For more than a decade Karen Buck was the MP for Regents Park and Kensington North. Today, she serves the constituents of Westminster North. In this time, she has represented the communities of which Grenfell Tower was at the heart of. She has also championed social housing causes, including drafting and introducing the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act, which is now enshrined in law.

As part of HQN’s Through the Lens of Grenfell podcast series, Karen sat down with journalist Danielle Aumord to discuss the Social Housing Regulation Bill, her frustration at the pace of change since the Grenfell Tower fire, and whether her Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act is having a positive impact on the lives of both social and private renters.

“Housing has always been a huge issue for me and for this area. Why?” says Karen in HQN’s latest podcast. “Central London has always been on the frontline of housing need. And this was the area – Kensington and Paddington – where you had the notorious slum landlords. It was a bit more before my time, but we still had the legacy of that. So, housing need has always been pretty well top of the list of pressures.”

While Karen wasn’t a sitting member of parliament for the Grenfell community at the time of the fire, she was serving constituents in a neighbouring community with whom the Grenfell Tower victims and survivors shared many personal, cultural and ethnic links.

“I’m amongst many people who can’t quite ever find the words adequate to describe the sheer horror of the situation. Partly, obviously, because I knew the tower quite well. I’d been in there many times. I’d been in there talking to tenants, and I’ve done case work for many of the people living in the tower.

“One of my local councillors in Westminster actually called me in the early hours of that morning and was actually there because she had family and friends in the block. It felt horribly, horrifically close to home.”

Over five years on since the fire and the government is still in the process of finalising the Social Housing Regulation Bill in response to the tragedy. Karen has questioned why it’s taken so long to get to this point: “The question for me is why is it now five and a half years before we’ve been able to get everything in place in response to Grenfell? I think that although the inquiry process was a very rigorous one, and I understand that these things can’t be rushed, I also understand why many of the survivors and the wider community do not understand why it is that it has taken so long to see action taken.

“I remember being in parliament the day after the fire. Parliament hadn’t even reconvened after the 2017 election, so we had to have a special meeting with ministers, and I spoke in that meeting and said that the thing we needed was urgency – absolute urgency in response to this.

“The government has legislated now, and we’re waiting for further social housing regulation. We’re waiting on the Private Renters’ Bill to see if that all does transpire. Regulation and changes in the law are necessary in a number of aspects, including fire safety and strengthening the rights of social tenants, but it is also much wider than that. We can’t just fall back on the law being enough because it is also about the cultural change towards tenants and the understanding that tenants have knowledge about their homes.”

Following the inquiry into the Grenfell disaster, many recommendations were made regarding what could be done to prevent similar events from happening. However, the government wasn’t legally bound to adopt any of these recommendations, something that Karen sees as an egregious mistake.

“I think it was inexplicable for the government not to fulfil the recommendations from the inquiry. I know very well from the weeks after Grenfell from representing residents from a large number of high-rise tower blocks that people absolutely wanted to know that in addition to physical improvements to their safety that the management of risk, including evacuation, was going to be managed properly.“

In the years before Grenfell, Karen was the driving force behind the Homes (Fit for Human Habitation) Bill and subsequent act. The legislation has helped to prevent landlords from shirking their responsibilities to mend disrepair under certain circumstances.

Karen explains: “[The bill] was designed to close a loophole in the law around housing standards. That is, if you are a tenant, you have some protection in law if you had poor conditions as a result of disrepair, but it was much harder to take action yourself against your landlord if your poor conditions were due to a design problem. For example, if you had damp and mould because you had no heating in the property, you had wrongly designed windows, you had a flat roof etc, it was much harder to take action.

“With the help of two housing lawyers, we drafted this to close the loophole, to give tenants the power to go to court, or preferably to get the landlord to make the changes necessary without having to go to court using this law. The first time round, the Conservatives voted it down, but I got a second shot, this time in the aftermath of Grenfell. We were able to get the support of the government and we got it into law in 2019.

“My act covers all tenants. It covers private tenants; it covers council tenants and housing association tenants. What we wanted to do was make sure that everybody in any tenancy would have the ability to go to a housing lawyer, or even act on their own behalf, and say ‘this property is a hazard. It is a risk to our health and wellbeing’ and therefore get the courts to intervene.”

Despite bringing about a change in legislation and the social housing sector now standing so close to the introduction of the Social Housing Regulation Bill, Karen doesn’t think that residents should have to rely on the law to get the level of service and housing they deserve.

“It’s not just ever about the law. I was very clear when I introduced my act that the purpose of it was to get landlords to improve their stock and take action before they ended up in court. Going to court is not a success measure: it’s a failure measure. You need to be dealing with these things beforehand. There has to be a culture change amongst landlords. There has to be capacity in local authorities.

“And, of course, the other thing we need to be talking about is tenants who perhaps don’t know what their rights are able to get to a housing lawyer or an advisor who will be able to step in.”

You can hear the full episode of the Through the Lens of Grenfell Part 3 podcast here.