In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire broke out at a high-rise social housing block in west London. The fire started due to an electrical fault in a fridge on the fourth floor, and within minutes flames had swept up the building. Following Grenfell Tower’s refurbishment in 2016, the outside of the building had been fitted with new, highly combustible cladding which, on the night of the fire, rapidly set alight. That night claimed the lives of 72 people and left 800 others homeless.
The images from that night are seared into public consciousness. From the very beginning, it was clear this was a tragedy on a near-unprecedented scale. In the seven years since, the exact causes have been rigorously examined by the Grenfell Tower inquiry, which was first commissioned the day after the fire by then prime minister, Theresa May. It has been led by Martin Moore-Bick, a retired court of appeal judge, and includes contributions from people involved with the maintenance and running of Grenfell Tower, the fire service that attended the blaze, and its residents.
Today (4 September), the inquiry published its second and final report. Running to more than 1,500 pages across seven volumes, it reveals a web of confused responsibility, dodged culpability and insidious negligence on a corporate and institutional scale. The report’s findings make it unequivocally clear that this tragedy was avoidable. Residents – all of whom lost their homes, some loved ones, and others their lives – were failed by the very people whose job it was to keep them safe.
The seeds of this crisis long pre-date 14 June 2017. The inquiry finds that the government knew about the risks posed by flammable cladding in 1991 after a fire at Knowsley Heights, an 11-storey tower block in Merseyside. The report points out that by 2016 officials at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) were “well aware of those risks, but failed to act on what [they] knew”. This failure to act was part of a wider attitude in the early days of the coalition government. As a consequence of austerity Britain, and David Cameron’s challenge to “cut the red tape”, MHCLG “enthusiastically supported” the government’s “deregulatory agenda”. The report found that this was suffused in every aspect of departmental operations, to such an extent that “matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded”.
This inclination to deregulate had pernicious consequences. It opened the UK construction landscape up to corporate exploitation. The report makes it clear that Grenfell Tower came to be “clad in combustible materials” thanks, in part, to the “systematic dishonesty” of those who made and sold the aluminium composite material cladding (ACM) panels and insulation products that were used in the tower’s refurbishment. The report describes how these companies “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies” to manipulate the processes for testing the fire safety of these materials.
Ten years before the fire, in 2007, Arconic Architectural Products – the company that manufactured and sold the Reynobond 55 PE rainscreen panels used on the external walls of Grenfell Tower – had become “aware that there was serious concern in the construction industry about the safety of ACM panels and had itself recognised the danger they posed”. Yet the company did not consider withdrawing its product. The report adds: “[Arconic] was determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries (including the UK)” to continue to sell a product that it knew was unsafe, including for use on residential buildings. (Arconic denied it had sold an unsafe product or that it had misled regulators.)
Residents of Grenfell Tower had repeatedly flagged their concerns over the safety of the building before 2017. But the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (TMO), which formerly managed 10,000 properties on behalf of the council (its contract was terminated shortly after the fire), had absolved itself of any responsibility or duty of care.
The report found that in 2017, relations between the TMO and Grenfell residents had completely collapsed and were instead characterised by “distrust, dislike, personal antagonism and anger”. The TMO had begun to regard some residents as “militant troublemakers” and “the result was a toxic atmosphere fuelled by mistrust on both sides”. The deterioration of this relationship meant that complaints from residents, concerned for their safety, continued to fall by the wayside. The report is scathing of the TMO’s responsibility for this difficult and ultimately dangerous dynamic: “The TMO 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.”
It adds: “However irritating and inconvenient it may at times have found the complaints and demands of some of the residents of Grenfell Tower, for the TMO to have allowed the relationship to deteriorate to such an extent reflects a serious failure on its part to observe its basic responsibilities.”
This tragedy was avoidable. Therefore, the natural conclusion is that blame for the use of known combustible cladding on Grenfell Tower must be apportioned somewhere. But throughout the inquiry, none of those involved have been prepared to take responsibility. When asked, respondents said it was someone else’s fault. A Metropolitan Police investigation is currently ongoing and criminal charges may eventually be brought, though a decision is not expected for another two years.
Regardless, the inquiry has scorched something into the public record: that the residents of Grenfell Tower were failed on an industrial scale.
[See also: Should we make films about Grenfell?]
Content from our partners
Related
