Companies and public authorities involved in the Grenfell Tower refurbishment are braced for wide-ranging criticisms when the final public inquiry report on the 2017 disaster is released at 11am on Wednesday.
The 1,700-page report is expected to spotlight serious failings among national and local politicians, builders, material manufacturers and sales people, fire-testing experts and the London fire brigade. The inquiry chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, and his inquiry panel colleagues, the architect Thouria Istephan and housing expert Ali Akbor, will also make recommendations to the government to ensure such a disaster is not repeated.
Hundreds of bereaved people and survivors granted core participant status in the £200m, seven-year inquiry were shown the report on Tuesday to allow them to digest in private what many hope will be a landmark moment in their fight for justice.
The report comes seven years, two months and 21 days after the fire and was delayed from earlier in the summer in part due to the high number of people – about 250 – who faced criticism and needed to be informed in advance.
Keir Starmer will respond to the report in the House of Commons at lunchtime and the Metropolitan police have said they will deploy detectives on the Operation Northleigh team investigating possible criminal charges to comb through the findings.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “We will never forget the 72 lives lost at Grenfell and remain absolutely committed to securing justice for the bereaved, survivors and the wider community. In the government’s manifesto, we set out our commitment to improving building safety, including accelerating cladding remediation, ensuring anyone responsible for the building safety crisis pays and better protecting leaseholders.”
Today’s publication will be the second and final inquiry report. In 2019, phase one conclusions focused on the night of the fire and found London fire brigade commanders were not properly prepared and there were “serious deficiencies in command and control”. It also found the cut-price refurbishment breached building regulations and the plastic filled aluminium cladding panels made by Arconic were the main cause of the fire spreading.
The longer, second-phase report will explain why the fire at Grenfell Tower happened, examining the decisions that led to the refurbishment, the conduct of the construction companies and shortcomings in government regulation.
The inquiry has already been told by its lead counsel that “each and every one of the deaths … was avoidable”. The government has previously said it was “truly sorry” for its “failure to realise that the regulatory system was broken and it might lead to a catastrophe such as this”.
Many of the companies, consultants and contractors involved were accused of engaging in a “merry-go-round of buck passing” and several key witnesses from Arconic, the US industrial giant whose French subsidiary supplied the combustible cladding panels, refused to face cross-examination.
Attention will next turn to Scotland Yard, which said in May it was investigating 58 individuals and 19 organisations for possible crimes including corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, fraud, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office. Charging decisions are unlikely soon, meaning trials may not start until 2027, a decade after the fire.
Ed Daffarn, a survivor and leading member of the families group Grenfell United, said: “We, I, personally, need to know what happened. No one in the public inquiry ever gave us the truth. They engaged in a carousel of blame pointing … For me it’s absolutely vital that I discover the truth of what happened and I’m reasonably confident that we’re going to get that when the report comes out.”
Joe Powell, the Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater, this week wrote to Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary, urging her to fully accept the inquiry recommendations and accelerate works to fix other buildings with dangerous cladding.
“We must urgently accelerate remediation work to fix dangerous cladding and ensure that those responsible for the building safety crisis are held accountable and pay to put it right,” he said.
