A former Bristol MP and government minister, who is now a key figure at the city council, has called on the present government to ‘act swiftly’ to implement the recommendations from the inquiry into the Grenfell Fire tragedy – which also criticised his part in the lead-up to the disaster.
Stephen Williams is mentioned several times in the huge 270-page final report into the Grenfell disaster, with the inquiry focusing on his response as one of the coalition government’s ministers responsible for housing and building safety regulations.
The inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick concluded Cllr Williams’ response to letters demanding tougher regulations on dangerous cladding following a previous fatal fire were ‘curt and dismissive’. Cllr Williams told Bristol Live that ministers ‘can’t act wisely if they’re not given’ good advice from experts.
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The huge Grenfell public inquiry report outlines how the residents of the west London tower block who were killed, injured, lost loved ones and made homeless in the horrific fire of June 2017 had been let down by decades of institutional failings involving successive governments, local authorities, regulators and private companies, who had been incompetent, greedy, corrupt.
Those failings meant that, when a fridge caught fire in a flat on the fourth floor of Grenfell House in Shepherd’s Bush, the entire building was soon engulfed in flames because the cladding on the outside of the block was flammable.
Two West of England MPs are mentioned several times in the report. The late Lib Dem MP for Bath, Don Foster, and Mr Williams, who was the Lib Dem MP for Bristol West from 2005 to 2015. After the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition took power in 2010, Mr Foster and then, taking over from him in October 2013, Mr Williams, were appointed as the government minister with responsibility for, among other matters, building regulations.
The inquiry heard at length how, for the next 18 months until he left his ministerial job in May 2015, Mr Williams had received regular letters from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety, a non-partisan committee of MPs, wanting action on fire safety relating to cladding on tower blocks.
The lessons of Lakanal
In July 2009, a fire at a tower block called Lakanal House in Camberwell, South London, had killed six people and injured at least 20 residents. An inquest into the deaths at Lakanal found that the rapid spread of fire had trapped people because the exterior cladding panels on the outside of the building, which were meant to be fire-resistant, had burned through in less than five minutes, spreading the blaze.
The Lakanal coroner drew up a comprehensive list of recommendations on fire safety, cladding and tower blocks that he ordered the Government, fire authorities and the building industry to implement, but in 2013 and 2014, the All Party Parliamentary Group were frustrated that this hadn’t happened.
The Grenfell Inquiry report details how this Fire Safety Group were urging ministers to implement the coroner’s recommendations, and had written to Stephen Williams five times between March 2014 and March 2015, but the inquiry report said Mr Williams appeared to be confused about the issues. He said he thought at the time the issue at Lakanall was connected to sub-standard windows being installed, and told the inquiry that he ‘did not believe he had ever read, or indeed that he had ever been shown, the coroner’s ‘Rule 43’ letter’. “He had no detailed conversation with any officials about the Lakanal House fire,” the inquiry report stated.
“He told us that he thought that the problem at Lakanal House had been that the windows had not been installed in compliance with the regulations and therefore the plastic had melted and run down the building,” the Grenfell Inquiry report said.
“It is possible that his misunderstanding of what had occurred influenced his approach to the matters being raised by the Group. Mr Williams could not be sure that he had read all the letters from the group to which replies went out in his name because it was not his practice to do so in every case,” it added.
The report criticised Mr Williams, ministers, officials and the culture at the government department, particularly in dealing with the MPs raising concerns about fire safety and the recommendations from the Lakanal coroner, which were gradually being drafted into new building regulations in something called ‘Approved Document B’.
‘Curt and dismissive’
The MPs’ group sent a ‘detailed letter’ in August 2014 identifying three ways in which they thought Approved Document B needed to be amended.
“However, Mr Williams’ letter of reply was curt and dismissive,” the Grenfell report said. “In essence it simply said he had neither seen nor heard anything to suggest that consideration of specific potential changes…was urgent.”
It emerged this ‘curt and dismissive’ reply hadn’t even been written by Mr Williams, but by a Government official, and the Bristol MP told the Grenfell inquiry he ‘regretted having sent that letter’.
The Grenfell Inquiry report is damning on the way in which the ministers and officials in the years between Lakanal and Grenfell dealt with the issues that arose from the first fire.
“The way in which the department dealt with the All-Party Parliamentary Group was unacceptable,” the report said. “Correspondence was lost, important matters were ignored, ministers either refused, or at any rate failed, to engage with the material or understand the serious issues being raised.
“They relied entirely on officials, who appeared to have been given almost free rein to decide on timing and policy, were dismissive both of the coroner and the MPs on the Group and displayed a marked lack of appetite to embark on a review of Approved Document B within a reasonable time,” the report added.
“The department’s response to the Lakanal House fire in the four years leading up to the inquests was complacent and short-sighted. Regrettably, its approach to the coroner’s recommendations was little better. No one treated them with any sense of urgency despite the fact that they had arisen out of an incident in which six people had died and the coroner had seen fit to make a number of recommendations with a view to preventing further deaths,” the Grenfell inquiry report added.
What Stephen Williams says
Mr Williams lost his Bristol West seat in 2015, and after a series of other election defeats for various political positions in the city, was finally elected to office again earlier this year, as Lib Dem city councillor for Westbury-on-Trym & Henleaze, and is now the chair of one of the new committees that run the council, which has responsibility for public health and communities.
He has consistently denied contributing to the failings that lead up to Grenfell, and told Bristol Live he would be taking time to digest the full Grenfell report.
“This report has been a very long time in the making and I hope it gives clear answers to survivors and bereaved families,” Cllr Williams said. “Some of the revelations about the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower are indeed quite shocking and upsetting.
“The law will take its course about those but I hope that the Government also acts swiftly to implement the Inquiry recommendations on the development of policy. In particular I support the recommendations that fire safety policy is brought together under one Secretary of State and that there should be an independent adviser on fire safety and the building regulations,” he added.
In terms of the criticism in the report of his ministerial departments response to the Lakanal inquest recommendations, he pointed the finger at his civil servants.
“I know from my own experience as a minister from 2013 to 2015 that ministers can’t act wisely if they’re not given robust and clear advice from experts,” he said.
“Finally, when I left office in March 2015 the research and evidence needed for a review of Part B (fire safety) of the Building Regulations was ready for handover to the next government. That full review is yet to take place, the further valuable evidence gathered by the Inquiry should enable the current government to get a new set of regulations in place as fast as possible,” he added.
The Grenfell Inquiry report does, in part, endorse that view, saving its fiercest criticism for officials in Mr Williams’ department, including one named Brian Martin, who was working at the department on secondment from the Building Research Establishment, and had been involved in cladding and fire safety for decades, including given expert evidence to the Lakanal House inquest.
The inquiry report states that it was he that wrote the ‘curt and dismissive’ letter signed by Mr Williams to the MPs demanding robust changes to the fire safety regulations, and had a ‘defensive and dismissive attitude’ to them.
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