Grenfell Tower residents were told to “stay put for too long” during the blaze which claimed the lives of 72 people, the London Fire Brigade’s chief has said.
Andy Roe, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) Commissioner, who revoked the formal advice within minutes of taking control at the scene on June 14, 2017, said the policy “would have had an impact on people's decision making”.
The policy relied on effective compartmentalisation of fire, which did not happen at Grenfell due to combustible cladding and insulation on the 19-storey tower.
The public inquiry’s first stage report has already found that “many more lives” would likely have been saved if incident commanders had told residents to evacuate instead of staying put an hour earlier.
Speaking to the BBC podcast Grenfell: Building a disaster, Mr Roe spoke of his disbelief at seeing three sides of the building alight when he arrived at the scene at 2.30am.
“It was a shock - people were screaming,” Mr Roe said.
“I could look into the building and see that fire was a long way inside it. People hanging from windows. Unbelievable...people on the ground as well.
“I was in my fire brigade uniform, so people were stopping me and saying, ‘What's happening? My mum's in there, my brothers and sisters are in there’.”
Then an Assistant Commissioner, Mr Roe took over as incident commander at 2.47am - nearly two hours after the first emergency call - and revoked the stay put advice.
This meant anyone then calling 999 was told to get out of the building.
“What I must say, out of respect to the families, is that people were advised to stay put for too long,” Mr Roe said.
He said revoking the advice had been “an easy decision to take” because of the severity of the blaze, but that it would have been more difficult to make earlier in the night, due to the risks of evacuating people through smoke logged stairwells.
The final report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry will be published in September.
The final hearing of the second phase of the inquiry, which examined how the tower block came to be in a condition that allowed the fire to spread, took place in November 2022.
The report into phase one, which focused on the factual narrative of the events on the night of the blaze, was published in October 2019.
It concluded the tower’s cladding did not comply with building regulations and was the “principal” reason for the rapid and “profoundly shocking” spread of the blaze.
The Met Police has separately said that it does not expect any charges to be brought until 2026 at the earliest.
