“Eight and a half years after Grenfell, we still have no criminal justice and a million people still living in unsafe buildings,” Labour MP Joe Powell has warned.
Speaking at the 2025 Labour party conference on a LabourList panel held in partnership with the Fire Brigades Union, Powell, the MP for Kensington and Bayswater, called the situation a “catastrophic failure of the state to deliver justice.”
His comments came amid fears from campaigners that the Labour Party’s approach to housebuilding risks repeating the failures of the past.
Giles Grover from End our Cladding Scandal described housing minister Steve Reed’s enthusiastic adaptation of “build baby build” as “cringeworthy.” He said: “That is landing so poorly with hundreds of thousands of people who are waiting for their homes to be made safe.”
He sharply criticised what he saw as a return to “talk about deregulation” and a focus on the “interests of business.” Grover warned that the building safety regulator was being weaponised, adding: “I’m seeing history repeat itself right now.”
The panellists emphasised that the government’s house building targets must not come at the expense of safety.
Powell said: “My priority is to make this building safety regulator work, because the risk, as others have outlined, is that we create what I think is a false choice between building safety and building the 1.5 million homes.”
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