The Grenfell Tower public inquiry report features a cast of companies, authorities and people who were involved in the disastrous refurbishment. Here, we look at some of the key players.
Arconic
Arconic is the multibillion-dollar US company whose French subsidiary made the combustible cladding panels on Grenfell Tower. The inquiry found that despite close to a decade of internal knowledge about some of the risks, it was “determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries including the UK”.
In September 2007, two Arconic executives attended a presentation in Oslo, Norway, by a consultant called Fred-Roderich Pohl, who compared the combustibility of 5,000 sq metres of aluminium composite polyethylene (PE) core cladding to a truck containing 19,000 litres of oil. Pohl also warned of the even greater danger of lethal toxic smoke that could kill in two or three minutes and hypothesised that 60-70 people could die in a building fire.
Despite this, “there is no evidence that anyone at Arconic took steps to examine the safety of Reynobond 55 PE [the product sold for use on Grenfell] or to ascertain the financial consequences of selling only panels with a fire-resistant core”, the inquiry found.
It did not withdraw the product but kept selling it “while withholding from the market relevant information about the product’s fire performance”.
In 2009 a senior executive, Claude Wehrle, showed colleagues pictures of an aluminium composite material (ACM) fire in Romania to demonstrate how dangerous the polyethylene-filled sheets could be when it came to architecture. In 2010 Wehrle told a colleague that the product performed worse in fire when folded into a cassette form and did not meet an advertised European standard but that should be kept “VERY CONFIDENTIAL!!!!”
These emails showed Arconic “deliberately and dishonestly” concealed from the market the true position, the inquiry found.
In 2014, before its panels were fitted to Grenfell Tower, Wehrle told Arconic’s sales staff that the fire rating of the PE panels had been downgraded. It was not as safe as previously thought. But the British Board of Agrément (BBA), which had granted a certificate of performance, was not informed to amend the certificate. Deborah French, the salesperson in the UK, did not highlight the change to her client for the Grenfell cladding either. In fact, she sent them a copy of the existing BBA certificate.
There was “a sustained and deliberate strategy by Arconic to continue selling Reynobond 55 PE in the UK based on a statement about its fire performance that it knew to be false”, the inquiry found. It concluded: “Arconic … promoted and sold a product knowing that it presented a significant danger to those who might use any buildings in which it was used.”
Wehrle was one of three Arconic executives who refused to be cross-examined, citing an arcane French law. Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the inquiry, said: “It is regrettable that in the face of a disaster in which so many people died they were willing to put the debatable requirements of French law above the interests of the survivors in discovering the true cause of their terrible experience.”
Kingspan and Celotex
The Irish company Kingspan, which turns over €8bn a year, made only about 5% of the combustible foam insulation on Grenfell Tower, but the inquiry found that by its “dishonest marketing” of its K15 product it “created the conditions” for Celotex, another insulation company, to try to break into the market by “dishonest means”.
According to the inquiry, “from 2005 until after this inquiry had begun [in 2017], Kingspan knowingly created a false market in insulation for use on buildings over 18 metres in height”. It did this by claiming a fire test of a wall system showed it could be used in any building taller than 18 metres when this “was a false claim, as it well knew”.
Tests of the material in 2007 and 2008 “on systems incorporating the then current form of K15 were disastrous” but it kept selling, and “made a calculated decision to mask, or distract from, the absence of supporting test evidence”.
When it was challenged it responded aggressively. When a company called Wintech raised questions about fire safety, Philip Heath, a senior manager at Kingspan, wrote in an email: “Wintech can go fuck themselves, and if they are not careful we’ll sue the a#se off them.”
The inquiry found that such emails “expose a casual disregard for public safety at a senior level in Kingspan, a determination to defend K15’s position in the market at all costs and a keen awareness on Kingspan’s part that it needed to find a way out of a situation that it had created through its own mendacity”.
The inquiry found Kingspan had “long-running internal discussions about what it could get away with” that “betrayed no concern for accuracy”.
The effect of its “dishonest marketing of K15 was to create a spurious market” for foam insulation on high-rise blocks that drew in Celotex as a competitor. Celotex found it impossible to create a similar product using its polyisocyanurate foam and could not understand how Kingspan had been able to make its product and meet the building regulations.
“It therefore embarked on its own campaign to break into the market by dishonest means,” the inquiry found. “Kingspan cannot be blamed for Celotex’s dishonesty, which was the choice of Celotex itself, but it did create the conditions that encouraged it and in which it was able to flourish.”
Celotex’s product, RS5000, was tested and marketed in a “dishonest and cynical way”, which “reflected a culture within Celotex stretching back to at least 2009”. The company had been acquired by Saint-Gobain in 2015, which aimed to boost profits from new products, of which RS5000 was one.
“Celotex embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market,” the inquiry found. The Building Research Establishment, the privatised former government test facility, was complicit when it allowed the inclusion of a fire-retardant board in a test in May 2014 to improve performance.
“Celotex presented RS5000 to Harley [Facades construction company] as suitable and safe for use on Grenfell Tower, although it knew that was not the case.”
Central government
Officials and some ministers were “defensive and dismissive” when MPs raised concerns about fire safety of cladding before the Grenfell disaster. This was despite the 2009 Lakanal House fire where cladding had burned and six people had died.
“In the years that followed … the government’s deregulation agenda, enthusiastically supported by some junior ministers and the secretary of state [Eric Pickles], dominated the department’s thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the fire safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded.”
But the problem in government went back further – as far as a cladding fire at Knowsley Heights in Liverpool in 1991. Between then and the fire at Grenfell, “there were many opportunities for the government to identify the risks … and to take action in relation to them”.
Tony Blair’s Labour government failed to heed a warning from the environment and transport select committee in 1999. The government “also failed to pay due regard to the striking results of a large-scale test in 2001 involving aluminium cladding panels with unmodified polyethylene cores, which burned violently”.
By 2012, after cladding fires around the world, the government knew the building regulations guidance on fire was “unclear and not properly understood” by many in the building industry.
The ministry was “poorly run” with “inadequate oversight”. The official in charge of the building regulations, Brian Martin, “failed to bring to the attention of more senior officials the serious risks of which he had become aware and they in turn failed to supervise him properly”.
“It was a serious failure to allow such an important area of activity to remain in the hands of one relatively junior official,” the inquiry found. The department displayed “a complacent and at times defensive attitude to matters affecting fire safety”.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation
The council landlord and its tenant management arm were behind the £10m refurbishment plan for Grenfell Tower. For years there had been “distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger” between officials at the tenant management organisation (TMO) and tenants.
“The TMO regarded some of the residents as militant troublemakers led on by a handful of vocal activists, principally Edward Daffarn, whose style they found offensive,” the inquiry found. “The result was a toxic atmosphere fuelled by mistrust on both sides.”
Daffarn was the resident who wrote on a blog eight months before the fire that “only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents” would expose “the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation”.
The TMO had “lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home and the privacy and dignity that a home should provide”, the inquiry found.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) and the TMO showed a “persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people” and the council’s oversight of the TMO was “weak”. The inquiry found that Robert Black, the TMO chief executive, had “an entrenched reluctance” to inform his overseers about fire safety matters – a “serious failure”.
RBKC’s building control department failed to perform its statutory function of ensuring that the design of the refurbishment complied with building regulations. John Hoban, the building control surveyor responsible for Grenfell, “was overworked, inadequately trained and had a very limited understanding of the risks associated with the use of ACM panels”.
The building control department “therefore bears considerable responsibility for the dangerous condition of the building immediately on completion of the work.
“The TMO must also take a share of the blame for the disaster. As a client, it failed to take sufficient care in its choice of architect and paid insufficient attention to matters affecting fire safety, including the work of the fire engineer.”
Failure to gather information on disabled and vulnerable people that might assist with their evacuation in event of a fire “amounted to a basic neglect of its obligations in relation to fire safety”.
Studio E, Rydon and Harley Facades
The architect, main contractor and cladding contractor were strongly criticised. Studio E, a now defunct architectural practice, “demonstrated a cavalier attitude to the regulations affecting fire safety” and did not recognise that the cladding was combustible. It specified Celotex but it did not realise it was not suitable for use on a building more than 18 metres in height, in accordance with the statutory guidance. “Studio E therefore bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster.”
Rydon gave “inadequate thought to fire safety, to which it displayed a casual attitude” and “failed to take proper steps to investigate Harley’s competence … it was complacent about the need for fire engineering advice”. It “bears considerable responsibility for the fire”, the report added.
Meanwhile, Harley “did not concern itself sufficiently with fire safety at any stage of the refurbishment and it appears to have thought that there was no need for it to do so, because others involved in the project and ultimately building control, would ensure the design was safe”.
It was induced to buy the combustible Arconic panels “partly by its existing relationship with Arconic and the cladding fabricator CEP Facades, with which it was able to negotiate a favourable price”. It “bears a significant degree of responsibility for the fire”, the inquiry found.
