Seventy-two people – 18 of them children – lost their lives in the fire at Grenfell Tower in June 2017. Many more were left traumatised and injured, displaced from their homes and thoughtlessly dumped into inadequate temporary accommodation. The final report of the official public inquiry into the fire, published last week, has one fundamental question at its heart: “How was it possible in 21st-century London for a reinforced concrete building, itself structurally impervious to fire, to be turned into a death trap that would enable fire to sweep through it in an uncontrollable way in a matter of a few hours despite what were thought to be effective regulations designed to prevent just such an event?”
The answer is set out across 1,700 pages: a litany of devastating failure after devastating failure that spans state neglect, corporate greed, regulatory capture and, ultimately, a total lack of concern not just for the residents of Grenfell, but the hundreds of thousands of people who still live in homes rendered potentially lethal by flammable cladding.
The most direct line from wrongdoing to disaster runs from Arconic, the multibillion-dollar company whose subsidiary manufactured the combustible cladding panels that were used in the renovation of Grenfell Tower in 2015 and 2016. The inquiry found Arconic “deliberately concealed” the true extent of the danger in using the cassette form of its cladding, particularly on high-rise buildings. The report describes how, despite knowing the risks, it “was determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes” to sell it for use on residential buildings. Three Arconic executives based in France refused to be cross-examined by the inquiry; despite its findings, Arconic has flatly denied any responsibility, claiming in the face of evidence to the contrary that its product was safe and that it had not misled anyone. Two other firms are implicated: Celotex, which made the vast majority of the insulation in the cladding, manipulated and misrepresented tests to make it seem safe; another market leader, Kingspan, paved the way for Celotex’s deceit with its own dishonesty. These companies represent the very worst of corporate behaviour: executives willing to put lives at risk to improve the balance sheet. The architect and building contractors also come in for the strongest of criticisms in the report for failing to discharge basic duties in relation to fire safety.
It is, of course, the state that is supposed to protect citizens from such corporate malfeasance through its regulation of the private sector. But the inquiry details how successive governments failed to heed warnings about the risks of external cladding systems. In 1999, the Labour government ignored a warning from the environment and transport select committee, and failed to act on the results of 2001 tests that showed aluminium cladding burning violently. But the situation grew much worse under David Cameron from 2010; the coalition government’s ideological drive to deregulate regardless of the costs “dominated… thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the fire safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded”. The government left most of the job of regulation to for-profit organisations funded directly by those they were regulating in a deadly conflict of interest. The tenant management organisation that ran social housing on behalf of the local council showed a “persistent indifference” to fire safety.
The failures do not stop there. The inquiry is clear that senior officers in the London fire brigade had not improved the way it responded to fires in high-rise blocks in the wake of the 2009 Lakanal House fire that killed six people, and that the manner in which the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea managed the response to the fire in the days and months that followed showed a “marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity”, compounding the trauma of survivors.
There is an urgent question of how the individuals implicated in this tragedy are held to account by the criminal justice system; it is seven years since the fire and police say it will take another 12 to 18 months to prepare evidence for the CPS to inform their decisions about criminal charges, meaning that trials are unlikely to happen until a decade after the fire. This is too long for survivors to wait for justice.
But the inquiry’s recommendations also pose a huge challenge for Keir Starmer. Chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick proposes nothing less than a sea change in the government’s approach to regulation: that the state should take back responsibility for overseeing the safety of building construction by establishing a single regulator, with a single line of ministerial accountability to cover all aspects, including the licensing of any company involved in higher-risk buildings. This will undoubtedly be expensive, but is ultimately non-negotiable: for at what price comes citizens’ rights to live in homes that do not pose a mortal threat?
Such an approach would be a good fit with Starmer’s correct instinct that the state must act to protect people from dangerous corporate behaviour; however, it will make fresh financial demands of a government that is too wedded to fiscal conservatism. But to avoid another tragedy such as Grenfell, the resources must be found.
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