Eric Pickles giving evidence
(Picture: Justice 4 Grenfell)Eric Pickles has apologised to the family and friends of the Grenfell Tower victims after he got the number of people who died in tragedy wrong and called them “nameless”.
He told the Standard: “I feel terrible... I feel bad for the hurt I must have caused.”
Survivors said they were left “speechless” by the former cabinet minister’s gaffe which he made while giving evidence to an inquiry into the 2017 disaster on Thursday.
The west London tower block blaze killed 72 people.
However, the former secretary of state at the Department for Communities and Local Government said 96 people had died in the fire.
He told the Standard that he had “stupidly” taken the figure from the death toll at Hillsborough as his thoughts in preparing for the inquiry were “on the horror of generations dying side by side”.
A coroner ruled last year that football fan Andrew Devine was the 97th victim of the 1989 tragedy.
Now Lord Pickles has told the Standard he emailed the inquiry’s chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick with an apology which he asked the inquiry to publish alongside his evidence.
“I corrected it immediately in writing and apologised,” wrote Lord Pickles in his email.
“Thank you for the courteous way in which the Inquiry allowed me to give evidence. In the last few weeks in preparing for the Inquiry my mind was also on other tragedies, including Hillsborough. In my final remarks I misspoke and referenced the 96 people that died in and immediately after Hillsborough.
“I apologise to the family and friends of the 72 people who died at Grenfell for this unintended mistake, which was unscripted. The dead are remembered not as a statistic but with dignity by their families , survivors and all of us.”
The unscripted remark prompted calls for the former Conservative Party chair to be removed from the Lords by Grenfell United, a group for the bereaved and survivors.
“Eric Pickles’ disrespect at the inquiry has left us speechless. How dare he refer to our loved ones we lost that night as ‘the nameless 96’”, it said.
“Seventy-two people died in Grenfell and none of them were nameless. His utter disregard for what happened and to those no longer with us is horrifying, given that he had the ability as minister of housing to reform building safety.”
Lord Pickles made the mistake at the end of his evidence while answering if there was anything he would have done differently.
He referred to the coroner’s recommendations following the 2006 Lakanal House fire in Camberwell which killed six people and injured 20 more.
The first report from the Grenfell Inquiry found that lessons from the Lakanal House fire had not been learned by the time of the Grenfell disaster eight years later.
Lord Pickles said: “What I was going to say is maybe I should have put in the letter the simple sentence ‘and I accept the coroner’s recommendations’ – would that have changed things?
“And your diligence, and your choice of examples, has made me come to the view, I don’t think it would have made any difference whatsoever I think. There was a kind of mindset that existed in parts of the department that just simply ignored what was happening, made a view about what we were and came to it.”
He said the inquiry should "never lose sight" that "this isn’t about deregulation". Instead, he said it was about the "nameless" victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.
"It comes down to Michelle (Udoaka who died in the Lakanal blaze) and to the nameless 96 people who were killed in the Grenfell fire,” he said.
"It’s them who we should think about when we’re arguing the toss.”
Earlier on Thursday, the second and final day of his evidence, Lord Pickles had also appeared to become frustrated with how much of his time the inquiry was taking up.
He later apologised to the inquiry for being “discourteous”.
