The families and friends who mourn the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire have waited two years and four months for the first findings of the public inquiry into the 2017 disaster. One conclusion stands out. Though the report published on Wednesday focuses on the night of the fire – with the next phase of the inquiry due to investigate the controversial overhaul of the building which added cladding that fuelled the blaze – chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick states clearly that the refurbishment of the building breached regulations.
Others had already reached that conclusion. But now a judge-led public inquiry has done so. The significance of the finding is huge. Deregulation in the building and fire safety industries was the backdrop to the disaster – notably the rejection by Conservative ministers Eric Pickles, Gavin Barwell and Brandon Lewis of calls for new rules following previous fatal cladding fires. But Sir Martin has made it clear that his inquiry will not pin the disaster on lax laws, but on what was done in the existing legal framework.
Not only did the panels on Grenfell Tower fail to resist the fire, the report finds, but they “actively promoted it”. The architectural feature that topped the building, known as a crown, aided the flames’ horizontal spread while serving no practical purpose. The failure of fire doors, for which Kensington and Chelsea council and its tenant management organisation (TMO) were responsible, is also identified as a cause of the rapid spread of the fire and smoke inside the building.
Local or national politicians may, in due course, be blamed by the inquiry for political choices including cuts to public services, as well as repeated attacks on “red tape”. But one reason that Grenfell’s survivors and bereaved have broadly welcomed this week’s report is that the finding of non-compliance with building regulations would appear to make the prospect of criminal prosecutions of the contractors involved in the refurbishment, and the public authorities that employed them, more likely.
Most of the document, however, focuses on the events of 14 June, and contains strong criticisms of the London fire brigade (LFB), which it finds to have been at fault before, during and after the disaster. If the report has won praise from victims, the reaction from the LFB and supporters including the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has provoked fury. LFB commissioner Dany Cotton is singled out for the “remarkable insensitivity” of her statement, in her evidence to the inquiry, that she would do nothing differently if Grenfell were to happen again, and that planning for such a fire would have been like planning for a spacecraft landing on London’s tallest building.
This claim, as the report sets out, was nonsense. While the scale of the Grenfell tragedy was unprecedented, cladding fires have happened before, including at Lakanal House in south London, where six people died in 2009. It may be uncomfortable and disappointing both to firefighters, and to the public and politicians who hold them in high regard. It may be that budget cuts, and their impact on training and morale, provide a partial explanation. But the fact is that the fire service should have been better prepared. At the inquest following Lakanal, the coroner made no recommendations to the LFB after being told that “extensive work” to learn from that fire had already been undertaken.
In this context, the Grenfell inquiry’s finding that nothing appeared to have changed in the eight years between the two fires is damning. National guidance suggesting that call handlers review the advice they give (such as that to “stay put”) was not included in LFB training materials.
Institutional failure does not cancel out or even detract from individual and collective acts of enormous bravery by firefighters. But the findings of fault by the inquiry, as well as its recommendations to government, must be treated seriously. To dismiss or discount these would be an insult to the 72 people killed on that terrifying night, as well as their neighbours and relatives. It would also increase the danger of what should be unthinkable – another such disaster.
