Tomorrow marks a year since the Grenfell fire, and the surprising emergence of the fire brigade as the new culprit. Nothing is fixed, with the inquiry still going on: doubtless, more blame will emerge and abate. It is a slippery business, attaching responsibility; as the head fills up with conflicting charges, the heart often decides what sticks.
The business of trying to stick it on the emergency services – or, to put that in news language, “ask tough questions” – seems to me to be inherently implausible. With hindsight, the advice to residents that they remain inside their flats was lethal to some: yet the protocol wasn’t devised on the night. It would have evolved over time on the understanding that a tower block would have been built with some precautionary measures to stop it going up like a matchstick. We either believe that, or we believe that the fire service makes up rules to suit itself and doesn’t really care about safety, which is just fanciful.
Directly after the disaster, blame clung naturally to the tenant management organisation (TMO), the developers and the council. Residents had said repeatedly that they feared for the safety of the building work, and were worried about power surges. Everybody agreed, after the event, that the cladding was put up on the cheap and wasn’t safe. The council seemed callous, slow and unconcerned. That tableau seemed credible and secure, until people started to tug at its threads: Dame Judith Hackitt, who was appointed by the government to review building regulations in the wake of the disaster, decided not to ban the cladding, because it wouldn’t “address the root causes” (it was such a peculiar explanation, like saying you won’t take precautions against a hurricane because it won’t address the root cause of climate change); a journalist, Andrew O’Hagan, decided that the council was full of decent people doing decent things, because they said so, and at such length; the TMO disappeared into the background as the world forgot what that stood for. Tabloids went after the man whose fridge exploded, and a guy who had lost his home and many friends then needed police protection. Grenfell frauds, people trying to claim compensation when they had never lived in the tower, were paraded by a morally decrepit media as ambient proof that the sort of people who talked about compensation were not decent people.
Building and fire regulations are part of the story, but they’re some way downstream. The systemic problem can’t even be pinned on a particular contractor. There’s something rotten at the root of PFI, in the supply of housing: in theory, the council signs a robust deal with the developer, who provides the upfront capital, takes the risk, manages the asset; the TMO makes ample space for residents’ voices, who can hold the developer to account; the council has many mechanisms to enforce the contract and the tenants’ interests. In practice – and this story is replicated wherever you care to look at granular enough detail – the democratic levers between the council and the residents are severed; the council doesn’t really have the legal muscle to enforce its terms, and didn’t have the in-house expertise to do the procurement in the first place. The sheer asymmetry of their relationship forces a dynamic in which the council and the developer protect one another from the people they’re housing, with the TMO rubber-stamping it.
Listening to residents has to be a democratic necessity: the only way to keep any building safe is to heed the people who live in it. Whatever culprits are found and punished, that can only be the first step on the road back to this principle: it will be scant comfort on its own.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
- This article was corrected on 15 June 2018. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Dame Judith Hackitt was a judge.
