Grenfell fire culprits MUST be prosecuted now | Andrew Marr | The New Statesman

criminal prosecutions are now absolutely essential and should come much more quickly than the crime prosecution service currently say is possible and they're saying 18 months aren't they minimum 18 months to bring charges and we're talking about the end of the decade to actually see those trials taking I don't understand I mean we now know the information is out there it's publicly printed we know what happened U I don't understand why it needs to take so long and that old saying of you know Justice delayed is Justice denied was never truer than in this case I want us to reflect on the findings of s Martin Moore bick's 7-year inquiry into grenfell that the fire that killed 72 people and left 800 others homeless I have to confess I haven't read the whole 1500 pages yet but just appalling negligence dishonesty deceit and I guess the thing that is most shocking is that every single one of those deaths was avoidable Andrew I don't know what you have taken away from this most well it certainly was when I was responding I I thought there was two figures that we should all remember one is of course the 72 people who died and been their faces have been all over the media the last couple of days quite rightly but the other figure is 585,000 and that is the figure of people living today in tower blocks which are fire hazards only one in 10 of the 13,000 big tower blocks has actually been fixed only one in 10 so there are huge numbers of people living right now in very very dangerous tower blocks and if this report means anything this is the moment is to really get on and fix those blocks and the government says it's got no money for anything but this money is apparently ring fenced inside the budget and I think the single most important thing for the government to do now is to move at speed to start to make uh our housing particular lot of our social housing much safer one of the papers suggesting today that there should be a minister whose sole responsibility is to sort of implement these findings of Sam Martin obviously the government's going to take some time to digest it but do you think that that's necessary I do think it's probably necessary it certainly needs to be driven through in a new way K starma who I think spoke very well about this in the Commons made some big Promises to the families above all you can trust us he cannot not deliver on that and if that means changing the way whiteall approaches this kind of thing so much the better you know there are several ministers yesterday who been put out with responsibility for housing and fire safety and all the rest of we don't need several we do need somebody who is in charge of the whole thing Rachel what did what stood out for you everything so firstly the the fact that it wasn't an accident in terms of the companies involved yes there was a huge amount of incompetence but there was also deliberate misleading the report found purely for the sake of of greed like selling selling material selling products that the report argues the companies knew to be unsafe um I think the companies involved have pushed back on on that although not with any degree of detail and they would say that wouldn't they but the fact that there were individuals in those companies who knew that they were selling faulty products or products that couldn't be shouldn't be used for those purposes and went ahead and did it anyway the other thing though is the government responsibility and the regulation and the fact that regulations that had been put in place in order to make people safer were stripped back from 201 10 onwards and it it sort of reminded me of chesterton's fence that philosophy Parable that if you see a fence you shouldn't tear it down until you understand why it was put up in the first place so all these regulations that various conservative ministers thought oh we don't need that cut the red tape you know maybe the red tape was put there for a reason and maybe those regulations weren't working as well as they could have done or maybe they had unintended consequences that were holding back other areas and not saying don't look at regulations but when you have uh we've got a number of them the conservative leadership contenders going you know for every new regulation we need to take out to you know one in one out cut back the bonfire of red tape all these phrases that we've heard this kind of is the result you strip away regulations that would have protected people would they have saved 72 lives I don't know I don't know what the exact balance is of responsibility but that's what they were designed to do and I think we need to think a bit more carefully when we talk about sort of setting free the entrepreneurial spirit and enabling the free spirit of the market and and and and that kind of thing let's not have regulation and red tape hold us back sometimes regulation is there to keep us safe yeah I think that's a really really important point and of course one in one out was a David Cameron slogan right at the beginning of this process and people like Eric pickles were pushing very very hard for deregulation I think that's absolutely right the only other thing I would say is that I think criminal prosecutions are now absolutely essential and should come much more quickly than the crime prosecution service currently say as possible they're saying 18 months aren't they minimum 18 months to bring charges and we're talking about the end of the decade to actually see those trials taking I don't understand I mean we now know the information is out there it's publicly printed we know what happened um I don't understand why it needs to take so long and that old saying of you know Justice delayed is Justice denied was never truer than in this case and that is the sentiment of uh a number of the victims families certainly they're calling for man slaughter at a minimum aren't they and and they're also saying that it's taken too long and actually the process of this report um while it's great that we now have this report but has delayed the police investigations cuz they or they could have been moving forward from a criminal justice perspective well I mean interestingly you had Max Hill uh the former um director of public prosecutions talking about that precise point yesterday and he said actually in this country we don't do that we don't move simultaneously with criminal and this this big sort of statutary inquiry process you have to wait for the inquiry to complete for some reason nobody can say that the inquiry was pointless no nobody can say that it was anything other than a really really useful Public Act really no no exactly not to take away the specifics from anything because 72 people have lost their lives in in this horrendous accident which was preventable but every time we have one of these I'm just struck by how similar all these things are you know scandal after Scandal we had the contaminated blood inquiry relatively recently obviously we've had the post office and it's the same themes time and time again weak leadership failure to listen a culture a focus on targets potentially profits at the expense of safety and why does this why does this keep happening I mean usually we see these in the NHS but it's the same isn't it time and time again and all these missed opportunities to to stop and make things better I have a horrible feeling it's something called human nature that if we are not observed and regulated clearly then most of us are relatively likely to be sort of heedless lazy and take the quick profit if we can in other words it's a slightly Bleak maybe conservative view of human nature but I think we all require proper outside scrutiny and regulation I think it's also about when institutions have a culture where protecting the institution is the key priority whether that institution is the NHS or the post office or you know in this case Kensington Chelsea C in a sense that the same thing because when they're protecting their own culture they are people protecting themselves well today's newspaper papers are full of really detailed excellent thoughtful and some quite upsetting analysis in detail so I do encourage you to read that and also our colleague Megan Kenyan uh has written a great piece for the new statement website