The ninth of the 14 parts of the second report of the inquiry into the Grenfell fire – the one whose name, as I scanned the contents pages, made me catch my breath – is called, simply, “The deceased”. It runs for 220 pages and contains the details of the 72 lives lost because of a mixture of private greed and public incompetence. “The simple truth,” the chair, Martin Moore-Bick, said at the report’s launch, “is the deaths that occurred were all avoidable.”
Commendably – unusually – the report does not pull its punches. Some of those it criticises were merely negligent. Others knew exactly what they were doing, the report says, even if they might not have considered the potentially fatal consequences of doing it. One comment, regarding the cladding subcontractor, Harley Facades, sums up the uncovered problems. It didn’t think it need concern itself with fire safety, “because others involved… would ensure that the design was safe”. In assuming this, it was not alone.
Perhaps the most damning evidence concerns the construction materials firms, who engaged in “systematic dishonesty” to mislead the market. Arconic Architectural Products, which sold the panels used in the external wall of the tower, knew they were more flammable in cassette form; but it was “determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes” such as the UK’s. The foam insulation firm Celotex similarly “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market”, using fire-resistant magnesium oxide boards when testing its products to ensure they passed, and then not bothering to mention them when reporting the results. Another insulation company, Kingspan, was still using misleading test results more than three years after the fire. In the extensive internal discussions about what the firm could get away with, uncovered by the inquiry, one senior manager said that those raising safety concerns could “go f**k themselves”.
How did these firms get away with this? In part because of a regulatory failure, in which the bodies meant to assure the quality of construction products, such as the National House Building Council and British Board of Agrément (BBA), were dependent on those who produced them. Arconic failed to cooperate with the BBA’s demands for evidence; it still received the necessary certificate. According to the report, Kingspan proposed a form of words to use in its own certificate. It took them from its own marketing literature.
Meanwhile, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – the richest council in Britain – and the Tenant Management Organisation to which it had outsourced its social housing showed a “persistent indifference to fire safety, particularly the safety of vulnerable people”. The latter regarded residents who complained as “troublemakers”, and acted as an “uncaring and bullying overlord that belittled and marginalised them”. The London Fire Brigade – whose own processes come in for criticism, too – expressed its concerns about fire safety on the estate. Those responsible ignored them.
In this they were not alone. The national government had been given evidence of the risk of cladding fires for decades – as far back as a 1991 fire in Merseyside. After the Cameron government came to office in 2010 it ruthlessly cut the budgets from which social housing providers funded refurbishments, and introduced policies such as the “red tape challenge” and “one in, one out” – later two, and later still, three out – which treated regulations not as a vital part of public safety, but as a problem to be disposed off as swiftly as possible.
Eric Pickles, communities secretary at the time, claimed such policies did not apply to building safety regulations – but this was “flatly contradicted by that of his officials and by the contemporaneous documents”, an extremely diplomatic way of phrasing a potentially serious allegation. In his evidence session, Pickles referred to the “nameless, I think it’s 96 people”, rather than the 72 victims, all of whom had names: he may have confused the fire with an entirely different state failure, because for many years 96 was the number of deaths attributed to the Hillsborough disaster. He also asked the inquiry if it could hurry up. He had plans after lunch.
It is more than seven years since the fire. No one responsible has faced criminal charges: indeed, such things have been delayed by the inquiry itself. There have been statements from executives at building supplies firms denying their own responsibility. There has been no obvious soul-searching from the architects of austerity (and the proponents of an aggressive programme of deregulation). All the while, hundreds of thousands still live in dangerous buildings. There have been two high-rise fires in London in the last two weeks alone.
Systemic failures present a unique challenge when it comes to accountability: if everyone is responsible, then nobody is. But letting this disaster go unpunished would not merely offend our sense of justice: it would make a repeat more likely. Greedy executives and negligent officials should face consequences, as a warning to those who come after.
Trials may not happen before 2027, by which time a decade will have passed. That is far, far too long. But even so – even though not all those responsible may face justice – there must be prosecutions.
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