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Building Safety and Resilience

I am delighted to be able to speak in this debate. I compliment and congratulate the Members who have made their first speeches: the hon. Members for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune), for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn), for Guildford (Zöe Franklin), for Burnley (Oliver Ryan) and for Chippenham (Sarah Gibson), which is the town where I was born.

This debate, about building safety, comes on the back of the report by Sir Martin Moore-Bick on the Grenfell fire, which should be sobering reading for anybody who has any sort of public duty or is in public life. It catalogues how privatisation, underfunding, inadequate surveillance and inadequate supervision led to a vulnerable group of tenants being left in a desperate situation in which a large number died. He concludes in his report that every single one of those deaths could have been avoided, had there been proper regulation and protection. His proposals are far-reaching, and I look forward to the Government responding in detail, in the near future, on how they will ensure proper regulation and supervision and, above all, a role for local government as the local inspectorate of all buildings to ensure that they are all safe and that all the materials are correctly put together. The idea that deregulation can bring about safety is obviously nonsense, and this report has shown it to be such.