, with around 1,000 people, including Susya, which many Members have visited—which are being incorporated into a firing zone and threatened with being demolished, in the same way that Khan al-Ahmar was.”
“Let me briefly say a word about the UAE and Bahrain accords with Israel. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon said, there has been no friction between those countries; indeed, there has been substantial military co-operation. A thousand miles separate them, and there has been no hostility between them. It is easy to see what is in the accords for Trump and Netanyahu, but it is less easy to see how they benefit the Palestinians or advance peace between Israel and Palestine. The Arab peace initiative—almost 20 years old—offered full recognition of Israel by the entire Arab world, in exchange for ending the occupation, and it is a pity that we have not gone further down that route.”
“However, the focus since the launch of the so-called Trump peace plan in January and Netanyahu’s call for annexation of the west bank in May has been on annexation. Trump envisages 30% to 40% of the west bank, including the Jordan valley and much of area C, being absorbed into Israel. Netanyahu would go further, although in stages. If there does remain any hope for a viable Palestinian state, and therefore for the two-state solution, either scheme would finally kill it. No doubt we will hear from the Government that the threat of annexation has gone away, but it is clear from the comments made by Netanyahu himself, by his ambassador at the UN and, indeed, by the US ambassador to Israel in the last few weeks that this is a temporary abatement and that annexation is still firmly on the table.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones), who is an expert in these matters, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) for securing this debate, which I think he first secured back in March. Time has moved on, but the issue is perhaps even more relevant now, so I thank the Backbench Business Committee for sticking with it. This debate is about annexation and settlements, de jure and de facto theft of Palestinian land, sequestrating and simply seizing land. Neither is new. East Jerusalem was annexed in 1980, and the Golan in 1981. Settlement has continued unabated under successive Israeli Governments since 1967. It is the most obvious and effective manifestation of the occupation.”
“The Chancellor, of all people, pooh-poohs them and says, “These are wealthy people,” and talks about dividends, but I have a letter from a constituent who gets £10,000 basic and then relies on dividends to top up their income. I could go on for a very long time—I am sure all Members could—in relation to these matters, but I will end on this: whereas we have got our act together with the ExcludedUK all-party parliamentary group and through ExcludedUK, the Government are all over the place. We often have to deal with four different Departments to get an answer. We are taking two or three months to get Departments to answer. Please will the Treasury Minister sort that out, make the change retrospective and help people who are genuinely in need?”
“Some people may not cry many tears over that, but the fact is that these people—I hope that many of them are successful and go on to great careers—cannot make do on the income that they have, and they are being done down in that way. I have so many letters from constituents, and often they are from couples who both work in those industries. I think that most of us know the common problems. They could be people who are just above the £50,000 earnings threshold. They could be people who recently became self-employed having set up their businesses. They could be people who have moved between jobs. They could be people whose incomes come from a range of different sources. Whatever it is, they fall through the gaps in the Government’s scheme, and they cannot get any help at all in many cases.”
“Often they are entrepreneurial. Often they are risk-taking. Often people who are at the beginning of their career are investing and have limited incomes. Often, also, they are following professional advice from accountants and the Treasury that has got them into the situation they are in. They are not wilfully ending up in this situation; they are there because they have entered into it in good faith. I have to declare that I was a self-employed barrister for a number of years, and the figures from the Bar Council say that not only have three quarters of chambers lost 50% of their work, but the majority say they will not be able to last more than six to 12 months.”
“We have major national music venues, such as the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and the Olympia exhibition centre. Such venues have had a double whammy, because in many cases they and their industries do not get any help and are not being allowed to open—it is likely, the way things are going, that that will be further delayed—and many of them rely on exactly the excluded groups we are talking about today. Of course this is not just about those groups. I have been involved recently with everything from the wedding industry to the Bar. Anything that brings barristers and wedding planners together must be quite extraordinary. We go to them at different times of our lives when we may be happy or sad, but there is an interesting point there, which is what all these organisations have in common.”
“I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing this debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for putting it forward. It is a shame that we have to cram six months of misery into an hour and a half, but we will do our best. Many of those excluded from Government support over the past six months work in the creative industries—in TV, theatre and the arts, but also in events and exhibitions. Sometimes I feel I have got all 3 million of the excluded in my constituency, which is very arts and ents heavy. With 70 years of the BBC, we have grown a massive media industry, including commercial broadcasters. We have three highly regarded theatres in the Lyric, the Bush and the Riverside.”
“I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on this timely debate. I have the honour to have the National Axial Spondyloarthritis Society based in my constituency, which is why I have some knowledge of the matter and am involved in the all-party parliamentary group on axial spondyloarthritis. I am sure that he will join me in praising its work and the extraordinary expertise that it brings. The danger is that if people do not have that association or contact, as many medical practitioners do not, it is difficult to diagnose, and therefore, heartbreakingly, young people suffer in pain and do not get a diagnosis when they should. Will he praise the NASS’s work and agree that the NHS needs to communicate about it much more widely?”
“A lot of us would probably have thought, pre Grenfell, that those things already happened, but they do not, and they did not. It is about time that they did. It is about time that the Government legislated and implemented these measures, rather than putting out general, catch-all clauses.”
“It seems like a piece of emergency legislation, when we should be on to discussing the nitty-gritty and more comprehensive measures. These amendments achieve that in various ways. I will not go through each one, but I would like to mention new clause 1. We now have the results of part one of the Grenfell inquiry, and new clause 1 effectively asks the Government to take some of those recommendations on board. They include: that information on materials and construction is available to fire and rescue services; that plans of high-rise residential buildings are available; that inspection and testing of lifts are done properly; that evacuation procedures and information to residents are carried out properly; and that there is proper inspection of fire doors.”
“Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) chairs, has equally made a huge contribution on this issue, with the support of professional bodies. I urge the Minister to listen to the advice coming from those sources. I do not know anybody who does not support this Bill. It is a very short Bill, and it aims to do two things. First, it clarifies what is meant by “common parts”, particularly in relation to external cladding and the responsibilities therein. Secondly, it is permissive, in terms of the introduction of secondary legislation to modify and add different classes of building in the future. Had we been debating this two or three years ago, I think everyone would have said, “This is very sensible. Well done to the Government for getting on with it,” but we are not. We are three years post Grenfell.”