Minister denies ‘aversion’ to more fire safety regulations in years before Grenfell

Former Fire and Rescue Minister Brandon Lewis denied at the Grenfell Tower inquiry that the government was “averse” to tightening fire safety regulations in the years leading up to the fatal blaze.

The Northern Ireland Secretary was Minister for Police and Fire Services from July 2016 to June 2017, and was previously Minister for Housing and Planning from 2014 to 2016.

He also had responsibility for fire and resilience, working as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) from 2012 to 2014.

He is the first politician to appear before the inquiry into the fire at a skyscraper in west London, which killed 72 people on June 14, 2017.

Lewis told the inquiry that while he was deputy secretary at DCLG, “many” meetings he had with the fire policy team were to discuss industrial relations disputes between the government and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).

These rows included strikes over pay and working conditions and the sale of a major fire training center in the UK.

In his evidence at the inquiry, he said policing and foreign crime were the “dominant” part of his portfolio when he was Minister of Police and Fire, with fire policy “forming a relatively small part”.

The inquiry revealed that in response to the 2013 Knight Review into Fire and Rescue Services, an internal proposal was made to create a national fire safety regulatory body.

Under the June 2013 proposal, the regulator would oversee “a local approach to supporting compliance with and enforcement of the fire safety order” and would deal with “a number of concerns raised by businesses”.

The inquiry was then shown an email from July 2013 sent to Mr Lewis’ office.

It said that “(Lewis) did not like the idea of ​​creating a national regulatory body, but further work needs to be done to establish the scope of this option.”

Defense barrister Andrew Kinnier QC asked Lewis why he didn’t like the idea.

He replied, “I don’t remember where I thought about it at the time, but I imagine it was because of the broader issues of analyzing how to make things efficient (and) effective with the programs we already have.”

He told the inquiry that at the time he would have had to ensure that “it didn’t just become another level of regulation”.

“If we’re going to think about something like this, how can we ensure that it doesn’t just become another layer of regulation that doesn’t provide anything significant beyond what we have and the ability to deliver through the machines that are already there?”

He denied there was “general opposition” to the idea, as the email added that more work needed to be done.

But he said: “From a conceptual point of view, it is unlikely that I would be interested in creating another body on top of bodies that already exist.

“I would be more interested in how we use the bodies we have.”

An article on this topic was written by then head of fire safety policy Louise Upton in December 2013.

Lewis told investigators he didn’t know why the proposal didn’t move forward.

The inquiry was shown an article warning that the fire sector had “failed to rise to the occasion” to ensure a “strong local government sector”.

The article also warned that “without an effective, sector-wide, holistic approach to fire safety, it appears that the government’s policy of standing back and allowing the sector to fill the space is risky.”

He added that the policy threatens the government’s public safety reputation because “no one is confident in the standards/benchmarks for adequate levels of safety in non-residential settings and policies enabling the sector to fill the gap are criticized.”

Kinnear put it to Lewis that there was “reluctance” to tighten fire safety regulations.

He said: “The reality we are skirting around here is the truth, which is that there has been a reluctance to tighten regulations even in the face of the industry’s failure to fix problems around the competence of fire risk assessors.”

Lewis denied this, pointing to work the department has done to improve carbon monoxide testing and the safety of smoke detectors.