In 2008, Philip Heath, a technical manager for the insulation manufacturers Kingspan, circulated an email about some contractors who had questioned the safety of their product. They, he said to a friend, “are getting me confused with someone who gives a dam [sic]”. In 2017, Kingspan’s insulation panels contributed to the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, in which 72 people died. Heath’s misspelt sneer could serve as the unofficial motto of the many companies, institutions and individuals whose shared culture of contempt – for people, facts and due process – helped to bring about the disaster.
It is a culture that goes beyond Grenfell. You can see it in water companies’ dumping of sewage into rivers, in the flawed responses to Covid, in the Post Office Horizon scandal. It is evident in the continued failure to deal with the unsafe cladding that, seven years after Grenfell demonstrated its dangers, it is a prime suspect in last week’s gutting of a block of flats in Dagenham, east London. If this culture doesn’t change, there will continue to be catastrophes in contexts – home, work, travel – where the public should feel safe.
This week, the public inquiry into Grenfell will deliver its final report, but its proceedings have already revealed how an electrical fault in a fridge led to the worst peacetime residential fire in the history of the United Kingdom. We know how the flames raced up the cladding and insulation, which had recently been applied to the exterior of the concrete structure, at a rate of 19 floors in 18 minutes, entering flats through their windows and filling the interiors with lethal smoke. We also know how multiple layers of deceit and the cynical pursuit of profit helped to make an avoidable disaster happen.
The cladding, made by a French subsidiary of the American company Arconic, was a composite of aluminium sheet with the ferociously combustible plastic polyethylene, a product of crude oil – it was almost as if the tower were wrapped in solidified petrol. The insulation, some of it made by Kingspan and most by their rivals Celotex, was also combustible. Other factors added to the disaster: faulty construction left gaps through which the fire could pass; automatic door closers, which should have slowed its spread, were often removed. The fire brigade’s advice to residents to stay in their homes and await rescue, which is sound when buildings are correctly built, here cost lives.
All, or most, of these dangers could have been and were foreseen, but warnings were suppressed and ignored. Fires involving similar materials had been breaking out since the 1990s. Arconic, some of whose executives insultingly refused to attend the inquiry, concealed abundant evidence of their product’s flammability. One of its marketing managers, who witnessed a presentation about the risk of such cladding at a 2007 conference, asked in his notes with chilly prescience “what will happen if such a building was involved in a fire and will kill 60 to 70 persons?” For their part, Kingspan buried the results of a 2007 test of their insulation, which had to be abandoned after a “raging inferno” (as the company’s technical manager called it) threatened to destroy the laboratory in which it was taking place. Celotex, seeing that their competitors got away with dishonest marketing, followed suit.
Government, susceptible to industry lobbying, was complicit. It failed to act for more than a decade on repeated warnings of the dangers of aluminium composite cladding, including the inquest on the Lakanal House fire of 2009, in Camberwell, south London, which killed six people. “We only have a duty to respond to the coroner,” said the civil servant responsible for building regulations guidance on fire safety, “not kiss her backside”. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, warned of the missing door closers in Grenfell, refused on cost grounds to implement regular checks.
So, over and over, with their David Brent machismo and their talent for inertia, officials and executives created the conditions in which terrified children would suffocate in the arms of their dying mothers. Some of the staff involved were low down the food chain, recently employed or insecure, who found that their concerns about bad practice gained nothing but threats to their own jobs. But the biggest culprits are those at the top, the chief executives and ministers who created the climates in which underlings felt they could and should behave as they did.
Such justification as there was for these actions came from the political belief that regulation is bad for business, once promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s government, enthusiastically revived by David Cameron’s “bonfire of red tape”. But it can hardly be good for UK plc that so many buildings have to be expensively reclad and their residents stuck in unsellable and unsafe homes, while countries like Germany, which banned dangerous cladding long ago, have not as a result suffered economic apocalypse.
It’s hard not to suspect something gratuitous beyond these supposedly pragmatic rationalisations, a sort of glee in cruelty, a notion that you’re not doing your job right if you’re not being mean – especially to those you might perceive as little people – which might also be seen in (for example) Paula Vennells’ cold defence of her treatment of sub-postmasters. It would be tempting to see this culture as a creation of recent Conservative governments, but although impresarios of nastiness like Boris Johnson turned contempt into a performance art, it goes back longer and deeper, across multiple administrations.
For this reason, it will be hard to eradicate the culture of contempt. It’s not encouraging that the new transport minister, Peter Hendy, in his former job as chair of Network Rail, effectively had an engineer sacked for raising safety concerns about overcrowding at Euston station. But if Labour wants to show that it does in fact give a damn, especially about the disadvantaged people who were most of the victims of Grenfell, it should start by doing what its predecessors did not, and honour the outcomes of the inquiry with swift actions.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
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