Stephen Williams endorses flammable cladding & blocks new sprinkler rules, Grenfell Enquiry, 04Apr22

Grenfell Tower Fire Criminal? Stephen Williams, for blocking regulations prohibiting flammable cladding and requiring sprinklers in 2014 while Communities Minister three years before the fire which killed 72

Calls for former Bristol MP to be stripped of honorary alderman status

https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/calls-stephen-williams-stripped-honorary-alderman/

The leader of Bristol’s Labour group of councillors says that is a “disgrace” that former Bristol West MP Stephen Williams remains an honorary alderman following his “shocking” evidence to the Grenfell Tower inquiry.

Bristol MP Stephen Williams was warned over tower block fire safety four years before Grenfell Tower tragedy - but said changes were not 'urgent'

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-mp-stephen-williams-warned-124266

Mr Williams told those warning him not to "wait for another tragedy" before reviewing regulations that he hadn't seen or heard anything to suggest that changing them was "urgent"

A former Bristol MP warned that fire regulations were not keeping people living in flats safe told campaigners changes were not "urgent", it has been claimed.

Liberal Democrat Stephen Williams was a junior minister with responsibility for building regulations when he told MPs on a fire safety committee that he "wasn’t prepared to disrupt the work" of his Government department to speed up consideration of the recommendations of a coroner who investigated previous deaths in a tower block fire.

Mr Williams has insisted he did not ignore the coroner's recommendations and says he started a review which should have been finished six months ago.

But pressure is growing on Mr Williams and other ministers involved in the review following the tragedy at Grenfell Tower in West London, where it is feared as many as 100 people may have died last week.

Mr Williams had been urged to act on a series of recommendations made in 2013, following a fatal fire at a tower block called Lakanal House in south London in 2009, which killed six people.

The former Liberal Democrat MP, who represented Bristol West for ten years from 2005 to 2015, became a junior minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government in 2013.

Within weeks, he received calls from the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group calling on him to act on the Lakanal House fire, in which six people were killed in South London in 2009.

An inquest into the tragedy in 2013 heard that the fire had quickly burned through exterior cladding panels and that fire-stopping material had been removed. Afterwards a coroner made a series of recommendations to improve the fire safety of tower blocks, and the Fire Safety Group demanded action.

In a strongly-worded series of letters that were leaked to the BBC, the group warned the government it "could not afford to wait for another tragedy".

Four ministers at the DCLG, including Mr Williams, received the letters.

In March 2014, the parliamentary group wrote: “Surely… when you already have credible evidence to justify updating… the guidance… which will lead to saving of lives, you don't need to wait another three years in addition to the two already spent since the research findings were updated, in order to take action?

"As there are estimated to be another 4,000 older tower blocks in the UK, without automatic sprinkler protection, can we really afford to wait for another tragedy to occur before we amend this weakness?"

The correspondence continued between the group and ministers before Mr Williams wrote back: “I have neither seen nor heard anything that would suggest that consideration of these specific potential changes is urgent and I am not willing to disrupt the work of this department by asking that these matters are brought forward.”

The group of MPs then fired back to Mr Williams, saying they were "at a loss to understand how you had concluded that credible and independent evidence, which had life safety implications, was NOT considered to be urgent".

They even warned him they would go public with the Government’s inaction if there was another "major fire tragedy," saying: "As a consequence the group wishes to point out to you that should a major fire tragedy, with loss of life, occur between now and 2017 in, for example, a residential care facility or a purpose-built block of flats, where the matters which had been raised here were found to be contributory to the outcome, then the group would be bound to bring this to others' attention."