Mixed view on Government `safety-first' hostels order

By Christopher Rails A NEW Government move on hostel fire regulations, prompted by the tragic fire at a Catholic hostel in Kilburn last year, has met with a mixed reaction from CHAR (the Campaign for the Homeless and Rootless), The Government move follows sustained pressure for legal safeguards from tHAR's All Party Parliamentary Committee with the backing of Cardinal Hume and other prominent church leaders, including the former Bishop of London, Dr Gerald Ellison.
The Kilburn fire, in which 10 women lost their lives, occurred in a hostel run by Mother Teresa's nuns, the Missionaries of Charity.
CHAR said this week that over the past four years more than 35 people have been killed in hostel firetraps in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Clacton, Eastbourne and the London Boroughs of Hackney, Brent, Lambeth and Lewisham.
Nick Beacock, CHAR's director, said: "The Government's new order represents a crucial breakthrough for the campaign to safeguard the homeless in substandard and unsafe hostels. The abominable conditions in many of these places are such that residents stay there at very serious risk to their lives." He said CHAR was disappointed that the Minister had restricted the scope of the order to the larger hostels only "but homeless people living in these high risk hostels now have proper protection in law for the first time — a long overdue safeguard."
Under the order (Schedule 24 of the Housing Act 1980) laid before Parliament yesterday (November 12), local authorities are required to enforce full means of escape from fire in multipleoccupied houses of three or more storeys with a floor area of more than 500 square metres.
CHAR has welcomed the new duty imposed on local councils this week by Mr John Stanley, the Housing Minister, obliging them to enforce hostel fire precautions.
But CHAR's all-party Parliamentary committee is extremely concerned at the limited extent of the new order which does not appear to cover hostels such as that at Kilburn.
Mr Joe Dean, Labour MP for Leeds West, who introduced, with all-party support, CHAR's Houses in Multiple Occupation Bill to tackle slum conditions, commented: "At last the Government has accepted the need for legal compulsion if lives are to be saved. But this step is only a beginning. Removing fire risks by law does not change the squalid overcrowded and insanitary housing conditions which thousands of vulnerable people will still endure in these hostels. These will only be changed if similar compulsory legal safeguards are introduced here as well, on the lines of my Private Members Bill."