London Assembly Fire, Resilience and Emergency Planning Committee 11 June 2020
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Appendix 1 London Assembly Fire, Resilience and Emergency Planning Committee 11 June 2020 Item 9 – COVID-19 – The work of the Strategic Coordination Group and the London Fire Brigade Andrew Dismore AM (Chair): That brings us to our main item of business, a discussion on the COVID-19 Strategic Coordination Group (SCG) and the work of the London Fire Brigade (LFB) at this time. I welcome our guests, Dr Fiona Twycross, Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience, and Andy Roe, London Fire Commissioner. We also have in attendance Richard Mills, Deputy Commissioner for Safety and Assurance, LFB; Sue Budden, Director of Corporate Services, LFB; Susan Ellison-Bunce, Assistant Director for Strategy and Risk, LFB; and Tim Powell, Assistant Director of People Services, LFB. Thank you all for coming. Fiona and Andy want to make some brief opening remarks. Fiona, do you want to go first? Dr Fiona Twycross AM (Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience): Thank you, Chair. Thank you for inviting me to this meeting today. I would particularly like to say welcome to Assembly Member Moore to the Assembly and Assembly Member Arbour to this Committee. Much has happened since I last met this Committee formally. I am here today as Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience and as Chair of the London Resilience Forum (LRF) to talk both about the work of the LFB and also about London’s response to COVID-19, a disease that has effectively turned all of our worlds upside down. As the Chair rightly said, today is just three days until the three-year anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. It is a fire that should never have happened and remains a tragedy of such magnitude that I personally still find it difficult to comprehend. Today and over the coming weekend, our thoughts and prayers are with the families, friends and community who are grieving and remembering their loved ones. This anniversary comes in difficult and very different circumstances to last year, but no matter what the circumstances, as Londoners, we can never forget that 72 people tragically lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire. To set the scene more generally, if a reminder is required for where we are now, COVID-19 remains the most significant public health crisis our city has faced in living memory. While this is primarily a health emergency, the economic and social impacts clearly pose huge challenges which we must overcome as a city. While we will be talking today about some of the issues including, no doubt, lockdown easing and transition arrangements, it is important to stress that the virus has not gone away. I want to personally thank Londoners who have made monumental sacrifices over the past few weeks and followed the rules. I urge them to continue to do so to help save lives. I have been the Mayor’s representative on the SCG. I have been involved in co-ordinating the response to COVID-19 on behalf of the Mayor, alongside London’s emergency services, local authorities and the Government, to ensure that the plans are in place for our city to respond to this public health crisis. I want to thank the Chair of the SCG, John Barradell, who has carried out this role tirelessly and extremely well over the past few months. I want to pay tribute to John and his Co-Chair Eleanor Kelly for all their hard work on behalf of London and Londoners. We are now moving to new structures to support and address the health, economic and social challenges posed by COVID-19, which I am sure Members will want to discuss further through the meeting. While the work of the SCG has been ongoing, my responsibilities in relation to the LFB have also continued. I have worked closely with the Commissioner and his team as we have faced the COVID-19 response through the LFB’s lens as well. I know the Commissioner will be talking in much more detail about the challenges and changes the COVID-19 crisis has made to the day-to-day running of the Brigade. However, at this point I would like to say how proud I am of the Brigade for how it has stepped up for London during this crisis. Over 300 Brigade staff have volunteered in roles that have helped save lives and maintained the dignity of the deceased who have tragically passed away as a result of the virus. There is a lot to cover in today’s meeting and so I will leave my remarks there for the moment. I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you. Andrew Dismore AM (Chair): Thank you, Fiona. Andy, do you want to make your opening remarks, Commissioner? Andy Roe (London Fire Commissioner): I would like to start firstly by thanking the Committee for the opportunity to present the LFB to you for your scrutiny and your questions. I welcome that, as I always do. Again, I would like to welcome Tony formally onto the Committee and I look forward to what I know will be forensic questioning moving ahead. Again, a big hello to Alison [Moore AM], whom I was privileged enough to meet for the first time virtually the other day and we had a really interesting conversation. Welcome to you both and thank you for taking the time to support London and Londoners in the scrutiny you bring to bear on me and my organisation. I am going to start by reflecting, perhaps as Fiona and Andrew had started to, on the fact that we are near the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. My thoughts and the thoughts of my organisation are very much with the bereaved, the survivors and the relatives. I am so grateful to have met some of those families because that meeting and those conversations keep me most motivated to drive the change I know must happen in the LFB to ensure that no Londoners ever face a tragedy on that scale again. I accept full responsibility to ensure those changes are made in light of the recommendations that fell from both the inspection report and the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. Despite the challenges of the current period in relation to COVID-19, that change has not stopped. It is still my key priority and it must not stop in the context of this tragic anniversary. Then the only other thing I would like to say is to place on record my thanks to the fantastic men and women of the LFB who have demonstrated once again in their quality, their courage and their endeavour that they are always there when London and Londoners need them. They have stepped forward in great numbers to reach out to the communities they serve and support them in a time of crisis, whether it was the 300 firefighters I have co-crewing ambulances, whether it was the 150-odd firefighters I had providing dignity at end of life to those people who tragically lost their lives in their own homes, or whether it was my members of staff who run our logistics network and are taking on responsibility for delivering personal protective equipment (PPE) across local authorities in London and only last Friday delivered their 10 millionth piece of PPE. It demonstrates that, regardless of the great institutional change that must come to the LFB its culture and its systems and the way we lead people and the way we train people to ensure a tragedy like Grenfell does not happen again, we must never doubt the quality of our people. That change is so important to ensure we honour their commitment, their courage, their endeavour, their loyalty and their service to London. I would like to leave it there, Chair, and, as ever, willingly open myself up to the questions of this Committee to ensure I am held to that promise. Thank you. Andrew Dismore AM (Chair): Thank you for that, Commissioner. Obviously, there is still a job to be done in rebuilding the confidence of the Grenfell community in the LFB and you have made a very good start in relation to that. What is particularly tragic is the statistics that came out this morning about the number of tall buildings still awaiting remediation. Nationwide, there are 300 still with aluminium composite material (ACM). For the first time the Government has published regional figures, which show that there are 247 un-remediated buildings in London, of which only 34 have seen works begin, and only 50 have been fixed so far. Most of those are overwhelmingly in the private sector. There is still a huge job to be done. The Government did set June 2020 - now - as the target and it is clearly not going to be reached. There is still a huge job to be done in making Londoners who live in tall buildings safe in their homes. I want to go on to start, Fiona, with the SCG. Perhaps I could ask you in what ways the SCG has developed over the past few months as the pandemic evolved, what have been the main challenges, and are there any plans to put the SCG on a more permanent footing with funding attached? Dr Fiona Twycross AM (Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience): Thank you, Chair. As you will be aware, the SCG has now been up and running for three months. This is an unprecedented length of time for an SCG. It is not really the normal structures that we would have for an SCG and so it has developed over time.