Angela Rayner has backed the police to bring criminal prosecutions against those responsible for the Grenfell Tower disaster “as quickly as possible”.
The deputy prime minister and housing secretary said there should “be consequences” for the failures that led to the deaths of 72 people in a blaze at the London tower block in 2017.
A seven-year public inquiry culminated in an excoriating report on Wednesday, which concluded that all the deaths were avoidable and blamed “decades of failure” by central government and egregious behaviour by several multimillion-dollar companies involved in the tower’s refurbishment.
The police are under pressure to accelerate their criminal investigation.
Asked on Sky News whether people should go to prison over the findings, Rayner said: “We can’t have a situation where justice is delayed because that is justice denied, so as quickly as possible the Met police will carry out their investigation and we’ve got to support that process.”
She said the government’s job was “to ensure they carry on with that investigation and give them all the support they need”.
Pressed on whether people should go to prison, Rayner told the Today on BBC Radio 4 that “there should be consequences”.
“The Met police [are] doing everything they can to get to their position of their investigation being concluded and their outcome, so that people can see,” she said.
Rayner said she wanted the Metropolitan police and Crown Prosecution Service to act “as quickly as possible” after the conclusion of the inquiry, which was led by the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick.
Moore-Bick found that companies which made the combustible materials used on the tower – Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan – “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to … mislead the market”.
He identified incompetence, “cavalier” attitudes and “concealment” of wrongdoing, and said Grenfell residents’ safety concerns were dismissed by their local authority and the landlord.
Asked whether the government could face actions for its failings, Rayner said: “The investigations that are being carried out will be carried out. And if there is answers for anyone involved in terms of criminality, the police will investigate that.”
She said progress in making other buildings safe had been too slow and that it was “not acceptable” that there were still homes with dangerous cladding seven years after the disaster.
“I’m not happy with the pace. Since I came in post, I’ve been very clear that this is not acceptable,” she told Times Radio.
She acknowledged that people still live in buildings which might not be safe, telling BBC Breakfast: “All buildings in the UK could have a failure of some sort. I can’t guarantee 100% that every building in the UK is going to be 100% safe.
“But what I can say is that measures have been taken to ensure that there is fire evacuation procedures, that where there is a waking watch that’s required, that there is a process with the fire brigade to ensure that people are safe.”
She said work was being done “to ensure that buildings are as safe as they possibly can be” and that “the obligations on building owners and those regulators are there to ensure that we can make people as safe as we possibly can”.
Dozens of firefighters were called to tackle a blaze in a tower block in Catford, in south-east London, on Wednesday, less than two hours after the publication of the report into the Grenfell Tower fire. The brigade said all residents were safely evacuated and there were no reports of injuries.
